Striking without gloves - recipie for broken hand?

[dave3006]

In my MMA class, everyone punches the bags with gloves. Many wrap their wrists before. The instructor teaches some awesome combinations and then we spar at about a 50% level.

 

In a real fight, it seems like a person would have an extremely high probability of breaking their hands striking another person in the head. You may aim for a softer portion of their face. However, it is a dynamic situation and I could easily see hitting their skull or the wrong knuckle causing a hand fracture.

 

The punching seems awesome when you have gloves to protect your hands. I would be very interested to know how things change in real life.

 

(This is a serious question, not a flame. I am a grappler and glappling has plenty of limitations.)

[Bad_Vibes]

A guy I know through other friends of mine has started fighting in MMA bouts and broke his hand in his third fight. I guess those MMA gloves don't offer as much protection as a normal boxing glove. It's obviously a ligitimate issue. But on the bright side, if I remember right, he broke it in the first round and didn't KO the other fighter till the third round. So he actually was able to keep using it do to the adreline more than likely. So even if you do break it, you can probably still make it out of the situation your in. But the next weeks will suck.

[SevenStar]

According to the chinese, you should use hard for soft and soft for hard - for example, a fist to the stomach, but a palm to the face. It makes sense. However, that's not really in the scope of this topic.

 

Breaking the hand is a viable issue. hitting the bag will condition the hand, but the skull is the hardest area of the body, so you naturally run a risk of breaking something when punching to the head, as you may hit his skull.

 

Another major issue is technique - be sure that you are punching with proper form while training.

[Northren Ogre]

Technique can get thrown out the window when things get down and dirty though. You can throw proper punches, but when the person you're fighting moves thier head (much unlike a heavy bag...stupid non-moving bags) you can wind up smacking very hard parts, doing damage to yourself. I have broken my right hand in a fight, but I had found myself in a bad situation where I was involved in a few fights in less than 24 hours.

[Rich_2k3]

According to the chinese, you should use hard for soft and soft for hard

 

Thats exactly what my instructer says.

[Vito]

if you hit with the right part of your hand (the first two knuckles) and avoid places like the back of a guys head, or his forhead maybe, then youll most likely be okay.

[Zephyris]

I have also seen people get angry and clench their fists real tight which definately will lead to injury. Leave your hands slightly loose and punch with the right form to avoid less injury. We do bare knuckle sparring at times basically you must try and keep your wrist straight when you come in contact with the other person. Most people sprain/break their wrists on left/right hooks cause they tend to twist the wrist too much and punching the temple will hurt you a bit. After awhile you get used it try punching focus mitts with handwraps only. Dont go all out but it does build up wrist and knucle power. good luck

[Rick]

Proper technique will get rid of these errors. But most importantly u need to wear NO gloves at LEAST 50% of the time so u can get your wrists used to the impact as well as your hands... Most of my training is done with small knuckle gloves that offer like 3 milimetres of padding (so i don't rip my skin off which is a pain if u wanna train all of the time).

 

I've broken my fingers and strained my wrist heaps of times when i used to do full contact sparring. I agree with the hard/soft/soft/hard principles also... As well, a usefull tip, aparently there is a pressure point between our index and middle fingers that effect breathing, so when u punch with the two leading knuckles in a 'karate punch' u may actually be affecting ur breathing (according to some chinese thing i read somewhere)... That's why in wushu and kungfu etc they learn vertical instead of horizontal punches. Just thought i'd put that in.

 

Rick