September 20, 2009

• Gloves and Strikes

  It should be noted that hand striking in K1, boxing and MMA are actually quite different for a number of different reasons.

  The most obvious is probably the rule differences: because there are no take downs in boxing and K1, your stance can be optimized to shift your upper body to avoid strikes to the head, and you can concentrate training for striking combinations that wouldn't be as easy to apply if someone were trying to grapple with you all the time. 

  Obviously the presence of kicks changes things a great deal either, as boxers don't need to defend their legs or torsos from kicks...

  However, another major difference not often discussed is the gloves.  In boxing and K1, you can put up two arms and use a passive block and pretty much at least deflect the vast majority of strikes to your head.  The glove size precludes slipping a strike between paired forearms.  The glove size makes it easier to deflect a blow, and distributes the force on your opponents head differently.

  MMA gloves are significantly smaller, allowing a different dynamic to striking and blocking.  Perhaps what might be more interesting is seeing K1 fighters using MMA gloves, under K1 rules.

  If one really wants to see striking skills, let's remove all padding, and allow people to use ridges, bare knuckles, chops, palm strikes (and I don't mean slapping), knife hands etc.  Of course the disfiguring injury rate would go up unacceptably, but... the best way to see how high the accuracy could get would be to take away all the encumbrances, and see what else a striker like Anderson Silva or Machida could sneak in through their opponents guard. 

  What's sometimes forgotten is that some of the advantages karate and other TCMs are supposed to have is body hardening of the striking surfaces.  A spear/knife hand can give you an extra 6 inches of reach, whereas a boxing glove, completely alters the profile of your spiking plane into a big blob.

  In a sense, a boxer that can knock someone out with a heavy nerfball on his fist should be able to be really dangerous with bare knuckles... I think. 

  Nevertheless, I think boxing gloves change a lot of fundamental factors related to accuracy because of the equipment. 

  • 4:16 pm
  • 2 Comments