Engage Tuff & Co Boxing Gloves Review

Engage Fight Tuff & Co Boxing Gloves Review

Brand

Engage is an Australian Fight Wear, Fight Gear, Activewear and Apparel brand. Engage has a high focus on visuals, with their equipment often featuring bold colours, designs and styles not frequently seen in the fight gear industry.

About the gloves

The Tuff & Co Boxing Gloves are a staple of Engage’s range. While the gloves are designed to be used for all combat sports, they share a lot of common features with Muay Thai style boxing gloves, making them a great option for those training with kicks and clinching.

With these gloves available in sizes 10oz to 16oz, so you should be able to find a suitable option for whatever type of training you’re up to.

Engage sent us pairs of these gloves in both 12oz and 16oz pair to test and give our opinion on.

Visuals

From Engage’s more recent releases it’s clear they’re leaning heavily into the visuals of their equipment – some of their recent collaborations with StreetX area great example of this. The Tuff & Co gloves definitely fall into the same category, with the combination of fresh white and a light aqua shade making them stand out in quite a unique way.

What makes things even better is that if you’re anything like us and love to wear matching equipment, you can get matching shin guards, grappling shorts and MMA hybrid shorts.

The colours are separated up with two separate leather panels stitched together on the back of the hand rather than just being a graphic printed on, which means the colour should resist wearing for much longer.

Other than the obvious Engage ‘E’ logos on the back of the hand and velcro strap, there are also some printed details on the inner wrist, including the full Engage logo on the side of the palm and two visuals indicating that the gloves are made with premium grade leather and are hand made in Thailand.

Below you can find our Fight Gear Focus video giving you a close-up, visual look at these Gloves. Make sure you check out the rest of the video series and Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any of our future videos.

Materials/Craftsmanship

As just mentioned the gloves are indeed genuine leather. Engage have used a full-grain leather which feels fairly thick, hopefully indicating at some potential for long term durability. On the outside the leather has a slightly dry feel to the touch.

The stitching is all well done, with all the important areas reinforced well, and only a couple of minor loose threads.

The inside of the gloves are lined with a dry, smooth inner lining. I found the lining comfortable enough, without absorbing too much sweat or making the gloves too hot to wear. Like some Muay Thai gloves, these feature a leather panel on the inside of the back of the wrist, which helps keep the gloves in place securely.

The padding is a fairly medium density, with the fingers in a fairly open position, which I’ve personally found to be great for clinching and catching kicks. The only complaint in regards to the padding is that on one of the two pairs of these gloves I’ve been testing, there’s a very minor bump under the leather on one hand, however this is likely an uncommon issue.

Comfort/use

The first time putting these gloves on, both 12oz and 16oz have a fairly snug fit, thanks to the thick padding on the back of the hand and knuckles. As a side effect of this I’ve noticed that the back of hand is really well padded, which comes in handy for blocking any big strikes coming your way.

While these gloves are generally fairly comfortable to use from the start, they do still need a little breaking in. The padding sits a little hard on the knuckles to start with, but do ease up after a session or two.

The cuff on these gloves is pretty sturdy, which means there’s a decent amount of stability and support. Because of the shorter fit of the gloves, it means there’s still a bit of movement, so you can twist the hand with ease when needed.

Overall these gloves have been great to work with. You could easily use these for any activity, but the fit and Thai-style shape lead me to suggest these would probably be best suited as a sparring glove for anyone training in MMA, kickboxing or Muay Thai.

Cost

These gloves retail for $149.95 AUD which works out to about £80, but can often be found on offer. For gloves of these quality that’s roughly what we’d expect to pay. To make the offer better though, Engage offer certain discounts when purchasing, such as saving 15% when buying the matching Tuff & Co Shin guards, which works out great.

As these ship from Australia, shipping costs can be a little high to some countries, however they do offer free shipping when you spend over a certain amount (£162.45 GBP if shipping to the UK), which means it works out best to pick up a bunch of Engage equipment in one go.

Engage also offer Afterpay, a service allowing you to spread the cost out, which to be honest sounds pretty helpful for reducing the cost sting of buying your training kit.