Grey & Thomas's Fountain of Knowledge

[Chris Nagel]

Gloves:

I don't like any glove larger than 8 oz. Any larger and you begin to stray from a real fighting experience and you develop your fighting style based on those experiences. But I can see why people wouldnt want to use realistic gloves for something like day to day sparring. Even though you would learn more from one day of realistic fighting than you would from a whole year of a inaccurate simulation. Your defense would improve for one thing.


I myself hate the feel of a big glove and I don't see how anybody can stand them. Some of them (I guess many of them) won't even allow you to make a closed fist or at least not with great effort first. They end up not only weighing down your arms but they also force you to clench the muscles in your forearm and wrist tightly just to make a fist. You have tense up your arm just to punch and because of that you tighten your arm up and you slow yourself down. This also makes your movements stiff.

One way around that is to take some tape and wrap it around the glove so that the fist area is wrapped down to make a closed fist. This allows the glove to remain closed by default so you don't have to squeeze down hard just to punch. This also reduces some of the bulk which will give you more fluidic movement and reduce the feeling of being weighed down by large objects on your hands.

Or you could be even slicker than me and stitch down the finger tip area to the palm creating a nice clean fist.

You will notice the difference immediately.

Way back when Ringside first introduced their 12oz bag gloves I bought a pair and they were the best gloves I've ever used. You could make a good tight fist in them and the long wrist cuff gave added support to the wrist. When I wore them out I bought another pair of the same and they were slightly different but still good gloves. Recently I bought a third pair (this being 2 years ago,now) and they are crap. The new and improved attached thumb makes it impossibleto make a fist or to throw a punch properly. Given the odd angles dictated by the claw instead of a fist in the glove, wrist problems became inevitable so I threw them out. At the gym where I worked at the time I experimented with a variety of gloves, tendingtowards the 12oz and above thinking to protect my now sore hands.

I ended up with a pair of Everlast bag gloves, straight off the shelf and I love them because I can make a fist. That is the most vitalthing in keeping your hands sound: make a tight fist. Keeping your wrist straight is technique and strength of wrist and forearm. Do the approriate exercises.

How you wrap your hands matters more than the glove, I think. You want to be sure and do two things with the wrap: support and strengthen the wrist and keep tight the myriad small bones in the hand. Wrapping too much around and across the face of the fist-padding the knuckles- is counterproductive as the more times you cross the palm the less tight a fist you can make. The padding is in the glove and that won't do much good if your hand is only loosely clenched. The wrist band of the glove is no substitute for a good wrap and good technique. Make a tight fist and do the work to stengthen wrist and forearm and you don't need bag gloves; loose hands and wists and the gloves don't matter.