Hayabusa T3 Boxing Gloves Review

The Hayabusa T3 Gloves

In this article, we’re reviewing a pair of Hayabusa T3 Boxing Gloves.

The T3 range is one of Hayabusa’s main lines of equipment. T3 stands for the fact it’s the third generation of their Tokushu range.

We’re gonna summarise a few points for you about the gloves. Make sure to also head over to training gear where we’ve also reviewed other gloves to train with.

Initially, Hayabusa released these in three colors: blue, grey, and red which is the version that we’ve been testing out.

Since then they’ve also released a white version (which is essentially an inverted color option), green or purple so there are plenty of colors to choose from. The color doesn’t just change the panel on the back of the hand, it changes the palm, and the stitching, the stitching color will change depending on what color version you went for.

Also if you didn’t know, it changes the inside of the glove as well, the inner lining changes depending on what color version you get. This is cool because it’s not something you see many brands doing.

Hayabusa has made these gloves out of ‘Vylar’ engineered leather. Vylar is synthetic leather that Hayabusa created, which they found performed better in their tests than real leather did.

You can tell it’s not real leather but it’s quite good quality out of all the gloves we’ve tested this is probably the closest that we’ve tried to the real thing. The Sweat-X thumb is a microfiber suede-covered thumb that you use for wiping away the sweat from your brow during a heavy training session.

For example, we love it because it’s a lot easier than just wiping away the corner of your t-shirt or you know just sweating all over the floor but if you use it too much it can get quite soggy and it’s a bit unpleasant after a while, so maybe it’s better for the quicker sessions.

With previous Hayabusa gloves, people complained that their sweat gets in and smelled out the gloves, so on these gloves, Hayabusa has tried to remedy that so in the actual lining, there are traces of silver which has antibacterial properties which should stop the sweat from ruining the gloves.

And then in between the padding and the lining, there’s a thin plastic layer that just stops the sweat from being able to soak into the padding just to further remedy that smell and stop it from building up.

While we can’t say we’ve noticed any terrible smells, we will just say that we’ve noticed that, perhaps it’s that plastic lining, but the gloves end up taking a lot longer than other brands to dry out. You just have to be careful and make sure that you’re airing your gloves out as well as you can.

T3 Boxing Glove Features

These gloves are now packed with features. One of them is the splints on the back of the hand. We’ve already mentioned the different panels that are hiding splints underneath them.

At the moment there are four splints on these gloves. In previous generations, they’ve only had three splints. But basically what these do is they add a little bit of protection for the back of your hand so if you have any incoming strikes they’ll block them, but what they’re good at is that when you lock up the wrist strap nice and tightly they just lock into place and keep your wrist secure so there’s no accidental bending of the wrist.

The stability this gives is great. However, you do have to bear in mind that if you’re parrying or perhaps clinching up you don’t have the wrist movement you’re used to. This isn’t a problem for things like pad work or bag work but if you are sparring it is something to bear in mind.

One of the other big features of these gloves is they have a dual strap as you can see here. Basically what happens is your first strap is elasticated and you can really stretch that around hard and the second strap pulls over the top of that and then just locks it in place. Once you’ve done these two both up you get a good secure fit around the wrist.

There’s also an amount of natural impact protection that comes with those two straps. Where you have that extra layer of padding it just gives you that extra protection from any incoming kicks perhaps.

When first putting these on you can feel the support in the wrist almost straight away, but they’ve got a comfortable hand compartment as well. The hand compartment is not too loose but it also doesn’t feel like it’s crushing your hand.

There’s a little bit of movement, a tiny bit of movement but it feels well held in place. With these gloves, we found you can make a nice natural fist, and the thumb tucks in quite nicely however we’ve found that it actually has caught once or twice when you’re boxing – I’ve just managed to smash my thumb on the end of something and it hurt a lot more than I’d expect. It’s probably because there’s not Vylar leather on that it’s just a microfiber suede so there’s not as much natural protection from that.

There’s not much you can do about it but it’s just something to be aware of. We’ve already mentioned just how good that double wrist strap is, but the problem is when you’re training it can be a little bit of a pain, especially when you’ve already got one glove on, to try and do both straps up. It’s something you get used to, meaning it didn’t take too long but it is a bit of pain, it takes a little bit longer on the extra glove.

Admittedly it’s worth it, but it’s just something to bear in mind that these aren’t a speedy pair of gloves to put on. What you can do is leave the velcro elasticated strap underneath just slightly looser than you normally would just so you can slide your hand in and only do the one strap but then we feel like you lose out on the extra protection that you get from the elasticated strap in the first place.

The padding is a little bit firm, a little bit dense, but it’s not too hard, and when you punch you don’t quite have a bounce.

There’s no bounce, you actually sort of sink in a little bit more, which is why we like these for Thai pads and heavy bags, because you can really sink those shots in hard without feeling anything in your knuckles and it works well.

I wouldn’t say you need too much of a breaking-in period with these gloves because they pretty much feel the same in terms of padding, as they did straight out of the box, which is pretty good. After all, it means you can just get in there and smash up straight away.

These gloves do of course work in any training you want to use them for you could use them for sparring, or you could use them for pads.

We think they’re good on the heavy bag or the Thai pads when you’re hitting that slightly harder surface, especially just because the wrist support really kicks in, and when you’re hammering in shots you can focus on it without having to worry about whether you’re gonna bend your wrist wrong.

If you have wrist support issues these would be a great pair of gloves for you, so you don’t have to worry about injuring yourself again you can just rely on the extra support from the two straps and the splints, and the wrist just to hammer in those shots without having to worry about hurting yourself. So these gloves retail for about $100.

That’s not a low price, you’ve got to bear in mind these aren’t aimed at beginners, these are aimed at someone slightly more advanced who’s looking for this extra support, stability, and these extra features that come with it.

T3 Recap

Just to recap, you’ve got some really good wrist support here, the padding’s thick and dense so you can sink your knuckles in quite nicely and we think the visual design is pretty stunning as well. On the flip side, it can take a while to put the gloves on, you do need to air them out after you use them, and also the wrists can be a little bit too supportive at times in fact, just when you’re trying to clinch and parry and all those things.

Catch kicks perhaps. If you like this review head to our newsletter and sign up so you can get all of our other written reviews and guides when they’re released. If you want more content like this, let us know in the comments section below and we’ll see you next time.