Pro Bare Knuckle Boxing

"But if you take away the elbows, do MMA fighters get more cuts than boxers?"

Your quote

"Dr. Shelby Karpman, a sports medicine physician and the study’s lead author, explained: “You’re more likely to get injured if you’re participating in mixed martial arts, but the injury severity is less overall than boxing. Most of the blood you see in mixed martial arts is from bloody noses or facial cuts; it doesn’t tend to be as severe but looks a lot worse than it actually is.”"

 

That doesn't answer the question.

 

So you wouldn't say that competitive fighters have an increased risk of picking up a chronic injury? It's totally safe?

 

I'm not, I'm also thinking of people I've known who have competed in knockdown karate, kickboxing and judo. Quite a few of them have a knackered something, though it is a small sample size.

 

Training 10, 000 hours and then having a competitive match vs training 500 hours will obvious incur a greater risk of injury, but also a greater reward.

The key is finding out how to train those 10,000 hours in the safest and most effective manner.

It's not as simple as big gloves bad, small gloves good.

Its what you do whilst wearing the gloves that matters.

 

Sure, I wouldn't argue with that. I also wouldn't argue if people had different ideas to me over risk/reward benefits. Everyone is free to do what they want with their own body.

I feel like we've veered from the point I made, which is simple: all things being equal, heavier gloves allow one to hit the head harder, thereby transferring more force to the brain. That's it, and I don't think that's a controversial statement.

 

I'd agree. But slightly adjust that to say

"heavier gloves allow you to spar for a longer period of time, without immediate injury to both parties, which can lead to taking prolonged impacts to the head which can lead to brain injury"

 

Thanks. I was just asking "which expert" because people say that all the time and my follow up question is "who?" So now we have some names and information to work from, but just to be clear,

My point is not about the head (which can suffer long term CTE from all sorts of things, CTE is not limited to career boxers by any means). The hands/wrists are the boxers most critical thing, you can't box without them. So from a professional point of view I didn't see the point of not only what is effectively devolving boxing from its present state to something out of the 1800s, but also posing a significant threat to all boxers taking part. I think the people who pay for that kind of thing are like the people watching the Wing Chun fight in Sherlock Holmes, they just want to see blood and bones. That sort of thing was gracefully weaned from the sport many years ago for what I consider to be great reasons. "Longevity in sparring and training" as you said is effectively zero if you break your hands.

All that said, I read through the interaction I missed and agree with the bias issue Dead Pool brought up. That bias was also shown in the medical study I posted last week. When CTE is found, it's the result of many, many, many fights, not average boxers, whether amateur or pro. The brain damage is heavily correlated with the number of fights, period, regardless of how strong any particular punch might be. This is also part of the reason many amateur boxing promotions will not allow people with recent concussions or over a certain number to take part.