Everlast Striking Training MMA Gloves Review

Everlast Striking Training MMA Gloves Review

Brand

Originally founded in 1910, Everlast have been a big name in the boxing world for many years. They’re now one of the most widely known USA boxing brands, with gear lines for boxing, mixed martial arts, and fitness related sporting goods.

About the gloves

These gloves are Everlast’s basic striking glove, which are designed for sparring and training to give you maximum protection while throwing punches.

Everlast rank their gloves on a 3 level system, with these classified under level II, which have advanced technology and materials, meaning these are aimed more at beginners and advanced fighters rather than professionals.

Weight and distribution

With these striking specific MMA gloves the vast majority of the weight is over the top of the knuckles, to provide protection for both you and your partner during sparring or when you’re hitting the bag or pads. The padding is fairly thick and soft, which attempts to reduce any impact for striking as much as possible. A large amount of the padding is spread down the back of the hand, with the wrist straps holding tightly to the hand to secure. The wrist strap on these gloves wrap around the wrist one and a half times, securing on to itself in two places and staying firmly in place when using the gloves. Shaped thumb pads on each hand protect the thumb, adding a tiny bit more protection.

Visuals

The Everlast Striking Training MMA gloves only come in one colour, which is a shame as they likely would look nice in a few other colour combinations. The overall design is simple in a clean way, with the external materials in black with grey details, and the interior in a deep, red with a lovely shine to it. The main visuals are the Everlast logo, covering the back of the hand and adding a splash of yellow. The Everlast logo is also found on a patch stitched on to the wrist strap, and on the inside of the wrist is an ‘Everlast MMA’ logo printed in white.

While the design is fairly basic, Everlast have done a good job at making these gloves look sophisticated, with the colours adding an extra dimension to the visuals.

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

As these come under Everlast’s level II, I was hoping the materials on these would meet the ‘Advanced Technology and Materials’ tagline associated to that level. As it turns out, in some ways they do and in some ways they don’t. The gloves are made with synthetic leather, so we weren’t expecting the highest quality material, but the leather feels a little waxy to touch. This wasn’t the real problem however. The real problem is that within only a couple of light sessions with these gloves, part of the leather (on the side of the padding, next to the thumb) on one of these gloves has torn. While the tear hasn’t gotten any worse in our time testing these gloves, it certainly says a lot about the materials used, and I would question the long-term durability of these gloves.

Despite the disappointing synthetic leather, the rest of the glove is surprisingly not so bad. The Velcro holds well, and stays in place tightly with no problems. The inner material is lovely. It has almost silky texture to it which makes sure they’re comfortable on the hand. I actually really like this smooth material and would personally say I find it a lot nicer than many more expensive gloves, however I’m not convinced it’s as good from an anti-microbial point of view.

Craftsmanship

The build quality of these gloves are more or less what you would expect for something in this price range. The stitching doesn’t seem to have any loose threads, however it also doesn’t always appear to be straight, and you can see knots where the stitching ends in one or two places, as well as a lot of random looking knots tucked away on the inside of the thumb.

I like several of the choices Everlast have made when designing the gloves, for example the finger holes. The finger holes on these gloves are all connected and fit the fingers almost like a glove would, which I personally much prefer to having individual leather rings as it tends to dig into the gaps between your fingers a lot less. I also find it gives a little bit more material to grip on to when making a fist. I also like the shape of the padding. The layers are held in place with a natural curve, which feels pretty natural and fitted well, holding the knuckles in place by the thickest point in the padding.

Comfort/use

When trying on any pair of MMA gloves, the first thing you feel is the padding. Even when wearing hand wraps, you’ll still have the material rubbing against parts of your fingers or wrists. The soft inner lining on these is really nice to wear and the padding on the inside feels fairly soft to prevent any unwanted rubbing.

This along with the nice thumb position, secure wrist strap and comfortable finger holes makes these fairly comfortable gloves to wear.

We’ve tested these gloves on the bag and pads, as well as a bit of sparring. The overall protection is alright, but these are probably better suited to sparring, as you can get better support for bag/pad work elsewhere. During sparring, the density of the padding works really well though, allowing you to hit without hurting your knuckles or opponent too much. Obviously these are still MMA gloves so will feel pretty sharp to get hit with, but the padding seems to reduce the shock a little more than other gloves, and much more than Grappling or competition style MMA gloves would. The gloves are also quite bulky, and are noticeably bigger than many other MMA gloves. Despite this though there’s still a fair amount of hand movement available for grappling and cliching.

It was mainly the materials which let us down. Obviously the synthetic leather was used as a cost-cutting measure, but it just feels like very little thought was put into the durability of these gloves, and I worry that they won’t last long at all

Cost

The RRP price of these gloves is $29.99, which works out around £24.99 in the UK. Of course as Everlast is such a big name, you can often find these gloves in most sporting stores, and shops like Sports Direct almost always have them on sale for much cheaper. If we were to suggest these gloves to anybody it would be absolute beginners. The gloves offer a good amount of padding for training, but also are comfortable in their own right. If you know for a fact you’re likely to stick to your training, we’d suggest investing your money into a pair of gloves built with slightly higher grade materials, as we’re not sure how long the Everlast Striking Training MMA gloves will last.

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