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The classic martial arts trivia (or possibly a teaching) is that serious brain injuries became more common in boxing after padded gloves started being used. Bar
by Delk 2y ago
The classic martial arts trivia (or possibly a teaching) is that serious brain injuries became more common in boxing after padded gloves started being used. Bare knuckle boxing seems more brutal but it's said to have been safer in that regard.
Using padded gloves allows for hitting the opponent much harder without injury to the hand, so they make it possible to hit with a lot more force. Serious brain injury is caused by accelerational forces, and those are only slightly reduced by the padding, but the padding gives significant protection to the thin bones of the hand. Without the protection the bones in the hand could break when struck against the relatively hardy bones of the skull.
Of course if you did happen to nicely hit the jaw, that's one of the common target spots for a knockout. A hit on the jaw causes a rotational force on the head which can more easily lead to a knockout (as well as injury to the brain).
- adrian_b 2y agoThis fact was already discussed during the antiquity. In the Ancient Greece and then in the Roman Republic and Empire, there were 3 combat sports: wrestling, pugilism (i.e. boxing) and pancratium (i.e. MMA). Punching was allowed in both pugilism and pancratium, but only the pugilists bandaged their hands with leather straps, to protect them from injuries (analogous to the big boxing gloves and the small MMA gloves of today). Because of their bandaged hands, the pugilists were using hard strikes to the head much more frequently than the pancratium fighters, so finishing a fight with severe injuries was much more common for pugilists. Some ancient writers have commented about this and they have mentioned that at big competitions like the Olympic Games it has been decided to schedule the pancratium matches before the pugilism matches, because there were some people who desired to compete in both tournaments. Had pugilism been scheduled the first, there would have been a high risk for them to be injured, preventing them to also compete in pancratium, while with pancratium before, they had good chances to be able to compete in both.