A very important piece of gear is a pair of boxing gloves. They have a long history, but I won;t be talking about that, instead I will be talking about why you should wear boxing gloves when training. Your hands have very small bones in them that are somewhat fragile. Yet for most most humans attacking with punches feels natural. That's where boxing gloves come in, they allow you to train with little risk of damage to both your hands and wrists. The gloves should have enough padding to protect the fingers. about 2 to 3 inches of foam will do the trick. When you are punching with gloves there should always be the feeling of a barrier between your knuckles and the surface that your punching. So if you have gloves on, and are completely feeling the punching bag, you need to throw those gloves away because there is no more barrier left to protect your hands.
When you start to look gloves, please stay away form sporting goods stores, the cheap gloves that they offer look like they are good, but they will break down after heavy training. I recommend buying online form brands like Ringside, Twins, and Title. They are a bit pricey but they will last through hard training sessions.
Boxing gloves and Muay Thai gloves only have minor differences, like the thumbs a positioned differently in Muay Thai gloves to allow for stand up grappling called the "Clench" (more on that in another post).
I personally like Muay Thai gloves because they are still hand made with cow grain leather and still smell fresh after years of use. They are pricy and often times have to be order from Thailand, but I'm willing to put up with that. For the average Joe just going to Ringside or Title and finding a pair of gloves on discount will cover you fine.
Which brings us to glove types. There are actually subcategories of boxing gloves: bag gloves, fitness gloves, training gloves, sparring gloves and competition gloves. I say just buy sparring gloves for training and your good.
The next thing to consider is the size because not everybody uses the same size gloves. If you happen to weigh around 120 pounds then you should wear 12oz gloves. If you weigh around 140 lbs then you should use 14oz and so on. However there is an easy way to picking a size, because 16oz is the size that will fit most and offer the best amount protection. The only Caveat to that is guys that weigh 180 lbs or heaver they
will need an 18oz glove to protect their hands and their sparring partners.
