I promised that there would be more posts this month and I meant it.  To follow up my review of the mouthguard last week, I was sent a pair of Combat Sports Gel Handwraps from the folks at Boxing Depot.com.  Now, I am a striker by nature and by training, so this was right up my alley.  Also, I’m not generally a fan of gloves or handwraps – I tend to train bare-handed (yeah yeah, I know).  So it takes a lot for a product like this to impress me.  That said, I was definitely impressed.

Let me start out by telling you a little bit about these.  Most gel handwraps are simply like a glove, but filled with gel.  These are a little bit different – these have both that gel glove component as well as a traditional wrap.  This means you get that ultra-important wrist support as well as the hand/knuckle protection.  The gel padding, which is roughly 1/4″ thick, covers your knuckes and your fingers – not just your knuckles as is common.  Again, this means improved protection.

Ok, enough about the technical stuff.  Let’s get down to the experience.  These are really nice handwraps.  I put them through some pretty extensive use on my heavybag, and my hands were none the worse for wear afterwords.  Now, I did experience some rub burns on my fingers from the wraps when I used them alone (that is, without wearing regular gloves over them), however I have found this with every other wrap I’ve used as well.  I did not have the same issue when I used gloves over them.  Aside from that little detail, my hands were extremely well protected throughout.  The added wrist support also paid off.  It helped me keep my wrists straight, preventing injury.

These wraps seem to run for anywhere from $19.95-24.95.  In my experience, that is pretty reasonable, especially when you consider that it is really two products in one.  I do wish that these were a little more practical to use by themselves (without gloves over top), but I understand that this is a weakness of all the products in this segment and not just these, so I cant really hold it as a negative.  All in all, I would highly recommend them to anyone who does any sort of bag work.

Interested in buying a set?  Head over to Boxing Depot.com.

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Tags: combat sports, fighting is your friend, fiyf, gel handwraps, handwraps, martial arts, product review, review

This entry was posted by Damen on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Equipment Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.