how do people head butt people without hurting themselves too?
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Headbutts in the movies are dramatized. When you headbutt in real life, you are aiming square to their nose. You are trying to break their nose.
This will cause a lot of blood that will block their breathing and ruin their composure.
It mainly has to do with what part of your head you’re hitting with. The “correct” way to do it, is to use the top of your head because it’s the hardest part of the head and is the least sensitive pain wise. Trying to headbutt with any other part of your head, like your forehead for example, you have a greater risk of hurting yourself.
Headbutts much like real estate is all about location. You’re trying to use the big solid crown of your skull to hit their fragile nose. If done well you should walk away a bit dazed and their nose should be broken.
Any time you strike someone else, it is going to hurt, to one degree or another. You just need to accept that. Doesn’t matter if it’s a punch, a kick, or a Glasgow kiss.
To head butt someone and minimize how much you are going to injure yourself, you want to use the crown of your forehead, where the vertical part starts rounding over to horizontal. This is the hardest and least sensitive part of your head. Basically, it is right around where your hairline starts.
Next thing you want to do is make sure you aim the blow at your opponent’s nose. Ideally, you will strike in a slightly downward motion with the crown of your forehead impacting the bridge of their nose. The result will be a broken nose for them, blood gushing as from a tap, and they will have watery eyes to blur their vision. For you, there will be a brief disorientation (if all has gone well), and you will have a choice to make as to how to exploit your advantage.
Watch Gladiator from 1992, not the Russel Crowe one, it will explain stuff. And aim for the nose, not the top of their head.
Bas Rutten (retired professional fighter, bouncer) explains that the proper technique isn’t the big windup and smash like in the movies. The other person can move their head and you lose all you teeth against their skull. this is not a desirable outcome.
Lethwei is a martial art from Burma/Myanmar that allows head-butting. It is absolutely brutal what it can do to a human face.
Nose is soft like a hotdog
Head is hard like a board.
Place hotdog on a board.
Hit hotdog with forehead but dont hit the board the hotdog is resting on.
Same principle applied to someone else’s face.
The skull is one of the strongest bone you have. Solid structure, not a lot of moving parts. It’s been designed to protect one of the most important organ, your brain.
Someone’s face is a lot of squishy structure: nose, mouth, and eyes with lots of nerve endings (= pain).
You don’t need a lot of force, as if you use too much force, you risk causing a concussion for yourself.
They do hurt you. The trick is to put the hardest part of your face (forehead) into the softest part of theirs (nose cartilage) but they will absolutely hurt you even if you do it right. And if you miss and get a tooth embedded in your forehead or something you can easily do more damage to yourself.
Your forehead is one of the thickest parts of your skull. It has a lot less nerve density, so trauma in this region isn’t very painful. It is fairly flat, so it can disperse force more evenly. Etc.
Your nose? Much more brittle, much more painful to sustain trauma. And definitely not flat enough to disperse that force evenly at all.
If you aim correctly, it isn’t really an equal exchange. It is more like a fist to the face than a face to a face, really. It still hurts to punch people–Sometimes people break their hands doing it–but it usually hurts you a lot less than it hurts whoever you punched.
Especially if you hit them on the nose.
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