Review - Climb X Super Crack Gloves

Below you’ll find our review on the Climb X Super Crack Gloves. We tested every crack glove we could get our hands on and compare the pros and cons against all the other glove options out there. (Future reference, you can see every model of crack gloves on WeighMyRack.com/crackglove).

Brand Sizing – A bit tough to fit. Brand recommendation for measurement is a little cryptic. We doubled their numbers and that seems to help.

• ClimbX doesn’t have any fitting guide we could find on their website. As they sell solely through Am@zon, we were able to find a bit more info on their product page, though the method for measuring may be lost in a translation somewhere. Without any images or charts, we made the guess that they are measuring just across the top of the hand in some way, so we doubled those numbers to get them a little closer to the rest of the brands.
• Though we can’t find any other way to correlate their numbers with our hands, our sizing seems to be fairly accurate when compared to other gloves.

Hand coverage – They certainly cover a lot of the hand. Though the shape of the strap in conjunction with the thickness of the glove can make them feel almost oversized.

• The teardrop shaped thumb hole makes sense in context of the overall shape of the glove, but it also means these have the least thumb coverage out of anything we’ve seen.
• There is nothing else on the market that covers more of your wrist than the Super Crack, but we don’t necessarily think this is a good thing. There is a protrusion that pokes out at the bottom of the wrist (where a logo is embossed in the glove) that feels more like an aesthetic choice than one of function. In practice, this ‘bump’ of rubber extends a full centimeter (~3/8″) and makes it nearly impossible to flex your wrist backward without massively deforming the glove.
• When comparing the coverage across the knuckles here there is plenty of rubber to go around. In fact these gloves cover the most of the 1st finger knuckle out of all the gloves we’ve tried. We do have to say that hasn’t turned out to be a very good thing, unfortunately, because this rubber likes to grab when you’re trying to get in the crack more than it does when you’re trying not to come out.

Jamming Performance – Poor. We haven’t found a type of jam that we like these gloves for. Their shape and thickness fight each other in odd ways, making them ineffective at everything we’ve attempted.

• These are not for thin hands. Unless you’re looking to add some serious thickness to a very very below average sized hand, this glove will do you no help here. They are so bulky at the knuckles that they’ve even kept us from performing some basic finger jams.
• For regular sized hands they are still pretty uninspired for jamming. The thinner size of things are definitely out because of the glove bulk, and when you get into slightly wide hands, you realize that the rubber is so grabby, chunky, and unforgiving that they often force you to fight to get a jam in. There have been a couple of users reporting using a ‘chopping’ motion to get into a basic splitter in frustration. Wider hands still have this issue, though less and when you get a jam they at least tend to stay put.
• Since these gloves are so thick, it would make sense to think that they might perform best in wider cracks, but we’ve also found that thinking to be wrong. They can sometimes fill a bit of extra space in a splitter if you are undersize for the crack, but their inability to deform means they aren’t helpful at all in a wider or flaring pod. One tester likened this to feeling like their hand was inside a tennis ball, that just keeps wanting to go back into it’s shape no matter how much you deform it.
• Similar but worse performance was found in offwidth. One of the things about the nature of stacks is that it is less about width and more about being able to contort your hands into odd shapes that fill space and maximize contact with the rock. The ClimbX has made a very odd choice to have the wrist strap on these gloves sit at nearly a 45º angle to the line of the knuckles. What this means in practice is that the wrist has to bend wildly just to put it on, which means as soon as you straighten your hand, the glove deforms. This deformation fights every shape of stack you would reasonably want to use by either putting your wrist automatically in a bad position, or creating thick, inflexible ripples in the glove that either grab rock when you are trying to build the stack, or make your hand suddenly too big to fit.

Notable Features – Things that are only found on the ClimbX Super Crack Glove

• The Super Crack glove is the only one currently on the market that is made from a single piece of molded rubber. This probably serves to make manufacturing simpler and cheaper, but unfortunately also means the finger loops can be stiff and uncomfortable and the glove mostly wants to return to its shape rather than support the wrist or hand during a jam.
• One of the strangest things about the Super Crack is the choice ClimbX made to angle the wrist strap. At first glance, it means that once the strap is fastened, the glove is automatically tilted ‘forward’ in a position that might seem like it is ready to perform a basic hand jam. In practice, this actually creates a lot of discomfort and poor hand positioning. Most people naturally want to straighten their wrist when it is relaxed, but while wearing the Super Crack this causes the finger loops to tug on the pinky and ring finger and pull up on the inside of the wrist strap. If you give into the shape of the glove to relieve this stress, your wrist is now in a forward pointing sort of flag shape that has not been found to be particularly helpful while jamming hands or fists.

Our general experience with the ClimbX Super Crack Glove has been fairly poor. Because of their thickness these gloves struggle to be helpful in anything thinner than wide hands, regardless of rock type, and even when they fit decently in a crack they are either too stiff to properly deform and add friction or so grabby that they hinder movement and fine adjustment when setting a good jam. The result is a feeling of climbing with potholders on your hands that get in the way rather than gloves that are helping you climb.

We’ve found jamming in flaring cracks often requires a delicate balance of flexibility and structure to be deform a crack glove and then maintain its shape as you put your weight fully onto a jam. The rubber on the ClimbX is too thick to flex into small corners and strangely at the same time too floppy to provide support in wider jams, resulting in a feeling that it is more in the way than it is being helpful.

On particularly grippy rock like sandstone and fine granite the Super Crack gets caught on everything in and out of the crack and seemingly at the all the wrong times. When moving from one jam to the next the most efficient technique is often to slide up the crack, but the jagged soft rubber texture of the back of these gloves means they catch on sometimes the smallest features and their stiffness then pushes your wrist out of position, making it stressful at best and impossible at worst to feel like you’re climbing effectively. We’ve had some folks stop mid route and use their teeth to remove and spit them out and go gloveless rather than continue to climb with them for this reason.

At first this grippyness seems like it would at least be nice to have on slippery rock types, and to some extent that is true. These gloves definitely grab soapy overclimbed limestone and polished granite better than any other we’ve tried, but the unfortunate poor performance of every other aspect of them greatly outweighs this. It doesn’t matter how sticky a glove is if you can’t get it in the crack, move it in the crack, or trust it in the crack.

We’ve climbed all over, in all types of cracks and on most types of rocks and have struggled to find any combination where we would recommend these gloves over anything else. The finger holes are the least comfortable and the wrist strap is cryptic. These gloves are the cheapest you’ll find (currently around $20) and that might be a big deal for you when the next cheapest is twice as much. But we’ve found that anyone willing to spend 20 bucks on a pair of gloves to try should either save a bit longer and spend 40 on almost any other brand, or stick with tape; either will be more effective at helping you climb cracks than these gloves.