TUFF Custom Muay Thai Shorts Review

Screenshot of the Custom Muay Thai Shorts page on tuffsport.com

TUFF Custom Muay Thai Shorts Review

Brand

Tuff are one of the lesser known Thai brands that have been producing a wide range of fight gear since 2003, they offer a wide range of gloves, shorts and shin guards in a variety of colours and interesting designs.

About the shorts

Tuff recently reached out to us to let us know about their new Custom Shorts, and we were instantly pretty excited. The new page on tuffsport.com lets you completely design your own Muay Thai shorts with a surprising amount of control. We’ve tested shorts from other brands who allow you to add text to their ‘stock’ shorts, but Tuff’s new designer puts those to shame.

As soon as Tuff let us know about their new designer, I jumped at the chance to design my own, and shot a video showing you how to design your own – similar to other videos we’ve released. If you want to see how my design came out, you can watch the video here:

After the video released, Tuff decided to produce and send us the actual shorts we designed, in order to test them out and give our thoughts on.

Visuals

The appearance of a custom product like this always depends a lot on how you want to design your own, and your personal style choice may not be anything like mine. What I will say though is that I was thoroughly impressed with just how many options there are for colours and designs. Right now there are 46 short colours, 34 waist styles and 33 options for side graphics (including the option to select none). If my maths is correct that adds up to 51,612 potential combinations. Yes, you read that correctly, over 50 thousand – and that doesn’t even include the optional additions of images or your own text on top of that.

That’s seriously impressive, sure. But the question is, how does it come out in person?

Mock up of the TUFF Custom Muay Thai Shorts

Actual version of the TUFF Custom Muay Thai Shorts

Well, lets start by saying I absolutely love how these shorts look. The blue of my shorts is pretty vibrant, and the colour combination looks as good as I hoped. The design is pretty accurate to the mockup of my design, and the graphics continue all around the shorts.

The colours and designs are all printed directly on to the fabric. While this has it’s benefits I would point out that this means colours like silver or gold won’t actually be metallic. I personally suspected that might be the case, but it is an important thing to remember when ordering. The effect really comes from the fact that these items are printed with a colour gradient, so although they aren’t true metallic, they still add a really nice effect to the shorts.

I had an ‘image’ in the center of my shorts, which isn’t printed on, but is a separate panel stitched on to the front, as you would typically expect to see on other shorts. The silver used on here is metallic. I could have opted for some custom text here, but right now Tuff only offer 1 font style, which I wasn’t particularly keen on. A few more text styling options would definitely be a welcome improvement in future.

Materials/Craftsmanship

Something you might not be able to spot from the photos of my shorts is that the colour of the stitching also seems to match the main colour of the shorts – in my case, blue. This is a really subtle thing, but means you don’t have bright white stitching ruining the look of your shorts. The stitching in general seems fairly well thought out. All edges are reinforced with additional fabric, and the slits at the sides of each leg have additional rows of stitching to stop them from tearing.

The waist of these shorts is formed of 8 bands, so is pretty wide and there’s a lot of elastic to hold the shorts snug against your waist. If that isn’t enough for you though, one of the middle rows is actually a drawstring, so you can manually tighten the shorts even further if the elastic isn’t quite tight enough. It’s not needed at all, but is still a useful inclusion.

The material is a lightweight Micro Fiber Fabric, which use for most of their short range. Microfiber shorts are becoming more popular thanks to the impressive designs that can be printed on them, as well as the fact they’re so lightweight. These shorts are no exception – they feel somewhat lighter than other satin shorts I’ve owned. Realistically you aren’t going to even think about the weight of your shorts when you actually get training, but it’s good to know that your shorts aren’t going to feel stiff.

The leather panel on front of the shorts is a little sturdier, which has the benefit of making sure that the the text stays readable and doesn’t crumple.

Comfort/use

The shorts are designed in a traditional style fit, which means they’re fairly high waisted with wide legs. If these custom shorts end up being a popular choice then it would be interesting to see if Tuff would do a similar custom offering for their Retro style shorts too.

Generally moving around in these shorts feels great, and I’ve found they still feel pretty dry after a training session. I haven’t noticed any rubbing from these shorts, which is aided by the fact that all of the seams are pretty flat. The only issue I’ve really had with the fit of these shorts is that if you wear them too low then the legs can feel like they get in the way when stretching, and limit flexibility a tiny bit. It doesn’t really get in the way of kicking or any other activities I’ve done while training, but be aware you’ll want to adjust them before trying to properly stretch.

As mentioned previously, there’s a pretty serious waistband on these shorts. Personally when training in these shorts I decided to roll down the waistband and pull the shorts a little higher to really maximise the flexibility.

Cost

When talking about custom equipment, there’s always a steep price to pay. A lot of brands will inflate the price to ridiculous levels to account for the freedom they give you over the designs.

With that in mind, you’ll be as suprised as we were to find out that the base price of these shorts at the time of writing is just $29.99, roughly around £22, which includes total choice over colours, the waistband colours and the size visuals of the shorts. Adding text and images on top of that adds a little more to the cost, but even then it maxes out at $49.99, roughly around £36.50

Considering the inflated prices many brands opt for, Tuff’s pricing model is refreshingly brilliant.