Nobody likes stinks and smelly gloves. Well, it is understandable that sports gear of all kind can become sticky, grubby and stinky after usage. While doing sports or during your workout sessions, athletes and combat fighters sweat a lot and this sweating form a breeding base for fungus, bacteria and additional unpleasant stink. Same like other athletic gear, gloves for boxing and MMA can become clammy and filthy too. Though, nothing like the apparel, cleaning and keeping your MMA gloves are not that simple, that you just have to just drop them in a washing machine. No. You cannot do this to the gloves. So, what will you do? How will you wash your gloves? These questions must be crossing your mind at the moment. That’s why we’ve written this article. Read on to find out more.
Every combat fighter invests a lot of money and time in choosing and purchasing the gear they need. So, to keep the gloves in a maintained healthy condition, it is important that you take care of them and keep them in good condition. That way you will be able to use them over the long run. Know that the gloves rip down gradually if they are drenched in sweat. But you can stop this from happening by taking care of your gloves and cleaning them regularly after every use.
How important is it to clean gloves and wash your hands right after the session?
Subsequently, after quite a few rounds of bag workout or multiple intense training sessions, gloves start to dirty up immediately. So, after an intense training session, if you do not clean your gloves and wash your hands, imagine about everything you touch. Right after the session, if you do not wash your hands, the irritation transfers throughout the body abruptly. And here we all know that skin irritations and allergies are nothing to be taken lightly. That is why it is crucial to clean the hands and MMA boxing gloves right after you have used them. On a side note, who wants their gloves to stink bad and wear down after a couple of usages? No one, that’s right! Hence, by taking good care of your gloves, it will have a much longer life span, and it will smell fresh as if ready to help you throw powerful punches at your opponent.
Let’s talk about glove maintenance thoroughly. It is the one aspect that most trainees ignore and do not seem much to care about. But remember that a clean and fresh pair of gloves surely lessen the chances of any skin allergies, irritations, and infections.
To clean and get rid of the smelly gloves are the hardest because, at times, conventional, unconventional or whatever regimens you use cannot bring the nasty stinking gloves back to the cleanest and pleasant life. So, what do you do then? Well, the key to this is to avert your gloves to end up in this state at first. So, to truly keep your boxing gloves clean, mind to start taking care of them rightly from the beginning, not when they start to stink after some time.
What is the right way to clean MMA Gloves?
Well, below we’ve mentioned different ways and tips to stop your boxing gloves from smelling. We have listed down a few steps through which you can learn the right way to clean your gloves and maintain them in a good position. Read away and follow as it is or adapt these tips as per your requirements.
Washing & Disinfecting
Generally, the exterior or we can say the surface of the glove is kind of easy to clean an compared to the inner side of the gloves. You can do a rapid wipe with clean water easily on the surface of the glove. Also, if you have a glove cleaner, you can use that too at times and it does not do any harm. But ensure that after cleaning the outer surface of your gloves, you let it completely dry too.
However, if we talk about the cleanliness of the inner part of the gloves, well that part varies according to what material your glove is made up of. For some gloves, maybe cleaning in a salted solution is perfect, because it is not as sharp like bleach or other cleaners. Instead, it enhances the basic water quality to clean effectively. You can immerse the gloves in saline solution for an hour or two and then clean it by dipping it into simple water.
Once the gloves are cleaned completely, just pour over the freshwater over them again, just in case. Apart from this cleaning method, there is another one. For that, you can just clean your gloves with baking soda without adding any water. What you will do is, you will just add or apply baking soda to gloves and wait for an hour or so to let it absorb odors and then brush away off of the gloves before using it.
Exposure to Air
After cleaning, next comes up the drying process. And it is an important one because the gloves should be completely dry before you start using it again. You have to take out the extra water out of the gloves and use towels or other woolen stuff to absorb as much water as it can. After that, you will need to place your gloves to an area that has the access to fresh air, which let gloves to dry fully.
To speed up the drying process, you can use newspapers. By stuffing newspaper into the gloves, it sucks the moisture out of the fabric and works as a catalyst.
Freshening
Today, you may come across various no stink glove deodorizers that can surely help you in keeping your gloves fresh and free from any unpleasant odors. Some do quite a good job at it and well, there are also some, which are full of chemicals causing you gloves to break down faster than they would normally do. So, you have to choose very carefully.
Let’s first get to know what are the gloves deodorizers and what are they prepared from? Mostly these deodorizers are made from using burnt bamboo sticks; we are talking about the charcoal that is released from the burnt bamboo. That’s why these gloves deodorizers are an easy approach to get rid of smelly odors and breeding bacteria on your gloves.
But for those who do not want to spend money on deodorizers, there are two natural ways they can apply to get rid of false odors and developing bacteria. First is the use of coal and other method is by using the greatest organic deodorizer, apple cider vinegar.
First for coal, if you live in an area where coal is easily available then you should use coal as a budgeted solution to clean the gloves. For this method, you just have to place a piece of coal into your glove and the coal will do its trick by absorbing all the moisture and odors from the gloves. Sounds crazy? But it does work effectively.
Next comes the use of vinegar. For this method, you will take one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in your hand and scrub it inside the clean dry gloves carefully. Once you get done with the rubbing inside the gloves thoroughly, you will then place gloves near the open window or in an area where they can easily dry out. But avoid placing the gloves into any spinner to get these to dry out quickly. Never think of that as you have to make sure that vinegar dries out naturally by eliminating all the odors and bacteria from the gloves.
We have provided you will all the basic tips and cleaning practices to keep your all types of training and fighting gloves fresh and clean. Moreover, you can also use these cleaning methods to not only the gloves but also on your head guard, shin guards, focus pads and any other leather or imitation leather gear you have. Follow the above-mentioned methods and keep your gear looking and feeling fresh for as long as you train.