What kind of gloves are best for HYROX?

Thin, breathable, and still tacky once your hands are sweating, with a secure fit that will not slide when your hand relaxes. Minimal padding. The stations that decide races are the sled pull and the farmers carry, so grip under sweat and a glove that stays put matter far more than cushioning.

Can I just use weightlifting or gym gloves for HYROX?

You can, and most people find out why they should not. Gym gloves are built for short sets on a barbell, so they tend to be padded for comfort and closed enough to trap heat. Over an hour-plus race they cook your hands and cost you feel on the rope.

Should HYROX gloves be full finger or fingerless?

Either can work, and it is mostly personal preference. Fingerless keeps the hand cooler and preserves feel. Full finger gives more coverage on the rope. What matters more than the cut is whether the palm holds when wet and whether the glove stays put.

How tight should HYROX gloves be?

Snug enough that the glove does not move on your hand when you relax your grip, without cutting off circulation or bunching in the palm. A glove that shifts under load is worse than no glove, because you end up gripping the glove rather than the equipment.

Do padded gloves help in HYROX?

Rarely. Padding is designed for a loaded barbell pressing into your palm, which is not the problem HYROX creates. What HYROX creates is abrasion on the rope and sustained grip fatigue on the carries, and padding does nothing for either while costing you feel.

What to Look For in a HYROX Glove

Most training gloves are worse than nothing over an hour-plus race. The five things that separate a glove that helps from one you take off at station four.

Most gloves sold for training are worse than nothing in a HYROX. That is not a sales line, it is why a lot of strong racers go barehanded and tell you gloves are pointless. They are right about the gloves they tried.

If you have decided you want a pair, here is what separates one that helps from one you take off at station four and carry for the rest of the race.

1. A palm that grips when your hands are sweating

This is the whole thing. Everything else is secondary.

Your grip does not fail at the start of a race when your hands are dry. It fails at the sled pull and the carries, after several kilometres of running, when your palms are slick with sweat. A palm that feels tacky in a shop and glazes over the moment you are sweating has solved a problem you never had.

Be precise about what you are testing for, because sweat and standing water are not the same problem. Sweat is a thin film on your skin, and a good grip palm cuts through it. Water poured over the outside of a glove sits between the palm and the handle, and at that point almost any material will slide, silicone included. That is why a tap test tells you very little. It is not a condition that happens in a race.

Test it the way it will actually be used: get properly warm, get your hands genuinely sweating, and then go to the rope and the heaviest carry you can hold. If it holds there, it holds where it counts.

2. Thin, with minimal padding

Padding exists for a loaded barbell pressing into your palm. HYROX does not do that to you. What it does is drag a rope across your skin and ask your grip to hold two kettlebells for 200 metres.

Padding helps with neither, and it costs you feel. On the rope you want to know exactly what your hand is doing. A cushioned palm puts a mattress between you and that information, and thick gloves are also the ones that bunch when you close your hand.

3. Breathable everywhere that is not the palm

This is the failure that makes people give up on gloves entirely. A glove with a solid back traps heat, your hands sweat harder inside it, and now you are gripping a wet lining. You have made the problem worse and added a layer.

The back of the hand should be mesh or something close to it. You want air moving through it for an hour-plus, not a neoprene wrap.

4. A fit that does not move

A glove that shifts when you relax your grip is worse than no glove. You end up gripping the glove, the glove grips the rope, and the slack between the two is where your energy and your skin go.

Look for something that anchors to your hand, usually a wrist closure wide enough to actually hold rather than a token strip of velcro. Test it the honest way: hold something heavy, then deliberately ease off your grip. If the glove starts sliding down your fingers, it will do that under load at minute forty.

5. Comfortable enough to leave on

Plan to wear them for the whole race. Stopping to pull gloves on and off in transition costs time you cannot get back, and fumbling wet gloves onto wet hands is worse than the thirty seconds you imagined.

This raises the bar. A glove only needs to be tolerable for a set. A race glove has to be something you forget you are wearing while running, rowing, doing burpees and throwing a wall ball, none of which are grip stations but all of which you are still wearing it for.

What to ignore

Wrist support. You are not maxing out a bench press. Support is stiffness you have to fight for an hour.
Heavy branding on the palm. Printed logos are usually smoother than the material around them, which puts a slick patch in the middle of your grip.
Anything marketed on cushioning. See above. It is solving a barbell problem.
Rating a glove dry. The single most common mistake. Every glove works dry.

The test that settles it

Do not evaluate a glove fresh in a ten-minute session. Get properly warm, get your hands sweating, and then go to the rope and the heaviest carry you can hold. That is the only condition that matters, because it is the condition that decides your race.

And whatever you choose, train in it before you race in it. Race day is not the time to discover a glove slides or cooks.

Still deciding whether you need a pair at all? Start with do you need gloves for HYROX, which goes station by station, or ask our free AI HYROX coach about your weakest station.

What we are building

We wrote this list before we had anything to sell, because it is the list we went shopping with and could not fill. So we are building it: a thin, tacky palm that bites when it is soaked, a breathable top that does not hold heat, and the Anchor, a wide adjustable wrist strap that locks the glove to your hand under load. We race them for the first time on 19 September 2026.