Do you not feel your gloves are lasting long enough? Are they losing their grip effect too quickly? Is the latex crumbling? A gloves lifespan depends on how you treat them. Follow the advice in this blog and you will experience massive improvements.
18.11.2016
Do you not feel your gloves are lasting long enough? Are they losing their grip effect too quickly? Is the latex crumbling? A gloves lifespan depends on how you treat them. Follow the advice in this blog and you will experience massive improvements.
When I answer your DM’s on Instagram, the question I get most frequently is about certain gloves' longevity and durability. This question is often the hardest to answer too because the answer is fairly counterintuitive. The top gloves, which are of the highest quality, give easily the strongest grip, but are often more vulnerable and break quicker. On the flip side, most downgrades give a worse grip but will last you longer. Most top gloves seem to match each other on durability, so if you want a glove that lasts longer, no model is especially better than the other. That means the only way to get the best possible grip, without buying gloves every third game is to take good care of them.
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This is the most obvious point, the most essential point - and also the most time consuming. It may seem like a jungle to figure out the best way to do it because there are so many guides on how to wash your gloves properly. My advice is simple and has served me well for many years. Bring the gloves with you in the shower, lightly wash them, spray some glove wash on the foam, put the glove on the shower floor, wash your hair, pick up the gloves and rub them clean. If you make this a habit after each training, this prolongs the life of your gloves by so, so much. You can skip the glove wash if you like, but it does give the foam a deeper clean, so it maintains more grip.
Pro tip: If you don’t have time to clean your gloves, then you can always try to bribe a teammate with the promise of cola. Do that and you will quickly have people fighting for the honour of washing your gloves.
When you are done washing the gloves, it is very important you dry them. If you put your gloves anywhere near a radiator, then the foam will take pretty critical damage, and you will lose a lot of grip. If you just leave the gloves to dry on a bench, then they won’t have enough air or time to dry, which means they won’t be ready for training the next day. Instead just do what Kasper Schmeichel does and bring a hanger to dry them on.
To give your gloves the best performance, it is important they don’t dry out. The gloves work best, when they aren’t too wet and aren’t too dry, so keep them slightly moist most of the time. You can do that by always having a bit of water and a towel with you on the pitch.
You can see our selection of towels, glove wash and Glove Glu right here.