Lonsdale Pro Style Training Boxing Gloves Review

Lonsdale Pro Style Training Boxing Glove Review

Lonsdale Pro Style Training Boxing Gloves (14oz) Review

Summary:

We found these gloves to be poorly made, making them fall disappointingly short of the price range they place themselves in. These gloves are designed to catch the attention of beginners who don’t know any better, but are a choice which should ultimately be avoided.

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Brand

Lonsdale is a boxing, mixed martial arts and clothing brand that was founded in London, England in 1960. Ex-boxer Bernard Hart started the brand as a boxing equipment company, but it eventually branched out into clothing as well. The company is named after Hugh Cecil Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale, who in 1891 set up the first organised boxing matches with gloves, following the deaths of three boxers in bare-knuckle fights. Lonsdale have been historically worn by many famous boxers, including boxing legend Muhammad Ali. The brand is now owned by Sports Direct.

About the gloves

The Lonsdale Pro Style Training Glove is a low end glove, aimed mainly at beginners. It’s a fairly basic glove, which is sold for a relatively cheap price. It’s designed mainly for boxing, and has a short Velcro strap on the inside of the wrist for putting the gloves on quickly when training, with a grip bar and breathable palm for extra breathability. As with most boxing gloves, these come in 10oz, 12oz, 14oz and 16oz versions. I’ve been trying out the 14oz versions.

Visuals

These gloves come in four colour options; black, red, pink and blue. It’s a small choice, but adds a little bit of variation. The design on these is pretty basic. The gloves are solid colour, with white outlining around the palm, and a grey wrist. The Lonsdale lion icon is on the back of the hand in white, just above the Lonsdale logo in a white patch on the wrist. There’s also a short tagline reading ‘Unleash The Lion’ across the grip bar, but this was smudged on one of my gloves. Overall the design is pretty basic, but some people do prefer an approach that isn’t as flashy. Unfortunately the synthetic leather of these isn’t pulled very tight, which gives these gloves a very crumpled, un-shaped appearance as well.

Materials and Craftsmanship

As previously mentioned, the gloves are made out of synthetic leather. The synthetic leather looks like the real thing close up, but is rather disappointing in quality. It feels cheap to the touch, and feels much more plastic-like than I’ve found on other synthetic leather gloves. The leather is also really loosely attached to the glove itself, and you can literally pinch the leather where it isn’t sitting tightly over the padding. The padding is what Lonsdale call ‘L-Core layered foam padding’, however it feels like a couple of layers simply bent around the fingers, and there’s no real attempt at distributing the padding more around the important areas, such as the knuckles.

The palm of the glove is fully breathable, from just above the wrist, all the way up to the fingers. This means the glove is great at keeping your hands cool, however it’s a slightly scratchy meshing, and it also means that the gloves loses any natural shape and tends to flatten out. Inside the glove, the material isn’t actually too bad. It feels rather basic, however that’s to be expected from a glove in this price range. What lets it down however is the fact that there are bits of spare untrimmed fabric and loose threads in a few places. Perhaps this is just in my ones and may not be an issue for everyone, however it says a lot about the craftsmanship of the gloves that this happens at all.

I found the stitching to be a bit messy generally, and while it all seems to be secure, it makes me question the quality of the stitching. I was also disappointed to find that after only a few uses, the grey leather around the wrist had started to split slightly just above the Lonsdale logo, around the stitching. It’s not noticeable at a distance, and the sort of thing you have to look to find, however it’s not something you should have happening no matter how much you pay. Boxing gloves should be built to last many months if not years depending on how much you use them, not just a couple of sessions.

The Velcro is fairly sturdy and will hold itself, however I was a bit worried about the amount of Velcro there was. In total, the attaching areas add up to about 1 inch wide by 2 inches high, which is a tiny amount especially compared to the more typical wrap around style of Velcro found on many gloves. There are no complaints about tightness thankfully. The elastic in the strap ensures that the glove is pulled tight no matter how big or small your wrists are, and these would easily fit somebody with a much slimmer wrist.

Comfort/use

Before I get started, I feel like I should warn that this isn’t going to be a glowing review. These gloves were uncomfortable to use, and felt like they were almost promoting bad hand positioning when throwing punches.

One of the main things I find strange about these gloves is the fit. The padding seems to gently curve around the knuckles and then bend sharply at the finger joint, meaning that no matter how hard you hold the grip bar, your fingers are always sticking out slightly more than your knuckles. I was amazed by how badly fitting this was. Most gloves are designed to either curve around the whole way, with extra padding to support, or bend around the knuckles with a squarer fit, while these gloves just left the fingers exposed and often taking the majority of the force before the knuckles. The other weird thing is that the gloves seem angled, so that the fingers on the thumb side are further forward in the glove than the smaller fingers on the other side. This doesn’t just look weird, it actually means that you end up using much more force on one side, which could easily lead to bad habits with beginners developing bad habits and punching at an angle to make up for it. The only way I’ve found to punch successfully with these, is to bend the hand down, however it’s a massive risk of injury when punching like that and the cuff gives almost no wrist support whatsoever.

Not to mention the thumb position is horrible. I know different people prefer a variety of different thumb positions – some prefer it more curved, some prefer more straight – but these seem to just be pointing almost vertically. It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but once on, your thumb is almost left in a pinching position next to your forefinger, which is, once again, further out than your knuckles. From my experience using these gloves, I would be incredibly worried about injuring my thumb using these gloves, and it worries me that any beginner is more likely to injure themselves through bad fist posture than actually protect their hands.

Inside the glove, the material tends to get caught up in the finger area, which I find isn’t quite long enough as it is. I have a fairly average finger length, and it’s really cramped in the finger compartment, so I dread to think how somebody with longer fingers would feel with these. The material getting bunched up and caught around my fingers is the last thing I want to think about when putting my gloves on, and shouldn’t be distracting at all.

These gloves are also not suitable for anything other than bag/pad work. The lack of actual material on the hands other than mesh means that there is no padding on the palm. For Kickboxers or Muay Thai fighters, blocking a kick could be painful, and training methods such as Dutch drills would be a bad idea too. Not to mention the fact that the padding on the knuckles of these gloves is so badly spread out that your sparring partner would be unprotected. I would of course advise using 16oz gloves anyway, rather than the 14oz gloves we’ve tested here, however they’re incredibly thinly padded even compared to other 14oz gloves.

Cost

These gloves RRP for £30, but are often found around £10 – £15. I can say for a fact that these gloves definitely fall short of the quality you should expect out of a £30 pair of boxing gloves. Gloves like these are the exact reason why it’s important to invest more in some high quality gloves.

In Lonsdale’s defence, they do have much better ranges of gloves at higher prices, which do appear to be much, much higher quality and more competitive with the market. It disappoints me however that these are the gloves which are stocked throughout sporting stores all over. These are the gloves that beginners find when they go to buy their first gloves and assume in all good faith that they are ‘okay’ gloves. This is simply not true. These gloves are the cheapest feeling gloves I have personally tried, which fall disappointingly short of the price range they place themselves in. They seem more built for the purpose of making profits for sporting stores than protecting the boxer.