Hand Wrapping for Boxing

Video Transcript

"The next clip on our segment of introductory boxing lessons is going to be hand wrapping. You want a good quality hand wrap. These are a Mexican style of hand wrap. They're slightly elastic, so you get a little bit of elasticity there. They're also 180 inches long. That's 15 feet. So you get plenty of wrap to be able to do the wrist, the knuckles, the thumb, all in a good form. So Nick here is going to allow me to wrap his hands. He knows how to wrap them but for the benefit of what we're doing here, I'm going to show you how I do it. We're going to loop it over the thumb first, and then this side down on the wrap, we're unrolling from the bottom of the wrap. That way we can keep tension on it. If you unroll from the top, there's little or no tension there. So we're going to keep some tension on it by unrolling from the bottom. We're going to wrap around the wrist about four times, overlapping a little bit each time. Then we're going to work our way up to these big knuckles, which is the working man's knuckles for a boxer. We're going to wrap around those knuckles about four times, alternating a little bit as we go. When it comes to the thumb, we want to protect that thumb. We're going to wrap halfway around the thumb from the bottom to the bottom. If you notice all by itself, that's nothing. You say, ?What would I do that for?" Well, we're coming back around again, and we're going to wrap it from the top back around to the top again. Now what I've done was I've created a little cradle for that thumb to sit in. Then from there we're going to go back up to these knuckles again, maybe three times or so. Back to the thumb again and we're going to do the same thing. From the bottom, we're going to wrap around halfway around the thumb, go back to the top. Come back around again from the top, back around to the top again. Now we've created a good cradle for that thumb to sit in. Nick can still move his thumb but it's not like flopping in the breeze. Okay? So we got a good protection on that thumb. From there I'm going to go back up to the big knuckles two or three times, and then back down to the wrist. If you started on the wrap with this side down, you're going to end up with the Velcro side up, and then it's just a matter of securing it onto the Velcro. Now Nick is protected on the wrist, he's protected on the knuckles, he's protected on the thumb, you can hardly see any of his hand at all. That's a good wrap."