In the world of boxing, Muay Thai, and MMA fighters; a popular question is often asked among the players, “Can you Punching Heavy Bag without gloves?” Well, the short answer to this is yes.
To be more precise, you can punch a heavy bag with just MMA gloves, hand wraps, or even without any protective garment for your hands. Yes, you can exactly do it just like that.
After all, it can be a good method to strengthen not only your knuckles but also your wrist and forearm muscles. So as to say, it is not a matter of whether it’s permissible or not. Actually, it is a matter of frequency, “How often should you do it?”
Definitely, it is not something to be taken lightly about. It requires so much technique and planning because it may lead to serious hand injuries if you don’t.
You wouldn’t want to regularly succumb to the pain of punching a 200-pound heavy bag, right?
With that said, let me give you some knuckle-friendly tips and advice with regard to punching heavy bag without gloves
The Five Steps of Punching Heavy Bag without Gloves
Flatten your First
First and foremost, you need to check your fist and make sure it’s strong and flat.
Get your fingers to remain flat or in a flat plain while flushed to one another.
When you punch, make sure your flat fingers and top row of knuckles make contact with the bag at the same time.
Align your Wrist
Don’t even think of bending your wrist before or during your strikes. If you do, your wrist will collapse due to the bad-angled punch that you just threw in.
The last thing that you would want to have is a wrist sprain, right?
So, watch out for your wrist and make sure it’s straight. Particularly, align it perfectly with your first.
When Punching Heavy Bag without gloves, make sure that your forearm, wrist, and fist are tensed together as one solid piece.
Execute Precise Punches
Instead of giving it all for power, focus on your punching speed when throwing precise, crips, and powerful punches.
Pulling off a magnitude of your strength towards a heavy bag without any gloves will increase your chance of injury.
Snap your punches on the target by pulling your punches as soon as they land.
Hooks are a No-no
If I were you, I’d definitely go for jabs and right hands. Executing hooks while your knuckles are bare is as dangerous as going inside the octagon without any gloves.
Hooks are powerful moves so they can make your wrists more vulnerable.
Moreover, you can’t possibly align your wrist if you’re aiming for hooking punches. And so, I suggest letting it go and simply aiming for jabs and right hands.
Take a Break
This is perhaps the most obvious advice on this list. But really, taking a break will never go out of style.
Punching heavy bag in a bare-knuckle style is already strenuous enough, how much more if you overtrain yourself?
This type of boxing style increases your chances of having occasional breaks or cracks in the surface area of your knuckles’ skin.
While this skin will strengthen over time, you also need to give it time to heal before getting back to aggressive training.
Bruises or painful wounds can also occur from time to time. With that, you really need to know how to stop and when to resume your training.
Apart from that, fatigue will also haunt you as you continue to manifest this boxing style.
Fatigue can lead to a breakdown of boxing form, and if you don’t preserve your form when punching bare-knuckle style, you can easily injure yourself.
So, if you feel yourself getting tired, either take a break or put on a pair of boxing gloves for the rest of your workout.
The Perfect Glove for a Bare-Knuckled Punch
If the above-mentioned tricks and hacks, by any chance, don’t work for you, then why don’t you kickstart your way into a bare-knuckle boxing style by starting off with a lightly padded training glove?
And then eventually, you replace it with a much heavier one, and so on. You get the gist of it.
With that said, the so-called RDX grappling glove is best recommended to perform this.
It does a fairly good job in a make-believe feeling of punching without gloves. Just don’t forget to check the sizing chart when buying one.
Final Words
Training for bare-knuckle punches is completely okay, but in doing so, you need to follow certain steps and procedures so as to not hurt yourself.
It is important to take these things into consideration so you will find yourself in a position where bruised knuckles will lead to your fight’s delay or cancellation.
What’s good about it also is how advantageous it can be in certain aspects. For one, it strengthens your skin, as well as the bones, muscles, and connective tissues of your hands.
At the end of the day, it is only just a matter of learning the curve of throwing a punch without any protective gear.
As days pass, you will eventually get a hold of this technique. Trust me, I know that for sure.
