I watched a video about cranking neck where it could tear your blood vessels and form a blood clot which makes sense, but then how does this not happens more often? When we seems to get hurt from hitting something accidentally while in awhile
Learning about stroke help me understand how dangerous they can be with just one blood vessels get clogged and yet you see people hit each other in the head as a sport.
They also seems like a fragile wires so how can they withstand abuse is mystery to me, shouldn’t they burst out easily with some force?
In: Biology
Anytime someone has a bruise, that’s broken smaller blood vessels. We heal.
Big vessels are evolved to take more abuse – because they’re fatal otherwise. But they can still rupture such as in a car accident. If they do, it’s probably death.
Their flexibility plays a big role in it. They are both fairly strong and very flexible, and there’s an uncountable number of them underneath layers of other cells and tissue which helps cushion the impact and spread the load across many vessels.
But they do rupture here and there. thats what bruises are, or rather the dark color in bruises
The short answer is “they can’t”. Career boxers, professional american football players, and other people who get regular head injuries almost always end up with slow cumulative brain damage. Once you’ve studied this stuff (like I have) you’ll find that you can’t watch a lot of contact sports anymore because you’re basically watching someone slowly killing themselves for public entertainment.
Also note during boxing, boxers have hand wraps and also 16 ounces of foam on their hands dampening the direct impact and spreading it out a little bit.
Which isn’t to say you don’t still feel where you are striking with, you do, but it’s far lessened than without gear.
In regards to the story about cracking your neck causing a blood clot, this has happened in adults of various ages, the common point was that they *regularly* would attempt to crack their neck, and would often use either extra force or speed to achieve more cracking, through pushing with the arms or whipping the head back and forth.
Blood vessels and capillaries are really good at flexing, and withstand *single impacts* extremely well. However, if they’re subjected to extra force regularly over a long time, the walls of the vessels can begin to degrade and wear out. It becomes a ticking bomb (for as long as the cracking behavior continues) where each flex, even though they don’t vary in intensity, could be the one that causes the wall to fail.
I regularly crack my neck and only recently heard about this myself. Some articles are saying “no more than once a day should be okay, less is preferred”, but I do that shit hourly. I’m 29 and haven’t suffered anything yet, but I’m going to do my best to change my habits
It’s like punching a rubber tube. They are flexible and can spread the force to a less fragile place (like muscle). Smaller vessels break all the time, thats why you can see bruises/hematoma.
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