A very good exercise for your shoulders, pecks, core, and arms is to punch something repetitively with great force.  Unfortunately for most of us, our knuckles will break open and our wrists will buckle if we try this exercise bare-handed.  That is why Harbinger made these excellent bag gloves.  I’ll just tell you right at the start, I think these gloves are perfect.

Description

The most obvious thing you’ll want in a bag glove is protection of the knuckles, both of the knuckle bones and of the skin on the knuckles.  Harbinger protects both of these with solid padding over the knuckles and a soft fabric on the inside of the gloves.  My friend got a different pair of bag gloves and the fabric on the inside was so rough that it would rub open his skin while punching.  I can only think of one time in all my punching with these Harbingers that my skin broke open.  The padding over the knuckles seems to be just the right thickness to avoid injury while still allowing your full force to travel through to the object being punched.

This is just a pose. If I were using them, all you'd see would be two blurry black clouds.

The other most significant feature of these bag gloves is the built in wrist wrap.  The wrap is made of leather and is about a foot and a half in length.  You first stick on the unwrapped glove, and then twist the wrap around your wrist tightly.  It wraps around your wrist twice, and is stiff but still comfortable.  It has really saved my wrists from some poorly angled punches.  My friend, who got the mma gloves, still had to wrap his wrists every time he wanted to punch with them, which took him a long time and required purchasing wrist-wraps, which also insulated his wrists and made him sweat more.

There is also padding on top of the glove, I suppose so that you can practice back-hand punches, or just for protection if you miss your target.  The whole exterior of the glove is made of nice black leather.  If have spent several hours punching with these gloves and I don’t notice any wear in the leather, so I bet they’ll hold up until I’m dead or have arthritis.

I removed the padded bar on the palm to be more mma.

These bag gloves also provide a little padded bar on the palm, which you can wrap your fingers around.  This prevents your fingers from buckling in if you accidentally punch with your lower knuckles.   I considered this to be an unneeded crutch, and I wanted to be more m-m-a, so I used the little scissors on my swiss army knife and cut out the stitching.  It was easy to do, and I’m happy with the results.

Conclusion

These Harbinger bag gloves are the best bag gloves that I’ve ever seen or owned.  I plan on using them for the rest of my life. If I were rich, I would buy some extra ones now and keep them in storage for my future generations, just in case Harbinger ever goes out of business.