The UFC has introduced a significant change when it comes to their equipment – their gloves design!

During an official presentation in Las Vegas on Friday, the promotion introduced new gloves that its fighters will wear in all future competitions.

The decision to make this change was driven by the aim to reduce hand injuries and incidents of eye pokes, while ensuring that the gloves maintain dexterity and do not affect fighters’ performances or match outcomes.

VICIS Vice President of Product Development Jason Neubauer explained how some of the new features will benefit fighters:

The current glove that they were using was basically just a chunk of foam, a solid piece.
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.

They believe that it’s a revolutionary product:

The final product is something that we’re extremely excited about.
It is a glove that is really going to revolutionize the MMA fight glove space.

Some of the changes you’re going to see on the new glove are there are zero seams around the hand, all of the seems are around the inside, so there’s no place for a laceration to occur from a seam.
The padding in the back of the hand has been broken into two and essentially the first pad in that break allow for the hand to have this movement, while the new layering technology allows for the hands to move and be flexible.

The layering system aside, the foams are different foams, they allow for impact dispersion so that you’re not getting as much impact in a singular spot in the knuckle, so you’re seeing more distribution of the strike across the hand.

There’s pads that are on the bone, that are on the outside of either side of the hand.
The new wristband is a curved, ergonomic wristband, so it actually cinches down to the wrist.

There’s no more room to put your hand down into the actual glove, and then it’s a cross-function cinch, so it also allows for that tight custom fit to be exactly how the fighter wants around their wrist and provides support.

The finger holes used to be cut straight across the finger.
We’ve now cut that down at an angle so that there’s no bulk under the finger, which is allowing you to close your hands and not fight against the leather in the hand.