Irrespective of the combat-based sport you play whether kickboxing, bag punching, muay Thai or MMA all require one basic outcome other than scoring which is safety and protection of hands.
Without taking safety measures the risk of injury significantly increases for everyone involved in the game; user, training partner or opponent.
In this guide, our team at 8xSports will explain how boxing gloves protect your hands. Once you realize their purpose, you will understand why boxing gloves look, feel and build in a certain way.
Why shouldn’t you train barehand?
Unless you are a karate dojo player, you cannot think of playing without some hand safety measures. While others may look at you as hardcore without gloves, not wearing them is a mistake and cost your hands deformity in the long run.
Our hands have delicate bones, ligaments and tendons thus they don’t have the necessary strength for absorbing the impact of repeated and heavy blows.
So Let’s look at each element of a boxing glove and why they build in a certain way to shield the hands from deforming.
Weight
Boxing gloves deliberately build with some additional weight to protect the user and opponent. Boxing Gloves measure in terms of oz to specify how much weight and resistance the user is fighting with.
Simply put, a lighter-ounce glove requires less energy to throw a punch than a heavier one.
As a general guideline, a 10 to 12 oz boxing glove recommends for boxing bag and focus pad training while 16oz is for sparring purposes.
The above recommendations have a clear logic behind them and are important to understand.
A player wearing a 160z weight glove in sparring opposing the one wearing a lighter 12oz glove is at a serious disadvantage because sparring requires speed and flexibility of movement.
The person with heavier weight gloves will fatigue themselves easily. That is why amateur and professional competition requires different weights of gloves for executing different boxing techniques.
Padding
A boxing glove has padding distributed in all the important areas around the back of the hand, fist, knuckles, palm, wrist and thumb. Padding in these areas provides a multitude of benefits for the user and over-knuckles are essential for shock absorption and lower chances of injury while punching.
Padding around the fist and back of the hand helps in ease of opening and closing of the hand to form a fist so the user can guard himself against opponents’ blows.
Thumb padding is equally important and prevents accidental bend and breaking of the thumb.
Padding in the palm helps to properly form the shielding cage of the hands.
Lasting padding over the wrist gives strength to the whole hand when throwing punches.
Sewn-in thumb
The thumb is sewn very carefully to easily displace into the natural form of a fist. The thumb is carefully situated around the palm and not too close to the fist. This is immensely important to prevent the thumb area from getting injured out of nowhere.
A sewn-in thumb is specially padded heavily to lower the impact of accidental collisions.
Wrist wrap
The wrist wrap is significantly important to keep the whole hand in a neutral position. Although wrist wraps can move around, the player still relies on them greatly to stabilize the hand after hitting at an awkward angle.
Without a wrist wrap, the player is not confident to fully flex the hand and extend it for punching with full force, in hesitation of injuring his hand.
Wrist wraps come in wonderful varieties from their design and features to shaping and materials.
The most seen wrap is hook and loop style for easily putting on and removing.
Another common type is having lace-up closing for stronger bracing around the wrist though it takes some time to tie up and assistance from other players.
Additional features
The main areas of padding in the boxing glove are essential other than that some models of gloves offer more features for additional benefit to the user.
Then again, it depends on users’ requirements, so understand the needs of the combat sport you are in and obtain the boxing gloves to protect hand accordingly.
