I see this shit in movies all the time and it always just looks insane to me. Even just basic physics should mean that the equal and opposite reaction of one skull banging into the other would knock each person out equally. How does this ever work? The character always walks away like some badass as if they wouldn’t have some major concussion and are invincible. The only use of this I ever appreciated was the parody in an Adam Sandler movie where the guy did it and did actually pass out from it.
In: Physics
As with most things in movies, things are heavily modified to look cool.
The idea behind headbutting IRL is to break someone else’s nose with the thickest part of your skull. Still not great to be smacking your head on things, but if done properly you’ll do far more damage to the other person than to yourself. Broken noses are very painful and tend to involve a LOT of blood loss.
As a young man playing pick up football I was involved in a head to head collision with another player. I hit my head on the crowd above my forehead. The other guy hit right above his eye in the area of his eyebrow. I had a mild concussion and a bruise. His brow exploded, bone visible, blood everywhere, requiring multiple stitches. Later in life he chose to have some plastic surgery to repair the scarring.
You hit someone’s very delicate and breakable nose with your larger and sturdier forehead.
You hope you do more damage to them than to yourself.
Movies are not reality.
your forehead is very hard, a legimate technique is to take punches on the forehead or top of head, it’ll hurt but you can break their hand, with head butts the idea is to hit the face, which is much more fragile.
Ideally you smash your forehead into their nose since your forehead is strong bone and the nasal and eye socket bone is not.
Headbutting works because (1) you’ve tensed your neck muscles, (2) because your forehead bones are very hard, and (3) you typically aim your forehead at a painful area. (Edit: there is a very painful spot at the top between your eyebrows, but it is difficult to strike.)
Your opponent likely has not tensed their neck muscles to counter the impact. I’ve experimented with this in martial arts, and believe me when I say that a prepared opponent can feel like running into a cliff wall (even if their name isn’t “Cliff”). And if you manage to place your aim on, say, the bridge of their nose, it will be far more painful to them.
It really does work. Aim the top of your head into a soft part of their face. I’ve done it to a bigger guy than me who was throwing his weight around, he gripped my shirt with 2 hands and pulled me in towards him, I just followed through. I felt his nose crunch against my skull, it didn’t hurt me one bit. Here’s a video of a well executed headbutt: https://youtu.be/Z5mxUebiwgY
You’re hitting your opponent’s nose with your forehead. If you just clunk foreheads together it hurts both people equally. But if you hit their nose and do it right you only hurt them. A lot of the times this isn’t clear in movies because it happens very fast and obviously it’s all pretend so you never clearly see what exactly is supposed to be happening.
Proper technique is to tuck your chin and drive forward into the nose, not rear back and swing your head like a hammer. Having been on the accidental receiving end of one in practice, they’re very effective. Holy shit, how did I end up on the floor moment.
Forehead is actually very hard. You can easily break your hand punching full force into someone’s forehead. The idea of headbutt is using your forehead to hit your opponent’s face (mainly to break their nose), not forehead to forehead clashing which will cause some ugly damage to both.
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