Bigger gloves are useful for defense. You can catch a lot with big gloves that you can't with little ones.

What's gonna matter most is how the athletes train, how hard they get hit in sparring. A very long professional career might be 30-50 fights, but that's thousands of hours of training. If you're spending much of that sparring hard, even if you don't get many concussions, the cte is going to build up

What's the "cte"?

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy

In fact, the 10oz gloves that boxers wear allow them to hit their opponents' heads harder and more often, resulting in more brain damage. In MMA, we typically see a few light blows followed by a knockout blow or a quick flurry of head strikes before the fight is stopped. In a boxing match, the fighters can trade head shots for 15 rounds ...

Is this true? I actually haven’t been hit with 4oz gloves, but I train a lot with 10oz gloves and while they hit harder than my 16oz, I’d assume the 4oz hurt more. Or at least cut more and cause superficial damage since you have less padding for your opponent.

My thought was that since western boxing is limited to hands and standup, you’re going to go for headshots a lot more. You’re limited in your weapons. Muay Thai has a lot more options, and since punching scores less, you end up with a lot more shots to the body.

I only brought up the 4oz gloves in my original comment because I just don’t enjoy watching the style of lots of punching headshots as much. I feel like modern scoring and use of gloves that get through guards easily changes the style and encourages more punching to the face, which isn’t what I find artful in Muay Thai. My personal weapon of choice is going for knees.