The science of punch resistance

With no science to prove, and just pure observations from my experiences. I was a martial artists for six years, never a boxer and I did not take that much head blows to be honest with you.

Mostly mental, how you deal with pain is enough to negate a knockdout when the the force is not enough to rattle your brain.

What one must do to lessen the force of impact, if you see it coming that is, instead of taking the hit dead on, obviously u try to avoid. When it can not be avoided, some stiffens their muscle which I think is the wrong way to take a punch. I'll make an example of board breaking in martial arts. To break a board, they usually put the boards in a supported platform with empty space in the middle. This is like stiffening your muscles to prevent movement. Sometimes this boards are stacked in great numbers and usually they are succesful in breaking the boards. On the other hand, try hanging a board floating freely in mid-air with no force holding it and see how difficult it is to break the board. It can be done of course but the more effective way to do it is by explosive speed of your strike with a follow through, like if you were hitting something behind that board instead of directly on the board itself.

If the fighter relaxes instead of stifening the muscle, the impact would be somewhat like a board in mid-air, thus negating some of the impact. Placing your strike is also extremely crucial in breaking boards, you need to know which way the grains of the board runs through. same with striking a human head, you need to do it in the right angle to maximize the force and to where the opponent can not react by moving his head away from impact.

Many other factors affect punch resistance as stated in many of the above posts and I'm not going to touch into them, I agree on most of them.

One thing no one has touched on is punch resistance in the body. Punches in the body really hurts, but this is really where punch resistance is more mental than the actual damage. The most painful area specifially would be the solar plexus and the floating ribs. The physical damage is mostly minimal but it really hurts and get into your brain and the brain is suggesting you to give up. This is one reason I believe that some pain deadening trainings are effective.

Like I said, I have no scientific proof to my explanation, just experience, and I may be wrong.

 

I found this article interesting but having read many like it I found it to be too much of a propaganda piece to be able to tell which factors they outlined were more important in the development of serious brain damage then others. Also they only briefly mentioned the acute brain injuries but didn't really delve into factors that would contribute to ones ability to avoid a knockout.

 

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hahaha

 

I wanted to know if there is a correlation between the fighter's head size and punch resistance. Oscar had a big head and pretty good punch resistance, while someone like Amir Khan has a really small head and was knocked out easily.

 

Very insightful.

 

Not necessarily. Sure smoking diminishes lung capacity but people are born with differing lung capacity and other factors like blood pressure would come into play for oxygen delivery.

 

Obviously the BMA are not going to delve into the nature of punch resistance too much otherwise they would basically be saying, its ok for some people to box because of there physiology. It does appear however that the traditional notion of having a thick neck or thick skull is not that much of a determinant in deciding a fighters chin. What appears to be more important is what is actually stopping the brain in one's skull smashing around inside when hit.

 

Time to revive the thread again. Searching the internet i came up with this reference to research carried out by Tianjin University of Science. You will laugh at this but it appears that on average white women have thickest skulls in humans and white men have the thinnest. So maybe women boxers could really be built for the sport more so than the average man?

[url]http://www.medindia.net/news/Thick-Skull-Saves-Female-Drivers-from-Accidents-32214-1.htm[/url]

 

The only caution to laying out a graph like that: I've heard different theories about this, but still the currently accepted one is that a person is born with all the brain cells they will ever have. If mild damage is suffered the cells and neurons may be able to heal themselves or to make new pathways for existing cells to operate around the damaged area, (which is how people recover being able to function after having a stroke and such) but if the cells are damaged beyond a certain point, then there's nothing you can do to revive.

So to use your example: Yuri Foreman is presumably without any such damage. Yory Boy Campas, on the other hand, has likely suffered such damage from all the hits he's taken in the ring. (Especially when Trinidad knocked his head back about 90 degrees at the end of their fight.) As a result, their brains may never now be able to reach that spot where they even out.

Now, I do have add that it was discovered years ago that at least one area of the brain was able to regrow lost cells in a lab setting, and that was the hippocampas, a section that deals with memory. Since then they've said that the hippocampas does turnover cells all through its life, losing and gaining cells regularly, so the old theory outlined above may be wrong. However, so far as I've heard it is only the hippocampas that has been proven to be do this.

 

Some of it is physiological, especially when it comes to neck muscles and skull thickness but MUCH MORE of it is raw will...the inabiltity to give up or go down from sheer spitefulness(lol). This is something that , unfortunately, can't be taught.