In an opening scene, the main character is showing how sympathetic he is <see, sarcasm> by working another guy over, said victim being duct taped to a chair. The main character is wearing smooth leather gloves. The main character strikes the other guy about the head and face a few times, and in the process tears up his knuckles.

I know without question from personal experience (boxing in college, krav maga for a couple years, and a very rough playground growing up) that a competent striker will almost certainly break or at least skin his knuckles if he hits another person in the skull with any force. (Case in point--the captain of the boxing team my first year on was attacked at a party. He delivered one punch that finished the fight and put the aggressor in the hospital with a broken nose and four missing teeth, but also tore all of the skin off of his knuckles and strained a ligament).

What I don't want is a debate about whether and how skulls can be punched without injury to the puncher--that reality is well beyond arguing for me.

My question is this--how does is look to a normal reader, without personal experience in the various pitfalls of slamming his own hands into hard objects, when the main character suffers injury when punching someone? Does a reader make any conclusions regarding the main character in response to that data? Does the reality of punching need to be somehow contextually explained to be palatable?

This might also be a good companion thread to "Gut Wounds," to discuss the various difficulties of writing realistic brawling.

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I know without question from personal experience (boxing in college, krav maga for a couple years, and a very rough playground growing up) that a competent striker will almost certainly break or at least skin his knuckles if he hits another person in the skull with any force. (Case in point--the captain of the boxing team my first year on was attacked at a party. He delivered one punch that finished the fight and put the aggressor in the hospital with a broken nose and four missing teeth, but also tore all of the skin off of his knuckles and strained a ligament).

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I read an earlier version of this, and the only thing that I have a hard time understanding (as someone fairly inexperienced with hand-to-hand combat) is, if he is wearing gloves, would the skin really break? I would think the point of wearing the gloves would be to afford his hands a little protection and not just so he doesn't leave finger-prints.

I looked at your F&F thread and this stood out:

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Blood also flowed from the burst knuckles inside of Clay’s leather gloves.

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I slam my hands into hard objects all the time, and I don't injure them much. Besides, going for knockout blows during an interrogation is beyond stupid. What on earth would be the point of knocking the guy out? You use openhanded blows against the side of the head, particularly the ears (commonly called "boxing his ears"). That will produce plenty of pain and disorientation in the subject without causing you any more pain than clapping loudly. Heck, even if you're going for a skull crushing blow in a serious fight, you hit with an open hand. You use your fist for attacking muscle groups and the abdomen, that's a basic of fighting.

I might have mentioned that I wear rings rather than gloves, and I prefer more subtle methods anyway. But competence is not an issue of preference. Bruising your hands unnecessarily is stupid.

A guy who hurts his hands while roughing someone up in a chair didn't seem very bright to me.

But then, as someone who hits and kicks several times a week (Kenpo/Jujitsu) I came to this with a bit of bias.

Jim was experienced enough to know that punching the guy directly in the face would take the skin off his knuckles, even though they were protected by the leather gloves, but he delivered the knock-out punch anyway.

As a man who's had more bloody knuckles than he should have, I've got to say that unless he tore *deep*, he's not going to bleed very much at all. Most tears aren't more than a layer or two deep under the skin. On the knuckles, especialy, any deeper than that and you're tearing ligament and snapping bone.

If it's imperative that he knock the guy out and get his hand a little messed up, have him take the glove off despite knowing better and punch the guy in the mouth. The teeth should suffice for rending the flesh (a common occurance in street fights) and a good punch to the mouth can knock a person out as readily as a punch anywhere else, if they're on the bring of exhaustion from an already savage beating. If you want it more believable, have him punch downward so the blow slides down the brow ridge, slips off the cheek, snaps the neck down and snags on the jaw, thus tearing the flesh.

On the other hand, the plot necessities of that scene were local rather than global, the scene is there to introduce us to the main character and his methods, it isn't integrated into the main storyline. So it could have been a hand to hand scene rather than an interrogation scene.

In a full hand to hand scene, expectations change quite a bit. One important thing to remember on the subject of attackers injuring themselves is that this is only typical of "hard" martial arts and simple fighting techniques. "Soft" martial arts are quite different and do not favor attacks that can injure the attacker. They aren't less effective than "hard" techniques, though certainly a "hard" technique has the potential to deliever more damage in any given blow than the corresponding "soft" technique. Actually, that's not...it's accurate, but misleading. For instance, striking someone directly in the neck to crush the windpipe is a "hard" technique. Grabbing the head and twisting to break the neck is a "soft" technique.

Can you refer us to any written material that elaborates on the differences between soft and hard techniques and something about how each can effectively "beat" the other?

I guess for the specific issue of my story, the relevant information that makes the main character's injury make sense--nay, seem well-nigh unavoidable--to me is 1) He is a competent and devious fighter from neccesity, but by no means the master of any art; 2) What he knows in that arena is distinctly western (hands-oriented) and 'hard'; and 3) He just delivered several sliding blows (backhands), designed to inflict pain and cause shame without knocking out teeth or consciousness, but are also well-capable of chafing knuckle-skin clean off, even under a glove, and far more likely to do so than direct-impact strikes.

What I need to figure out now is how, without disrupting the story, to condense or imply all of that information so that a reader doesn't get turned off or get the wrong idea when the main character hurts himself.

I think the best place to start is probably some excellent suggestions I've received about changing the adjectives that I use to describe the injury

Typically, most fighting styles that are not composed on a "whole body" theory of martial arts tend to be "hard" in the sense of emphasizing strong discrete attacks and the force you can put behind them. Softer styles often have been influenced heavily by Chinese techniques, though some are entirely independent of Chinese influence.

