The topic of wearing gloves when lifting weights in the gym is hotly debated: while some think it’s an indispensable part of fitness equipment and can’t even imagine lifting without putting on their favorite pair of gloves, others feel the exact opposite.
In any case, when you visit almost any gym, you’re sure to see plenty of men and women who lift weights, both gym fanatics and hobbyists, wearing these gloves. The answer to whether or not to wear weightlifting gloves is, like so many currently open questions about personal fitness, personal. It’s up to you to decide if you really need a pair or not!
There are many hard-to-dismiss advantages to wearing weightlifting gloves. For starters, they increase grip strength. Using a good pair will help you lift more weight because of your better grip – without a good grip on a bar, you won’t be able to lift as much as you could with a better grip. When you wear these gloves, it’s much easier to hold dumbbells and barbells while performing your exercises. A better grip means less chance of the weights slipping off and hurting you.
They prevent blisters from forming on your hands as a result of those dumbbell and barbell exercises by reducing friction. To keep your hands callous-free, you’ll want to wear weight-lifting gloves!
Models that wrap around your wrists provide the extra wrist support you need during heavy lifting.
However, while there are undoubted benefits to wearing weightlifting gloves, they still come with a serious drawback: Wearing them, they say, actually dampens any real gains in grip strength. The main advantage of weightlifting gloves is also their biggest weakness! They are so good that they do all the work for you, instead of you.
In other words, they give you a false sense of grip strength. In real life situations, you’ll have to rely on your own hands, because you probably won’t be wearing your weightlifting gloves when you need to employ your real grip strength while hanging off a cliff, or in some other less dramatic situation, but it still requires real grip strength. That’s why some think it’s best not to wear weight lifting gloves, but to really work on strengthening your grip.