Weight lifting gloves: the pro’s and con’s for women weight training
Q: I noticed more and more people are wearing fingerless gloves when they work out. Is it recommended or beneficial? If so are there recommendations for which ones are best?
A: When it comes to weight lifting gloves (which are usually always fingerless) we recommend that people exercise their personal preference… meaning that some people love them, some hate them, and most people are in the middle.
Weightlifting glove Pro’s and Con’s
Pro’s for Weight lifting gloves:
- Padding: if you have painful areas on the palms of your hands, sometimes the padding a glove offers can be a game changer. Suggestion: go to a store and try some on so you know how they feel vs guessing online.
- Less callusing: if you do hard work with your hands – weightlifting, hair dressing, manual labor, etc – your hands will callus, but gloves can reduce the size, and increase the “neatness” of the calluses.
- Better grip: some gloves have higher friction material on the palm that improves your grip, which improves the strength of your hands. With that said, the materials that give the best grip are usually the materials that trap the most heat.
Con’s for Weight lifting gloves:
- Small hands: wearing gloves has the effect of making all handles (bars, TRX’s, kettlebells, etc) thicker, and therefore even more difficult to grip. The more padding the glove has the bigger the challenge for smaller hands. Suggestion: look for the thinnest gloves you can find, or don’t use them.
- Hot: the hotter your body tends to run the more that gloves will exacerbate your tendency to overheat. The palm of the hand is a major site of heat exchange – they are a hairless, flat area where your body can send a lot of blood to cool you off quickly. Gloves insulate. Suggestion: look for palm-less workout gloves – they will cover the base of your fingers and the top of the palm, but leave most of the palm uncovered to help your body cool off.
Quick tips on calluses
Everyone gets calluses, and everyone needs them. Guitar players get calluses on their fingertips from pressing on the strings, and it would be impossible to practice enough to develop any skill without those calluses. Hairdressers need their calluses to keep from getting blisters while doing hair. We will all get them, and all calluses can be kept “neat” in just 3 steps:
1. Don’t pinch them: if you feel a pinch when you are holding a weight, move the handle down 1/8-1/4” to the other side of the site of the pinch. This will keep your calluses from getting too big and from getting ragged. This is the most important tip.
2. Exfoliate: brush off the rough edges if you get any. You can use a non-metal emory board when you cut your nails, or, often you can use the same exfoliant you use for the rest of your body.
3. Moisturize: use some hand lotion on them like you would on your cuticles.
“A callus is just a blister than never gave up” – Martin Rooney.
Bottom Line
If you have pain in your palms that goes away when you wear gloves, then you should almost certainly wear them for the exercises where it makes a difference. For everyone else, it’s a matter of preference or memory. Perhaps the #1 reason people don’t wear gloves is they forget them, and, if you think about it, that’s probably a sign that it’s not that big a deal one way or the other for them.
P.S. Don’t forget to let your gloves dry out all the way, and to wash them regularly.