Go a quarter of the page down to question #3 for a good, basic definition of "soft" versus "hard" martial arts.

Capoeira is a pretty interesting martial art, but for my money, I'd still only bother with Krav Maga. And only that because it's been tested in the field and is, as I understand, the only one that developed out of need to survive rather than other purposes.

Some have said Jeet Kune Do evolved for that reason, but Bruce Lee didn't have that in mind when he created the art. He had in mind creating the ultimate martial art.

If you want, J, I can always give you the schematics for my invented martial art (to be used only in stories, not actually studied or heavily analyzed) Shichi Poa. It might be an interesting style for your character to use. It involves seven places to strike a man, with varying degress of pressure, to harm them, debilitate them or kill them out-right.

It's meant to be a close-quarters quick and deadly no poetry language that is all about surviving and getting away.

Kathleen--capoeira is different from BJJ. I've tried my hand at BJJ with some practicioners at my krav maga gym. Man, what an incredibly effective style! Two 45 minute sessions of "rolling" (as they call it) with those guys opened my eyes to whole new worlds of fighting.

[Edited to call Kathleen by her correct name.]

[This message has been edited by J (edited September 01, 2005).]

The martial arts I've studied, or 'fiddled' with, over the years have varied in both technique and the execution thereof. One thing I've noticed in the Korean martial art of Soo Bahk Do (until recently called Tang Soo Do...the Moo Duk Kwan variation, anyway) is that students are trained to strike with a 'snap'...especially when breaking boards/cinder blocks or delivering blows to harder parts of the body (i.e., the philtrum, or base of the nose...which can cause significant disorientation). This 'snap' is actually a practical use of physics. It is concentrating a force between 1200 newtons (the average beginner's strike) and 2800 newtons (an advanced student's) on a very small area at high velocity. Just to illustrate the 'power' of the latter figure...breaking a "typical concrete slab 1 1/2 inches thick takes on average only 1,900 newtons (Rist)."

To better explain my point, I'll quote a passage from one of my old research sources...back when I actually had to do some research for my written martial arts tests.

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Of course, the best boxers can punch as quickly and powerfully as any black belt. Why can't they break concrete blocks too? The answer lies in the nature of their punches. When a boxer throws his fist, he usually ends the movement with follow-through. This gives the punch maximum momentum (golf and tennis players follow through for the same reason), and it can help knock an opponent down. But the impact itself is diffuse: It's meant to jar an opponent's brain, not crack his skull.

A karate chop, on the other hand, has no follow-through at all: it lashes out like a cobra and then withdraws instantly. When a black belt hits a slab of concrete, for instance, his fist touches the block for fewer than five milliseconds, and yet the block breaks with a resounding crack.

To understand how this works, Jearl Walker, a former Tae Kwon Do student who now teaches physics at Cleveland State University, set up a study much like Feld's and McNair's. A well-thrown fist, he found, reaches its maximum velocity when the arm is about 80 percent extended. "That's exactly what my tae kwon do master had taught me," Walker says. "You learn to focus your punch in your imagination so that it terminates inside your opponent's body, rather than on the surface. To deliver the maximum power, you want to make contact before the slowdown begins."

The purpose of all that focused power is brutally obvious: to break bones and rupture tissue. But success also depends on more subtle forces. Solid as they seem, all materials are at least slightly elastic. Whack them in the right spot and they will start to oscillate. A punch with a follow-through would dampen such oscillations, but a karate chop, by pulling away at the last moment, lets them move freely "If you tweak a rubber band it goes up and down, and the same is true if you tweak a board or a brick with a much greater force," Feld says. "When they reach their elastic limits, they start to yield. In other words, they break."

Fortunately for most of us, reaching that limit in bones is no easy matter. Feld says bone can withstand 40 times more force than concrete, and a cylinder of bone less than an inch in diameter and 2 1/3 inches long can withstand a force of more than 25,000 newtons. Hands and feet can withstand even more than that, because their skin, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and cartilage absorb a great deal of impact. As a result, a well-kicked foot can absorb about 2,000 times as much force as concrete before breaking.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_5_21/ai_61692484

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So, in a nutshell, various elements come together to create a good strike. And yet, as Survivor mentioned previously, open-hand techniques such as palm strikes are more effective on the 'hard' vital points of the body. They're much less painful for the striker and more agonizing for the strikee, let me tell you. However, toughening up the palms helps even more...the average person would probably feel 'discomfort' if they tried to use a palm strike without previous conditioning. The same is true of standard punches. I used to (and still) do push-ups on my knuckles on a hard floor to toughen the skin, ligaments, and bone in my hands. It does help...trust me. So, if a character has had formal martial arts training, or is aware of this fact, he/she would be able to minimize damage to his/her own anatomy.

Ok. I'm done.

So if you want to hit hard things with your unprotected knuckles, you have to condition them first. Part of this conditioning is to simply build up the skin to be more like the skin on your palms and feet, thicker and tougher (and a bit rougher, too). At another level, you're conditioning the joint to be able to take impacts from an angle that joint doesn't naturally like. This involves stressing the bone and cartiage so they grow in a distinctly abnormal pattern to resist force applied at an unnatural angle.

There are some important psychological effects, though. For one, a person that has trained their fists for unprotected combat will probably have a lot more confidence about it, in addition to having better abilities. Also, a person who sees a heavily scarred set of knuckles coming knows that this punch doesn't usually get pulled.