The best weight lifting gloves and why you need them
Wight-lifting gloves hint that you’re getting to a certain level of capability and that you’ve already passed a few milestones in terms of what you can lift. By this point, the weights are getting heavy enough for you to start thinking about wrist support, and being gentle on your skin. We don’t mean this in a girly way either. If you’re doing high weights and an intensive upper-body workout, you can risk ripping the skin around where callouses are, which can be painful, messy and an undesirable event in the gym.
Bear in mind when reading this that wearing gloves will not instantly make you a pro o gain muscle any faster. If used without experience they can even hinder your exercise process. If you really want to gain size and fitness then you should spend your time figuring out the best gym routine and a healthy diet as part of your supplement plan for the best kind of bodybuilding.
Picking the right gloves
The function of weight gloves is pretty much always going to be the same. They offer some comfort for the lifter, and provide wrist support to make sure there aren’t any bad sprains while lifting. Because of the extra comfort give, they also provide protection against callouses, preventing any rips that can take weeks to heal.
The best brands
Fitness products are a competitive market, so it’s hard to judge any particular product without finding a lot of similarities. Without going into too many details we can look at one of the many blogs on this subject to help decide. Diets have a video explaining the difference and are pretty helpful.
Why you should wear them
We’ve already explained the benefits fairly comprehensively, so if you need any more then they’re probably not for you. The only other extra benefit is that they won’t annoy the gym owners as much as their counterpart, chalk, which leave a mess and a wake of hate for yourself.
Why you shouldn’t…
Despite the large range of products around weight gloves, there are some people that think they can actually do more bad than good for your lifting capability. It can be hard to see what is genuine and informative advice on the web against what is mindless sale/slander of products, but the general consensus of all the blogs and forums gives these as the reasons not to get training gloves:
- They add circumference to the bar you’re lifting. This may not be a problem on smaller weights, but as they get bigger, you’ll need a stronger grip of the bar to get the right technique. If you’re making the bar too wide with the added padding of gloves then you could sacrifice your technique and, ergo, muscle strength.
- They don’t prevent calluses: contrary to the above statements, these bloggers believe that they can actually make a callus worse as not being able to hold the bar properly will cause your skin to pinch and then harden.