Chest punches - deceptively useful, or movie fantasy?

Question

I know that Wing Chun has the chain punching that can target the chest / solar plexus so as to rattle the other guy and not provide any opportunity to recover. But why not do the same punches to the face?

Is there some benefit to punching your opponent in the chest that I’m not aware of? Is there much at all reality behind movies' depictions of someone being struck in the chest then coughing up blood or even dying?

I know that just about any technique could work, but why not go with the higher-percentage strikes which hurt the other guy more?

Answer 1

Well, to start off, punching someone in the head is potentially harmful to the puncher. Skulls are made out of hard bone with few flat surfaces and several angles, which increases the risk of breaking your knuckles on contact. And that's if you're lucky enough to not make contact with something like the teeth, and also suffer additional lacerations. Frankly, the damage caused by punching a head is one of the major factors behind boxing gloves (the other major factor being preventing grappling, but that's a different topic). Compare that to the chest, which is largely flat, and therefore less likely to damage your hands. In addition, the head is a relatively small target, and one more easily moved away from the attacker than the torso, so it's going to be harder to target.

Lastly, yes, chest punches can be very damaging.

A chest contusion, or bruise, is caused by a fall or direct blow to the chest. Car crashes, falls, getting punched, and injury from bicycle handlebars are common causes of chest contusions. A very forceful blow to the chest can injure the heart or blood vessels in the chest, the lungs, the airway, the liver, or the spleen.

Pain may be caused by an injury to muscles, cartilage, or ribs. Deep breathing, coughing, or sneezing can increase your pain. Lying on the injured area also can cause pain.

Answer 2

There are a couple of ways that a direct blow to the chest could cause damage, other than the freezing of the diaphragm from a blow almost anywhere along the line of the ribcage (Although the side edges and solar plexus are the more vulnerable points).

Breaking a rib

If you can punch around 3300 newtons of force, you have about 25% chance to fracture a rib, according to a Livescience article. A typical boxer can generate up to 5000 newtons with a punch. A fractured rib will impair both breathing and movement immediately, and depending on the break, a chance to rupture blood vessels running along the rib itself. (This also depends on angle of strike, bone condition of opponent, many factors. This is just a rough example).

Stopping the heart

A direct blow over the heart has a chance to stop the heart. The basic mechanism is that the blow strikes during the major repolarization phase of the heartbeat (Called a T wave on an ECG), and disrupts the rhythm. This is called commotio cordis and while rare and more prevalent in youths, it does happen in many sports, and has a mortality rate above 60%.

Why the chest?

As pointed out already, striking the face is potentially very harmful to the person doing the punching. Additionally, a punch to the face may do no more damage than a nosebleed and really enraging the opponent. Knocking a person out relies more on torque causing the brain to bang against the skull. There is no guarantee that you are going to be able to do that with a punch.

Add to that, the head is relatively small in area compared to the chest, and can easily be covered, or deflect blows coming at it. In comparison, the chest has a very broad area from front to back and top to bottom, and it takes a skilled person to guard that.

The final point - Against an untrained person, the typical reaction is to jerk the hands down in front of an incoming punch. An experienced fighter can target the ribs, potentially do damage and cause the hands to move, then target the face if desired once the guard is moved.

Answer 3

A little bit useful, a little more fantasy.

In the context of a real fight or an MMA fight, it's really only useful as a set up punch. IE, it's not a strike for damage, it's to open up the real damaging shots. There are much better set up punches, so they aren't used that often. Also due to the position of a traditional boxing or kickboxing guard, they're incredibly easy to defend.

I first need to define the "body". In fighting the body refers to strikes to the lower-outside ribs, lower ribs (below the solar plexus), stomach, and obliques (where your left hand liver shots hit).

Much like a body jab, body cross, and liver shot, you can get your opponent to think about their body a bit too much, and drop their hands. The same can be done with a chest punch. Here's the problem, body jabs, body crosses, and liver shots, and body hooks all do this better. They hurt more, do more damage, and most important, they cause your opponent to drop their hands lower to defend. This is key. The lower they drop their hands, the better time you have landing your follow up shot to the head. If you strike to the chest they don't have to drop their hands as low (if at all) to defend. It goes the same way for setting up body shots. The chest is too in the middle, so forcing someone to defend the chest doesn't do the job as well as head and body shots.

One could argue that an unblocked (good luck with that) chest strike could do damage. I've never seen someone hurt by one in all my years of MMA, and assume it would only work vs an untrained opponent, which isn't even worth talking about. Tons of ridiculous techniques work against untrained opponents.

Answer 4

I asked my instructor an analogous question once, when we were looking at a scenario where the defender has fallen and improvises by attacking the lower body. We started with strikes to the knees, and then to the groin. I asked why we don't immediately attack the groin to disable the attacker and secure safety for the defender ASAP. To answer, he tapped me on the knee just hard enough to prove that he could easily have caused me great pain.

Although obvious places to attack, such as the eyes, groin, jaw, and head generally, are important targets in a fight, there are other places in the body that are not as obvious but perhaps equally important. 3 more anecdotes to prove this point:

• My instructor has a story that a well-placed hit on the clavicle by his instructor, done for demonstration purposes, caused him so much pain he nearly passed out.

• The teacher that hit my instructor on the clavicle once flicked out his arm at me and knuckled me in the bicep for demonstration purposes. He took advantange of a nerve in the arm, and it felt like an electric shock. My elbow was stiff for 3 days. He related that the same strike with greater force could cause enough pain to render a person unconscious.

• A sparring partner once got too excited and hooked me in the liver. I literally crawled out of the ring and started hyperventilating, and it took me at least 15 minutes to calm down. Another hit to the liver, probably not as hard, during boxing a few weeks later stunned me for around a minute, plenty of time that my partner then could have finished me off.

So it's not that it's wrong to think about hitting the attacker in the face, but if that is the only target you permit yourself, that is a disadvantage. Yes, there are other very worthwhile vulnerabilities in the body.