Differences Between Boxing Gloves Vs MMA Gloves?

As much as strength and good training make the win of a fight, the equipment is vital. Check the main differences between boxing gloves vs. MMA gloves. 

You might think gloves don’t matter when it comes to fighting sports, but here is where you are very wrong. In fact, gloves are essential equipment that includes different rules and regulations depending on the type of sport they are used for. 

Therefore, let’s face them together, boxing gloves vs. MMA gloves, and inspect every aspect of their specification on what makes them different. 

What’s the Difference: Boxing Gloves vs. MMA Gloves?

One of the most obvious differences when we compare these two types of gloves is the size. According to MMAWhisperer.com, boxing gloves are bigger and heavier since they have more padding insight, while MMA gloves are open-fingered and more lightweight. 

Punching with a boxing glove might result in severe brain trauma and damage, while punching with MMA gloves only causes external injuries to the body. 

Other Differences

MMA gloves are much softer and have less padding than boxing gloves 

If you take both models of gloves, you’ll immediately notice that the boxing gloves are giant compared to the MMA gloves. The size of the boxing gloves covers a much greater area of the hand, and they have large padding on the fingers. 

MMA gloves are much smaller, thinner, and obviously less padded. Getting punched with an MMA glove will feel the same as it’s bare-knuckled. It’s sharper, and the contact with the desired body part is more accentuated. Also, it will hurt a lot more and even break a jaw. 

MMA gloves will damage your hands if you use them for powerful punching on the heavy bag. You’ll need the best padding possible to protect your hands and wrists for training on a heavy bag.

Boxing gloves are heavier than MMA gloves

Now that we have established that boxing gloves have more padding than MMA gloves, it’s obvious that the boxing ones weigh more than MMA gloves. 

Generally, boxing gloves weigh from 8 to 12 ounces, and in rare cases, they can weigh up to 20 ounces. On the other hand, MMA gloves weigh around 4 to 6 ounces as they have much less padding and hand protection. 

The lighter weight classes of boxing, kickboxing, and Muay Thai involve using around 8 ounces of fight gloves; in contrast, MMA fight gloves are almost always around 7 ounces. Their design has foam padding and is much more compressed.

Punching with MMA gloves is faster than with boxing gloves

Since boxing gloves have more padding and protection compared to MMA gloves, when you use them, you tend to lose mobility. Boxing with each of these types of gloves involves very different techniques and equipment. 

Punches with MMA gloves are more controllable and faster because your hands are almost bare, and it helps you to articulate your strikes much easier. 

Grappling is part of MMA, and wearing boxing gloves completely removes mobility because the fingers aren’t exposed.

However, they aren’t that effective in blocking hits in your face compared to the boxing ones, and frequently, you might end up with broken finger bones.

Punching with boxing gloves is stronger and does more concussive damage

Since boxing gloves are heavier, they deliver full-power shots to the head, which is something that you’d break your knuckles if you did it barehand. 

If you punch the opponent using boxing gloves, it might not make too much impact on the external parts of the body because of the soft padding. However, it causes a more concussive force on the brain resulting in brain bleeds. This is why boxers face brain trauma more frequently than MMA fighters.

Moreover, if you punch someone with the MMA gloves, having less cover on the knuckles will only do superficial damage to the receiver, breaking teeth or nose since MMA gloves are softer.

MMA gloves are safer than boxing gloves

Surprisingly enough, comparing boxing gloves vs. MMA gloves, MMA gloves are considered safer than boxing ones because they cause much less impact of a punch to spread to a larger surface of the head and cause brain damage. 

Generally speaking, according to the overall statistics, boxers are much more prone to face brain trauma than MMA fighters. 

Since the invention of boxing gloves, more modern boxers have died from boxing related to head strikes with boxing gloves compared to the bare-knuckle boxing era.

MMA gloves offer better attack while boxing gloves have a better defense 

Let’s establish something; gloves aren’t protection for the fighter not to get hit – they just protect them when they are throwing punches. The big boxing gloves allow different types of defense to be used more effectively, like a high guard and full cover. However, they make precision defense much harder to be executed. 

On the other hand, MMA gloves allow various attacks to be used more effectively, including body shots, but in this case, shotgunning will result in damaged hands. 

As we mentioned, MMA is all about grappling, so smaller gloves allow a wider range of grappling techniques resulting in sharper and closer throws. 

Boxing gloves require hand wraps, while MMA gloves don’t 

Boxing gloves have bigger space inside and require hand wraps so the nad will fit better inside and absorb the shock. MMA gloves have a tighter fit, so they don’t require extra wraps. 

Most importantly, the way MMA fighters wrap their hands is not the same fighters wrap for boxing. Sparing fighters tend to wrap their hands with synthetic or polyester-type false to protect their hands from soreness or in case they have bruises or injuries.