I am aware they cover up and are trained, but some of those fighters have taken clean, straight shots and lived to tell the tale
In: Biology
Disclaimer first. As far as I know there isn’t any clear consensus on exactly why a punch can knock you out. The brain is really complicated and even neurologists don’t really understand how it works.
The human skull is incredibly strong. The dome shape makes it really hard to break without a weapon.
Short of puncturing the skull the main way to get knocked out or killed is brain trauma. Your brain basically floats inside your skull in a fluid. When your head gets rattled around your brain rattles around inside your skull.
That’s one reason why strong people are harder to knock out. When you punch them in the head their head doesn’t move as much so the brain doesn’t get jostled as badly.
Strikes to the back of the head can absolutely kill someone. You don’t even need to be Mike Tyson. I’ve been told that the most common cause of death in fist fights is that the person falls backwards and hits their head on something. If you’ve ever GENTLY slapped the back of your head just above the neck you can feel the jolt.
Strikes to the jaw are the ones that are most likely to cause knockouts. I have never heard a good explanation for what’s so special about the jaw but punches to the side of the head, nose, eyes, etc. while painful, rarely end up in a KO.
Mike Tyson was a sport fighter. The rules of boxing say you aren’t allowed to punch someone in the back of the head. So he wasn’t hitting people in the spot where it’s likely to kill you.
Well you would survive too. I mean you wouldn’t feel great but you would live. If you’re wondering how they don’t get knocked out after a few hard punches it’s all about desensitization. Your brain will adapt to certain sensations to save itself the trouble of having to spend limited mental processing power on them.
For example, I have been near hypothermic a few times in my life. I am an outdoorsman and I didn’t always bring the right gear for the weather. So I spent some cold nights freezing. Nowadays though, the cold doesn’t affect me as much. I mean I feel cold, but my mental and physical reaction to cold isn’t as extreme. I’m slower to shiver and can honestly walk around comfortably in shorts and a t-shirt for a few minutes during cold weather.
The same thing happens with punches. They’ve been punched in the face before. So they physically feel the punches, but the automatic response that others might feel is suppressed allowing them not to be as disoriented by it.
They’re ALL damaged! Brain damaged. One of the first and most famous to bring about this realization was Muhammad Ali. Now start looking at retired NFL players and their wives dealing with it.
You are greatly overestimating the lethality of a punch to the head, even by incredibly strong individuals.
Theoretically if prime of his career Mike Tyson were to train to produce life ending punches rather than match winning ones, this could be a different conversation. Hypothetically if he were to run and throw his entire body-weight behind a single undefended shot to someones temple, then you would probably have a much higher chance of killing someone with a single hit.
The kind of blows you are discussing are certainly dangerous and damage causing, but the risk of death in the short term from a blow of that caliber isn’t likely. Training and desensitivity are huge parts of why boxers can take punishing blows to the head and stay on their feet and fighting when many of us would be on the ground. Actually dying from a punch to the head is normally the result of rupturing vessels in the blood brain barrier. In normal healthy people the force required to burst those blood vessels is above what a human punch produces. Dying to a single punch to the head is more commonly a result of a very unlucky combination of an abnormally weak collection of blood vessels and an unfortunately precise blow hitting them in the right way to cause a rupture.
Boxers actually can suffer from weakened blood vessels as long careers of physical punishment can result in weakened arterial walls and leave them more prone to dangerous aneurysms. An experienced boxer would almost certainly take a most blows to the head and stay upright and coherent more so than someone inexperienced in getting punched. Boxers are also at higher risk than normal of having the kind of complications that can lead to fatal head injuries though, so when it comes to surviving powerful punches, being a boxer isn’t necessarily a benefit.
1. Boxers train their neck muscles to help them take punches. 2. They are also very good at dodging so a lot of punches don’t land great and don’t have full force. 3. Boxers also ride punches, meaning they go with the direction of the punch to help lessen the jerk.
I believe your head hitting the floor/concrete would cause more damage than a punch from a professional boxer. Mike Tyson hits incredibly hard, but the human body is more resilient than you think. That being said, the knockout mechanism comes from the brain taking damage hitting the walls of the skull, which would affect anyone the same way (unless you had a very strong, thick neck).
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