If you walk through the starting corral at a HYROX race, you notice the gear. It’s a sea of intention. The shoes are a specific type of carbon-plated racer, chosen for their energy return. The shorts are technical, split-hemmed for movement. The watches are tracking biometric data in real-time. Everything looks purpose-built, honed for a single task: going faster.
But then you look at people's hands, and you see something strange. You see athletes, incredibly fit and serious, wearing gloves that look like they came from a hardware store. Or a garden shed. They’re often grey, bulky, with a crinkly rubber coating on the palm.
In a sport completely obsessed with optimization, this has always struck me as odd. Why is this one critical piece of gear so often an afterthought? And more importantly, what is it costing people on the clock? I think the answer is: more than they realize.
A Tool for the Wrong Job
The use of generic work gloves in fitness racing seems to be a legacy habit. In the early days, you just used what was tough and available. The culture was gritty, and the gear was improvised. But the sport has moved on, while this one piece of gear has often been left behind. People still use them because they seem "good enough." A glove is a glove, right?
This is a flawed assumption. Using a hardware store glove in a HYROX race is like using a dinner knife as a screwdriver. You might be able to turn a screw with enough force, but the tool is fundamentally wrong for the job. It’s clumsy, it’s inefficient, and you’ll probably strip the screw. The hardware store glove strips your performance in three key ways.
The Sweat Problem
Those gloves are designed to keep dirt and oil off your hands; they were never designed to manage moisture from the inside.
When you start working hard on the SkiErg or the rower, your hands sweat. That sweat has nowhere to go. It pools inside the glove, creating a horribly slick surface between your skin and the glove's inner fabric. Now you have two slippery interfaces to deal with: the implement against the glove, and your hand against the inside of the glove. Your grip is compromised from both sides.
The Bulk Problem
The thick, uniform padding of a work glove increases the diameter of whatever you’re holding. This might not seem like a big deal, but basic biomechanics tells us that gripping a thicker bar requires significantly more forearm strength and endurance.
Your muscles have to work harder just to hold on, leading to faster burnout on the farmer's carry or sled pull. That bulk also creates unnatural folds and pressure points, which are the primary cause of painful blisters and hot spots during a long race.
The Durability Problem
The stitching and materials on a work glove are meant to resist abrasion and punctures, not the dynamic, high-repetition stress of a fitness race.
The seam at the thumb joint, a critical stress point when pulling a sled, is often the first thing to tear. They simply aren’t built for this kind of work.
What Should a Hyrox-Focused Glove Actually Do?
So, if the hardware store glove is the wrong tool, what would the right tool look like?
Instead of just looking at what’s available, let’s think about the ideal solution from first principles, based on the problems we need to solve.
The first problem is sweat: The ideal glove must be a sweat-management system. It needs to be made from technical, moisture-wicking fabrics that pull sweat away from the skin and move it to the surface where it can evaporate. It needs a highly breathable and minimal back panel to let heat escape freely.
The second problem is grip failure: The solution can’t just be a "sticky" palm. The grip needs to be engineered. It should be made of a material like silicon that maintains its hold even when wet with sweat or water. The pattern of the grip shouldn't be random; it should be designed to interface with the different implements you face in a race, like the knurled bar, the smooth handle of a kettlebell, and the coarse rope of a sled pull.
The third problem is bulk and fatigue: The perfect glove has to be minimalist. It should feel like a second skin, not a clumsy mitten. This means using as little material as possible, placing it strategically only where it’s needed for protection and grip. Anything extra is just dead weight that contributes to fatigue.
Finally, a tool designed for competition needs to be durable and hygienic: It requires reinforced stitching in key stress areas. And given the amount of sweat it will encounter, the fabric itself should have some form of embedded odor-control technology to keep it from becoming unusable after a few sessions.
Our Attempt to Build the Right Tool
This exact thought process is what led us to develop our own gloves. As athletes, we were tired of the compromises. We were frustrated with having to choose between the wasting of time at chalk buckets or the clumsy inefficiency of work gloves. So we tried to build the glove we just described from first principles.
We call them GLVZ.
To solve the sweat problem, we used a lightweight, technical mesh for the back of the hand and a functional finish on the fabric to make it moisture-wicking.
For the grip problem, we designed a specific anti-slip pattern using high quality silicon ink that provides an unmatched hold.
To combat bulk and fatigue, we focused on strategic material placement, keeping the glove incredibly lightweight and minimalist while reinforcing the palm and thumb.
And for durability and hygiene, we used reinforced stitching and embedded odor-control technology right into the fabric.
We didn’t just add features: we tried to build a comprehensive solution to the problems every hybrid athlete faces.
The Part I Used to Be Skeptical About: Style
I'll be honest, for a long time I thought the color and style of gear was a distraction. Performance is all that matters. As long as it works, who cares what it looks like?
But then you spend enough time at these events, and you start to notice something. You see an athlete in a fully coordinated kit (the shoes, the shorts, the top, the gloves), and they carry themselves with a different kind of confidence.
There is a real psychological component to feeling prepared, to looking the part. It’s the old saying: look good, feel good, play good. It’s not about vanity; it's about signaling to yourself and everyone else that you are serious and you have left no stone unturned.
That’s why we didn't just make the GLVZ in black. We created colorways like the vibrant Pink Orange and the tactical Army Green. It’s about allowing an athlete to create a complete system where every piece works in synergy, from performance down to presentation.
The hardware store glove is a compromise. And in a race against the clock, compromise is just another word for lost time. Your gear should be a weapon in your arsenal, not an obstacle you have to overcome. The choice is actually quite simple.