Palm Sliders Explained: What They Do and What They Don't

A friend went down at maybe 15 mph in a gravel parking lot, put both hands out the way every human does, and spent the next eleven weeks in a thumb spica cast with a scaphoid fracture that nearly did not knit. He was wearing gloves. Good ones, in fact. They had no palm sliders, and in his case that probably mattered.

Palm sliders are the two hard pucks you see on the heel of the hand on sport and touring gloves. They get explained badly, usually as generic armor, which leads riders to either dismiss them or expect too much from them. They do one specific job in one specific crash mode. Here is that job, the wrist anatomy behind it, and the honest situation with classic leather gloves, which mostly do not have them.

How the Scaphoid Actually Breaks

You have eight carpal bones in each wrist. The scaphoid sits on the thumb side, and it is the one that breaks. Depending on which study you read it accounts for somewhere around 60 to 70 percent of all carpal fractures, and it breaks in a very repeatable way: an outstretched hand, palm flat, wrist bent back past about 95 degrees, with your body weight arriving through it.

The reason orthopedists hate this particular bone is blood supply. The scaphoid is fed retrograde, meaning the artery enters at the far end and runs backward through it. Break it across the waist and the proximal fragment can lose its supply entirely. That is why a scaphoid fracture is eight to twelve weeks in a cast when it goes well, and a screw plus a bone graft when it does not.

Two mechanical things make it worse in a fall off a motorcycle:

• Grip. Your palm catches the pavement, the pavement holds, and your arm keeps traveling. The hand stops, the forearm rotates, and the load goes straight into the carpals.

• Hyperextension. The more your palm sticks, the further the wrist bends back before your body stops moving. Past roughly 95 degrees of extension the scaphoid is loaded in the exact way it fails.

What a Palm Slider Is Doing

A palm slider is a low friction puck, usually thermoplastic, sometimes carbon, mounted on the heel of the hand where you land. Its job is not to absorb impact. Its job is to stop your hand from gripping the road. When the puck hits asphalt it skids instead of grabbing, your hand keeps sliding along with the rest of you, and the wrist never gets levered into extension.

Think of it as friction management rather than armor. Under EN 13594, the European standard for motorcycle gloves, palm sliders are one of the ways a glove earns higher marks on the impact abrasion side, and Level 2 gloves that carry the KP mark have also passed knuckle impact testing. It is a real, testable feature, not a styling detail. It also cuts palm abrasion, which is the second thing that happens: even without a fracture, grinding the heel of your hand across chipseal for two seconds removes a lot of skin from a place that has to bend every day for the next month.

Where sliders genuinely earn their keep is exactly the crash my friend had. Low speed, hands down, hard surface. That is the most common motorcycle get-off there is, far more common than the high speed slide people imagine when they shop for gear.

What Sliders Do Not Do

They are not a wrist brace. A slider reduces the chance that your palm catches, but if you land with your full body weight on a bent wrist on a curb edge, the puck does nothing about that geometry. Riders who want actual wrist stabilization need a glove with a rigid or semi-rigid wrist cuff, which is a different feature entirely and one that most street gloves skip because it limits control input.

They also do nothing for the top of your hand. Knuckle and metacarpal protection is a separate structure. And they are useless if the glove leaves your hand, which is the single most common gear failure I see: a short wrist glove with a loose closure comes off in the first half second and everything else is irrelevant. Retention beats every other glove feature, sliders included.

One more honest limit: a slider on a glove that fits badly is worse than no slider. If the puck sits an inch off the actual contact point on your hand because the glove is a size too big, it is just a lump. Getting the size right with the glove size chart matters more than the feature list on the tag.

Why Most Classic Leather Gloves Skip Them

Here is the part a lot of gear sites avoid. The classic American deerskin and goatskin gloves I ride in most of the year do not have palm sliders. Legendary's whole deerskin line, the Churchill gloves, the fat welted models, none of them. They are unlined, unarmored leather. They are not CE certified and they are not armor. They are abrasion protection, wind protection, and grip.

That is a design choice, not an oversight. A palm slider needs a stiff mounting platform, which means a thicker, less compliant palm. Deerskin's entire reason for existing on a motorcycle is feel: a broken-in deerskin palm is about 0.7mm thick and lets you feel clutch friction point and brake modulation in a way no armored sport glove does. Adding a puck to that palm would remove the reason to buy it. The closest thing in this category is an aramid-lined palm, which raises cut and abrasion resistance without adding a hard part, and you can see how that is built on the aramid palm deerskin glove.

So the real decision is not slider versus no slider. It is which glove you wear on which ride, and being honest about what each one is doing for you.

Editor's Picks

None of these have palm sliders, and I am listing them anyway because they are the right gloves for the riding most people actually do. Buy them knowing what they are.

• Aramid Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $125. The most protective option in this catalog: aramid lining in the palm raises cut and abrasion resistance without a hard puck. Still not CE rated.

• Haymakers Super Welted Deerskin Gloves, $125. The fat welted seams sit proud of the leather and take the first contact on a slide, which is the old-school version of the same idea.

• Uppercut Knuckle Defense Gloves, $120. Covers the other side of the hand with a padded knuckle panel, ventilated for summer. Padding, not certified armor.

• Classic Longer Cuff Deerskin Gloves, $120. The longer cuff is a retention feature, and retention is the glove property that matters most in a fall.

• If palm sliders are your actual priority, buy Held. The German gloves are genuinely excellent, properly CE rated under EN 13594, with kangaroo palms and real scaphoid protection tested as a system. Nothing in classic American leather competes with that on certified protection, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

• Prices verified August 2026.

How to Decide

If you ride a sportbike, commute in traffic, or do track days, buy gloves with palm sliders and a proper wrist closure, and buy them from a maker that publishes its EN 13594 rating. The scaphoid is a bad bone to gamble with and the feature is cheap insurance against the most ordinary crash there is.

If you ride a cruiser at back road speeds and you care about clutch feel and how the glove ages, the classic deerskin answer is legitimate. Just size it correctly, pick a cuff that will stay on your hand, and hold the two categories in your head as different tools. I keep both in the same drawer and choose by where I am going, which is the most honest advice I can give on this.