Built for Athletes Black Cycling Backpack

The Built for Athletes Black Cycling Backpack is designed to help you carry your stuff on the bike, whether that’s to work or to the gym. It was developed with input from the Netcompany Ineos cycling team, and it’s comfortable on a bike, although with a limited number of truly cycling-specific features.

Built for Athletes makes a wide range of backpacks and travel bags, with the majority of its business focused on the UK’s rapidly growing gym segment. They’ve not neglected us cyclists, however, and offer this 22L model.

It’s a robust and well-made bag. The outer fabric is rubberised and claimed as waterproof, and in testing I found no real ingress of water when riding in the rain. I dislike bags that need you to attach a waterproof cover when it rains, so I really appreciated the built-in weatherproofing on offer here.

At 22L, the backpack is big enough to take your laptop and clothes to the office, but I found that it sat on my back high enough that it also allowed access to my jersey pockets and didn’t press on their contents.

It has a sternum strap to help keep it stable, but no waist strap. The shoulder straps are wide, padded and faced with a breathable fabric. Combined with their ergonomic S shape, I found them really comfortable.

The sternum strap is adjustable via the sort of slider arrangement that is common on backpacks, although I found I generally wanted it right at the lower end of this adjustment. I think the vertical positioning is way off here. No-one would want the strap any higher than the very bottom. I even tried it with my five-year-old wearing the bag.

Annoyingly, I found that one of the sliders was prone to sliding right off the end of the “rail” at the bottom, and it was pretty fiddly to get it back on. That’s a detail I’d want properly executed if I was spending £200 on a bag.

As you’d expect, there are some pads where the bag rests on your back which are designed to allow airflow and help reduce sweat build-up. They’re okay, but I’ve used other bags which do a better job in this area.

Each strap has a zipped easy-access pocket you can open without taking the bag off. They’re a slightly curious shape: long, thin and curved, as though intended to accommodate a banana (but I found they wouldn’t). I didn’t really use them because I didn’t have anything I needed to carry that would fit.

A phone won’t remotely fit. You could get a pen or an Airpods case in there, but the shape suggests that’s not the intended contents. They’d hold gels, but how often are you smashing gels on your ride into the office?

The main storage is accessed via a water resistant zip that opens to halfway down the bag. 22L is smaller than the Mous bag I tested recently, but I was able to get lunch and a change of clothes in here without a problem.

There are five pockets inside, including a zipped “dry bag” pocket lined with waterproof plastic. This is a nice touch. It’s big enough for you to stash a wet jacket or sweaty gym clothes.

There are two large, zipped mesh pockets facing each other front and back – they’re flat and the mesh is inelastic so you can only get flattish things in there. A zipped waterproof valuables pocket can easily swallow a wallet and a phone, and finally there’s an open pocket with padding in that will take a large tablet or even a 15in laptop.

The intended location for your laptop is accessed from the outside, however, and unusually this is via a vertical zip down the side of the bag. As with all the zips, it’s a water-resistant one, so your laptop should stay dry.

This pocket will accommodate up to a 14in laptop and when not carrying one, I also found it worked well to swallow a D-lock and would keep it from swinging around. There are a few millimetres of foam on the front and back of this compartment, but – in contrast to the Mous bag mentioned above – there isn’t a lot of padding at the base of the laptop compartment, so protection if the bag is dropped on its bottom is fairly limited.

On the sides of the bag are two external pockets. One is open and elasticated for a water bottle of up to 1L, and the other is zipped for anything else you want readily accessible.

The final storage space, and the most cycling-specific one, is out front to hold your helmet. There’s a vertical zip concealed behind the 2in strip of black reflective material down the centre of the bag. Open it up and the space inside looks far too small for a lid. You also need to unzip a second zip around the edge which releases a mesh pop-out section. Thus it will take even a large helmet and keep it securely in place.

If you are in the habit of clipping your helmet straps through the carry handle of your backpack and have ever unintentionally whacked someone in the face with it, you’ll appreciate the stability on offer here.

Unlike the Osprey Lidlock system, it’ll also work fine with aero helmets without vents on top. Counterpoint: it’s a bit of a faff to put a helmet in there, as you need to undo a couple of different zips first and then push the helmet in awkwardly via that central vertical zip.

One other feature on the inside worth mentioning is the bright orange lining. This is excellent. Bags with gloomy, dark interiors are rubbish when you’re trying to find something inside them.

One of Built for Athletes’ signature features is Velcro panels (the hook side) designed to allow you to customise your bag with patches. A wide range of badges can be bought, which mostly are of the “gym bro” type – although I did find a couple of bike racing ones available on its website.

I’m not quite sure how much this feature will appeal to buyers. It must be over 30 years since I last felt the need to customise a bag (one of those Head tennis bags that were ubiquitous in my school in the 1990s, seeing as you asked). I wrote ACID on it in Tipp-Ex despite not really knowing what drugs were.

So would I buy this? I’m not a gym-goer, but I certainly appreciate well thought out rucksacks that can cover cycling, commuting and general travel use. I found it comfortable and some of the storage on offer here is unusual and well executed.

The price? Well, £200 is a lot for a backpack. It’s a small UK brand and so won’t (yet) have access to the sort of economies of scale of more established volume brands. At over 1.6kg, this is also a fairly heavy bag before you’ve put anything in it.

The Mous bag I tested is now £309.99 – although you can currently get a version for £180, and it is certainly a more fully featured product with way more storage options.

Another option would be the £150 Osprey Metron 24, which has a good range of storage and some additional cycling-specific features such as a helmet attachment and a waterproof cover.

There’s also no getting away from the fact that there are endless good bags available for a lot less, from the likes of Decathlon and Revolution Race, and if it were my money, I’m not sure the Built for Athletes backpack does enough to justify its price tag.