Anyone out there hurt your hands in a fight? How did you incure the damage? Anyone have any advice on how to land bare fisted blows to avoid damage?
well, if your hands aren't conditioned and you fight bareknuckle with powerful punches you'll almost certainly mess your hands up.
Karate: I keep jarring my fingers when blocking in sparring. The middle finger on my left hand has been continuously sore since just before Christmas last year. Cheers.
Firstly, see my answer to your question on the 'heel of the hand' thread. When striking with the fist you have to carefully select your target to avoid damaging yourself in the process. As well as avoiding impact on bony protrusions you also need to consider the angle of the wrist. Otherwise you risk spraining it. The best method to learn the correct angling of the wrist I've found is working on the heavy bag without gloves. Start GENTLY and build up GRADUALLY. What little work I've done wearing boxing gloves made me acutely aware of how forgiving gloves can be. You can easily get away with blows that would have sprained your wrist without the glove. For this reason I never use them. Also consider alternative weapons for those times when a punch would result in damage to yourself. You could use a palm-heel strike (ie. the heel of the hand) although this has its own risks and limitations. Or you could even try striking with ulna bone in the forearm. Mike
two years ago i fell on my hands and sprained my wrists, i just started to fix the problem 2 weeks ago because it wont go away on its own! anyway i wuld love to get it fixed
A few months ago I was sparring this one older gentlemen, and both of us punched at the same time and our fists hit eachother. My middle knuckle swelled up in a few minutes and was pretty bruised. I don't think I dislocated it because I can move the my finger just fine as if it were unharmed. I'm guessing I chipped the bone because there's a small indentation that's still there
Last year I was boxing with a boyfriend. We had gum shields, head gear, hand wraps and boxing gloves. I went to punch his torso, he blocked with his left arm and my punch went straight into his elbow. I was in such pain that I fell to the floor. Boyfriend is a paramedic and thought I'd broken a bone. My hand puffed up bad. All I did was ice pack it. I went to a boxing class a couple of weeks later and the pain came back in the first two fingers on my right hand after punching pads repeatedly (Drrr - should have waited until it had healed ). The instructor advised me to get it x-rayed. No broken bones but I think I have done something to the first knuckle cos when I press down on it, it hurts slightly and there is resistance. I really want to push on it to make it crack but don't know if that's a good idea or not. Don't speak to the paramedic anymore (not related to the fight!) so have no on hand medical advice. Any ideas anyone?
1. Condition the hands and wrist like mad. Get those hands/wrists working on the punching bag. Get those wrists strong with wrist curls and use hand grips. 2. Keep your wrists straight, always. 3. Use three knuckle vertical punches. 4. Avoid hard parts of the body like the hard part of the skull. But you know its unpredictiable, look at Tyson fracturing his metacarpal (fingers) on the street from one punch. You just never know.
I got kicked in the funny bone a few weeks ago and it felt like i'd put my arm in a bucked of acid. It tingled for 3 days straight! If it's any injury where it swels and burns i use the ice on/off method. Basically you ice it about 10 min on/off for the first 24hors after the injury.
Was Tyson partly to blame himself though? Did he simply angle his fist badly as a result of training with gloves all the time but never without? I don't know, but that would be my suspicion. I know that if I trained on the bag with gloves all the time and then tried without then I'd do myself an injury. Three knuckle vertical punches? Like Wing Chun? Good suggestion I reckon. I punch karate style, ie. with the knuckles of the forefinger and middle finger. However, I do it with a vertical fist or slightly turned over, rather than the 'traditional' karate way of turning the fist all the way over. I find the supposedly traditional karate method to be much more prone to both wrist and finger injuries. Mike
yep boxers have so much protection in the ring they dont know how to hgit with power without often Tysons record in the streets isnt too good. the street is soooooooo different to the dojo you dont know wats gonna happen having a straight wrist etc is good but you cant control what the other guy(s) are doing. MF
umm maybe being pedantic but metacarpals aren't the fingers it's the bones in the hand that connect the fingers to the wrists. sort of start at the knuckles and reach the wrist. fingers are the phalanges sorry 3 years of biology forced me to say that jane
Hmm, last Thursday i was doing drills and i was blocking but i had my thumb placed wrong (on accident, slipped i guess) and i ended up fisting with my partner and my thumb got jammed. Ow. still hurts.
I think Mike Flanagan has pretty much covered the key points but there is one more thing to consider outside of competition: Teeth. Without a mouth guard a punch to the face can result in severe lacerations to the hands, even the embeding of whole or partial teeth into the knuckles and serious infection. It's happend to me. Even with conditioning I prefer palm strikes and forearms to the head and fists to the body.
Good questions. Wish there was a video. I agree using gloves for so long had him thinking he could power punch like a bull without them. That ONE punch ended the fight though. Painful for both parties but ended nonetheless. I meant like the old bareknuckle english boxing punches of the 1800s. Its a vertical punch using your ring finger as the 'crosshair' while keeping the wrist straight and there isn't a turn of the fist before impact like in modern boxing. Your middle, ring and pinky fingers make impact. Thats just how I do it though. You are correct. My best grades are not in biology.
