Boxing gloves
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Boxing gloves are gloves fighters wear on their hands to cushion the impact during boxing. They are also used for protection from injury such as fractures and/or contusions. Unlike the classical cestus, boxing gloves protect both athletes, and were adopted as a safety improvement over earlier "bare knuckle" boxing.
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[edit] Variations
Boxing gloves come in different styles and weights, and are often worn over hand wraps, which help stabilize the fist area against injuries such as the eponymous boxer's fracture of the fifth metacarpal. Speed gloves are relatively light vinyl or leather mittens primarily designed to protect the athlete's hands against scrapes and contusions when doing very light "bag work" such as on a stand-mounted speed bag. Bag gloves are cushioned to protect the athlete against the progressively heavier focuses of striking other punching bags and sparring gloves are designed to protect both athletes during practice bouts. Professional fight gloves are specially packed to protect only the person who wears them.
Gloves used in amateur boxing are frequently red or blue, with a white "scoring area" to help judges more easily see and record points.
[edit] Advantages depending on the weight of the glove
Because of their added weight, heavier gloves are generally considered safer, since force in physics is a measure of mass times acceleration and a heavier glove takes longer to accelerate over short distances. As importantly, heavier gloves contain more padding. A blow to the head with a heavily padded glove is less likely to cause the sudden acceleration of the skull that causes much of the brain trauma associated with boxing injuries. Common weights for gloves in the United States are sixteen, twelve and eight ounces. Many athletes train with heavier gloves than they will use in competition, as a way to increase endurance.
[edit] Influence of boxing gloves in other fight sports
Open-fingered grappling gloves are frequently used in mixed martial arts bouts, but such MMA gloves are not boxing gloves. Similar to the wrist-supporting, closed-thumb, broken-knuckle kempo gloves popularized by Bruce Lee's 1973 movie Enter the Dragon, they provide some padding to the person wearing the glove, but leave the fingers available for intricate wrestling and grappling maneuvers such as clinch fighting, which are illegal in modern boxing.
[edit] See also
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