Armor has been used by many virtully evey culture across the world for warfare. Armor evolved over time from leather to metel in ancient times, in modern times body armor is typically made out of ceramics and other materiles like kevlar. Body armor evolved out of the need to protect against weapons, and as weaponry evolved armor had to evolve over time as well. On the show most armor is tested in a for ancient warriors and is normally either Plate Armor, Chain mail or, Lamellar. Armor is such a huge factor in the fights that it is often one of the biggest resons for either a warrior winning or losing their battle.
Types of Armor
Armor can be broken into three varaiations helmets, body armor, and ,sheilds.
Helmets
The helmet guards the most vital part of the body, the head. Most warriors who wear armor usually don't wear helmets as often as often as body armor. While the head is more vulnarable than the torso, it is a much smaller target against ranged weapons. Addtionally helmets tend of obscure the warriors vision and hearing, making in harder to keep an eye on the enemy and hear their movments. Different types of helmets offer both protection and varying amouts of vision. Helmets worn by warriors the Knight and Gladiator cover the whole head but make it very hard to see and impared their hearing. Warriors like Vikings and Samurai wear helmets that cover the crown of the head and the back of the neck and offer a much bigger feild of vison but leave their faces open. Arguably the best designed helmet of the anceint world was the Spartans corinthian helmet. If offered complet head protection while allowing the warriors seeing and hearing un-impared. This was due to the eye's openings extended to be open to the peripheral vision of the wearer and openings around the ears.
Body armor
The most common area covered by armor is the torso. This was due to it being both the largest target on the human body and having most pf the bodys vital organs. Different cultures used different types of armor to protect they're torso's, mosr early cultures used leather shirts but many cultures started using metel when they could, However some, mostly Asianic, continued to use leathe due to the prefered light weight it offered. The earliest types of metal armor were normally lammellar, made out of scales of bronze. However in the Europe Lammellar fell out of favor for plate armor and chain mail, which preformed better in the feild and held up better over long use. Plate armor was easier to make than chain mail but made movment harder. Chain mail historically believed to be invented by the Celts and was used mostly in Europe. Knights used both chainmail and plate armor. In the show Vlad the impaler used chain mail with plates attached directly the the links.
Sheilds
The sheild was largly used in Europe to add protection against missle weapons, although quiet a few cultures in Asia, Africa, and, the Americas developed sheilds they never were as prominent as in Europe. Warriors like the Celts and Spartans considered weapons like the bow for cowards and used sheilds as a way of neutralizing them so they could close the distance between them and their enemys. Sheils could often be used as a weapon as well, Vikings and Centurions had sheils with a steel or iron boss in the center used for punching there opponents. Spartan sheils were famous in their effective ness, the covered almost the entire warrior, could be used offensivily and interlocked with the soldiers to there left and right to make a wall bronze that was almost impossible to get pass.
In Show
In the show armor is normally tested in pieces as opposed to whole sets, which can scew the results. Armor be the biggest game changer than any weapons. Even when warriors have relativly even weapons Armor can swing the results to the advantage to another warrior. Example of the are the Ming Warrior vs Muskeeter and Persian Immortal vs Celt. In both cases the warrior who had the better body armor won by a large margin. Somtimes armor isn't always poperly represented or warriors aren't given the armor they would of used. Chain mail if often said to be butted, when in history in was rivited, in the case of the Celt he was given little to no armor, when histoically they would wore a chain mail with leather combination.