Never neglect hand wraps – they protect your hands and keep you fighting

 

Hand wraps can be very crucial to anyone practicing a striking art, because it’s so very important to avoid damage to the hands. An injury to your hands means that you’ll be pushed to ...

Never neglect hand wraps – they protect your hands and keep you fighting   Hand wraps can be very crucial to anyone practicing a striking art, because it’s so very important to avoid damage to the hands. An injury to your hands means that you’ll be pushed to the sidelines, frustrated, while your training partners train and improve their skills, and perhaps move beyond you. So how do handwraps help? Gloves have lots of padding, but that padding is more to protect the other person, rather than your hands. While the padding on gloves serves this purpose, it is not sufficient to adequately protect the small bones of the hands. This is just where handwraps come in. They turn the small bones and joints of the hands into a single unit that can much better resist injury. Soft tissues in the hands are also protected by handwraps, which compress them and so make them more resistant to injury as well.   Above all, handwraps prevent the small fractures that might occur if you happen to powerfully strike one of your opponent’s stronger bones – without them, the bones in your hand might be liable to shatter, and the joints to take extreme damage.   The wraps that are used for training sessions are quite different from competition wrappings. Competition wrappings are far superior to training wrappings – as they have to be, because the competition gloves are so much lighter – but they cannot be reused. Cotton Hand Wraps These are cheap, and last a long time. You start with a loop around the thumb. Then you wrap up the hand, and use a velcro strap at the end to secure everything. Such wraps are usually about 2 inches broad, though wraps for Muay Thai tend to be slimmer.   If you’re a bigger person with large hands, you need to be sure to buy wraps that are long enough to give your hands enough protection and support. Best of all, cotton wraps are great if you train regularly, because you can wash and dry them, and have them ready to use the next day. Mexican Wraps Then there are Mexican wraps. To the inexperienced eye, these seem to nothing more than cotton wraps. In reality, the fabric of mexican wraps stretches better. This gives you much more flexibility in the hands when you use them – which is why some MMA and Muay Thai fighters prefer them. There are a lot of professional boxers who also feel that mexican wraps better fit the contours of the hands.   Best of all, mexican wraps are as cheap as cotton wraps. These wraps are protective, elastic and comfortable; however, they do not seem to last quite as long as traditional cotton wraps. Since they’re cheap, however, this is hardly a major consideration – you can replace them when they lose their elasticity. Besides, they’re only a little less durable when compared to cotton wraps – in reality, they last quite a long time. Gel wrappings. These are very convenient for training – you don’t even have to wrap them on your hands, because they slip onto your hands just as gloves do. They provide very good protection for the knuckles, but leave the fingers completely bare. These are adequate to protect the bones of your hand when you strike, but many people from striking arts say that they leave both the fingers and the wrist very vulnerable.   On the other hand, if you find cotton or mexican wraps tedious to put on, you cannot do better than you get yourself a pair of gel wraps. They are a little more expensive than cotton or mexican wrappings, and can be machine washed. Check out your local MMA shop or BJJ shop for options. Top King and FBT both make good hand wraps, and so do Ronin and Blitz.