Gear, and which rulebook it belongs to

One pair does not cover training. Bag gloves are firm and compact, sparring gloves are heavier and softer to protect your partner, and competition gloves are whatever the sanctioning body dictates. Buying a single pair for everything means either damaging your hands on the bag or hurting people while sparring.

The gloves protect the person you hit. The wraps protect the small bones and ligaments in your own hand, and they are the cheapest injury prevention in the sport. Training without them because the gloves feel fine is how people acquire long-term hand problems.

Most promotions supply or specify competition gloves, and the specification varies by organisation and by weight class. Turning up with your own preferred pair is usually not an option, which is a good reason to spar in something close to the competition weight before fight night.

Whether you need these at all depends entirely on the code. Under American full-contact rules nothing may be thrown below the waist, so shin guards are irrelevant in competition. Under low-kick, K-1, GLORY and Muay Thai rules they are mandatory in amateur competition and near-universal in sparring.

The one piece of equipment with no argument attached. It protects teeth, prevents the jaw fractures and lacerations that come from a closed mouth being struck, and is required for any contact under every ruleset on this site.

Mandatory in WAKO amateur competition and common in sparring, and its benefits are narrower than most people assume. It reliably reduces cuts, abrasions and superficial injury. It does not clearly reduce concussion risk, because concussion comes from the brain moving inside the skull and padding on the outside does little about that.

Required for competition under every ruleset here and sensible for any sparring involving kicks. The Thai-style steel cup with a cloth belt gives far more protection than the compression-short style familiar from boxing, because kickboxing puts shins and knees into that area rather than only fists.

Thin elastic sleeves worn over the ankle, standard in Muay Thai and common in kickboxing. They provide mild compression and some protection against the friction burns and minor sprains that come from pivoting on a canvas, and they are not a substitute for an ankle that has been properly rehabilitated.

The only striking sport on this site fought in footwear, and the only one where the shoe is the legal striking surface. Savate boots are not general training shoes with a different label — the reinforced toe and instep exist because those surfaces are what strike, and the whole technical vocabulary of the sport assumes them.

What you are allowed to wear is a ruleset question like everything else. American full-contact competition historically used long trousers, precisely because no strikes below the waist were legal and the leg needed no exposure. Muay Thai and modern kickboxing use short shorts because a kicking leg needs an unobstructed hip.

Missing equipment is the most common reason a fighter sits out a round they should have trained. The list is short and does not change, so packing it once and leaving it packed removes the problem entirely.

The single most useful piece of equipment you can own, and the one most often bought in the wrong length. A boxing-length bag ending at hip height gives you nowhere to throw a low kick, which removes the defining technique of most kickboxing codes from your home training.

The primary tool of the Dutch pad method and the reason it works. Thai pads absorb full-power kicks and knees while letting the holder move, counter and present reactions — none of which a heavy bag can do. A gym without good pads cannot run the method properly.

Small hand-held targets for hand work, timing and counters. They give far better feedback than Thai pads on whether a punch was accurate and structured, and they let the holder present openings and counter-punch, which is where most of the learning happens.

A large rectangular pad held against the body, used for full-power kicks, knees and teeps where a Thai pad would be unsafe for the holder. It is the tool for developing genuine kicking power, because it is the only pad you can hit as hard as you can.

A body protector worn by the coach so a fighter can throw knees, body kicks and body punches at a moving human target rather than a stationary bag. It is what makes clinch-entry and knee work trainable at real intensity.

Cheap, portable, and one of the few conditioning tools that trains something the sport actually uses: elastic calf and foot stiffness, rhythm, and the ability to stay light on the feet while breathing hard. It is a warm-up in most gyms and deserves to be more than that.