Keeping hands and feet warm through those winter months

Cold hands. I had almost forgotten them. It's one of the problems of cycling. You get cold hands.

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It’s been lovely all summer. But, this weekend was not. I wasn’t prepared and my hands were frozen.

For some people that’s a bigger problem. When they get cold hands or feet they loose blood supply to fingers or toes.

It's called Raynaud's Phenomenon and it can be really unpleasant. For those people the cold stimulus causes the small blood vessels in the fingers to go into spasm.

The blood vessels that go to our fingers are known as end arteries, roughly that means the blood to your fingers comes from just one vessel and there is no supply from anywhere else.

If the blood vessel gets blocked or goes into spasm there is no other blood supply to fill in the lack of blood. As a consequence the fingers go white. There is often a very sharp line between the pink and white of the finger. It hurts a lot.

Rarely it can be bad enough to cause chillblains - the skin dies because of having no blood.

We both share a problem; we need to prevent our hands getting cold.