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One of the most common complaints fighters have about competing in the UFC is that there are far too many pokes in the eye.
Because of the use of open-fingered fight gloves in mixed martial arts, it has long been seen as a problem that had no good solution.
On Friday, however, following the UFC 300 weigh-ins, the top MMA organization in the world unveiled some new fight gloves that they believe will not only reduce eye pokes, but also help lower the number of hand injuries fighters suffer.
“The current glove that they were using was basically just a chunk of foam, a solid piece,” said Jason Neubauer, Vice President of Product Development for VICIS, who developed the new fight gloves. “It wasn’t really developed as an impact-mitigation type of foam, it was just more or less a certain density that seemed to work well for fighting.
“The limitation there is one, how much it absorbs impact, but also its rigidity, and that was probably one of the major parts of the glove was that rigidity wouldn’t allow you to easily open and close your hand and therefore you could have eye pokes or other difficulty during fighting.
“What we developed was a multi-layer slip-plane system that allowed us to continue to mitigate those impact, but allow those slip layers to slide on each other in use without ever minimizing the actual offset between your hand and the outer edge of the glove.”
The new UFC gloves will come in five colors. Gold will be for championship fights. Gunmetal will be used for non-title UFC fights. Blue will be used for Dana White’s Contender Series. Black will be used for The Ultimate Fighter, and red will be for developmental events such as Road to UFC.
Some of the new features that have been implemented include the seams now being located inside the glove, padding that allows more hand flexibility and impact dispersion, a curved, ergonomic wristband, and finger holes cut at an angle to help allow fighters to close their fists better.
Check out the entire presentation of the new UFC fight gloves in the video below…
The new UFC fight gloves are currently expected to make their debut during competition at UFC 302 in Newark on June 1st.