Reddit mentions of XSHIELD 17-PUG,Polyurethane/Nylon Safety WORK Glove,BLACK,12 Pairs (Medium)

Check YouTube for some StrongFirst or RKC swing videos. Karen Smith has some great instructional videos.

Hinge, do not squat. Look at your hips in the video. Your hips are dropping down, your knees are bending and traveling out over your toes. What you should be seeing is:

1. setup with the bell out in front of you. You should be looking straight down on the handle once you bend over (also a hinge). Your arms should actually be angled from your head/shoulders a few degrees towards the top of your head, not straight down, when you grip the bell. Grip the floor/ground with your toes. From here, use your lats to pull the bell towards your hips, hiking it up to your butt like an American football. This should load up your hamstrings for the hip snap. One movement, not two small swings.
   
   
2. Once the bell has reached it rearward most motion, it's time to snap the hips into your forearms. You want to mimic the vertical jump motion. This is all in the glutes and hamstrings. Contract them hard and forcefully. This will put the bell into it's forward/upward motion.
   
   
3. The bell will swing up and out on its own. Keep your shoulders in their sockets.
   
   
4. Your arms do not lift the bell - they are just ropes, straps or whatever that attach the bell to your body. This is all hips, but your back will get some work. Don not shrug up with your shoulders or use your arms to lift the bell. If you think you might be using your arms, loop a towel through the handle of the bell and swing the bell gripping the towel. If your arms do not stay in alignment with the towel throughout the swing, you're doing something wrong.
   
   
5. The hip snap should end with you standing upright. The bell should come to the top and float for a short bit before beginning the downswing. Be sure to squeeze your glutes hard at the top of the swing. Try to cramp them. This protects your lower back. Do not lean back. Your body should form a vertical straight line and your arms should also form a straight line with the bell at somewhere between waist to shoulder height. I prefer my swings to come up chest high at a minimum.
   
   
6. You can either passively allow the bell to come down, or, for a bit more of a challenge, you can use your lats and abs to pull the bell down. Stay upright until the bell is almost straight down. Your wrists/forearms should be just brushing your groin when you punch the hips back (pretend there is a heavy bag behind you and you are trying to punch it) and allow the bell to continue back to the hike position. Keep your eyes forward - do not look back between your legs.
   
   
7. Once you get this, you'll see in your next video that your hips will be moving back and forth as opposed to up and down. Your knees will bend only to accommodate your hip punch (back) and snap. Your shins should remain nearly vertical throughout the movement.
   
   Personally, I would ditch the gloves as well. However, if your work requires a lack of callouses on your hands, I understand. You might want to try these. They are not as thick and give you a much better feel for the bell while still offering grip and protection.

Buy a pack of cheap gloves and you can make them last all season. Go into a place like IRL in PG and there will be some hanging on a rack, and if you just buy the box/bag of them you'll be set all season+ be able to sell some to folks mid season. Or get some online or another work-wear dealer, Marks or Home Depot might, but they usually get their $$ by selling them for 3-4 per glove.

• Newly washed pair every day, after the day of work put them with laundry. Also remember: when buying gloves some types don't wash well, and will fall apart faster - such as the ones that look shiny on the "dipped rubberized" part. or especially the wooly types. All of them likely have that rubberized look, but the shiny surface ones wear out much much faster, it flakes and then peels off while the more dull black is more a part of the fabric and tends to stick to the lycra type fabric. In the end they all wear out, it's just a matter of helping it to not wear out as quickly as it would with just whatever glove you find and shoving your hand in dirty ones.
  
  
• Use ducttape on your fingers kind of like people wrap them when they go gloveless, though this is in order to save the knuckles & fingertips of your gloves. It makes your fingers less damaged from rocks and thorns as well too. Not all of them, just the 2-3 fingers on your tree hand & the thumb. Think about guarding the glove & your knuckles with the tape like with one thin long strand just the width of your middle-finger going from the top of your hand ---> up your finger and around the tip of your finger ---> finishing on the inside of your finger near your palm. Then wrap two or three little bands around the finger to hold it in place. You'll figure it out.
  
  
• Some days on rockier days I tape down the tips of my fingers inside the gloves for more padding since it's your fingernails grinding on the grit in the gloves against rocks which poke out the end of the gloves. We've all gone through a single pair of gloves in a day - having a roll of ducttape and a few strips of tape per day saves gloves through entire seasons, especially when you factor in flipping gloves over & scrounging them during the season and having a rotation of 5 or so through the laundry.
  
  Then at the end of the day I take the tape off. I've accidentally had it run through the wash before and it usually melts into the glove slightly and makes it tough to get all the grit out. It's a bit of a chore, but it beats jamming your nail on a rock and having your glove split at 9AM and your backup fail an hour later. This way you save your gloves lots of wear and tear.
  
  I like wearing a padded glove for the shovel hand some days, or one thicker for wet and cold days. Cutting out finger-holes in the end of a wool sock can make a nice arm warmer & also sort of protects vs devils club and retains some nice residual head in the shovel arm. For the tree-hand I like to use thinner nitrile gloves but guarding them from wear like described above. During the day I never take off my tree-hand glove since it's taped up, and use my right hand for food. And since the tree-hand will be more damp from going in the ground it makes sense to sometimes wear some different style on the shovel hand.
  
  As for pants there's a few useful types
  
  
• lighter coolmax ones with quick-dry fabric, maybe with zipoff pant legs
  
• thick ones like restaurant pants or mail-carrier ones - water repellent/anti-thorn-penetrable
  
  I prefer just tights/shorts/gaiters for most days, though in the hot summer the light quick-dry ones are good to keep your legs cool, and some people really enjoy having a stout pair of denim or somesuch - I just find thicker fabrics to make me sweat too much. On crazy devils-club blocks it might be nice to have a thick pair of pants, but other than that I have come to like the simplicity and comfort of tights/courtesy shorts.