It doesn’t matter if you are a professional or amateur boxer, you should never ever compromise in your performance and safety. For this you need to have the right type of boxing gear. In this post I will focus on boxing gloves and its types. These gloves are categorized depending upon the purpose you are going to use them. Whether be it for competitions, bag work, or training and sparring sessions, there are different types of gloves used in different conditions.
Let’s find out what exactly you need.
- Bag Gloves
As the name “Bag Gloves” suggests, these gloves are only for heavy bag or punch bag training.
What makes them unique?
These gloves are not only smaller in size but lighter as well, in comparison with training gloves. Being that much lighter, it gives you advantage of throwing faster punches, which results in building your speed. Because you use hand wraps along with the gloves to protect your hand, these gloves can’t be heavy, otherwise they will be too heavy. Normal weight of these gloves ranges from 8oz to 14oz.
- Training Gloves
You don’t want anyone to get hurt in training that where training gloves come in. Unlike bag gloves, training or sparring gloves are made much heavier, mainly for one and only one purpose – Safety. They are built with heavy padding, which protects you and your sparring partner. Normally, the genuine cowhide leather gloves are not used, instead polyurethane gloves are more common. There are many reasons for using such a material, but most importantly they are less expensive and also last much longer.
Training gloves weigh between 12 – 20 ounces, depending upon your weight, you will use different gloves. For example if your weight is below 120 pounds, you will use 12-14 ounce gloves, but if your weight below 140 pounds then you will use 14-16 ounce gloves, and weighing anything above 175 you will use 18-20 ounce training gloves.
Final Thoughts
Human hand is composed of 27 bones, and when you are boxing there is a great change of breaking these bones. Therefore, you need to protect them well by wearing heavily padded gloves for sparring. Buy at least two pair of gloves, one each for bag work and sparring. Make sure these are made using high quality padding. Also don’t underestimate the importance of hand wraps, they are as important as boxing gloves.