Biomechanical study of full-contact karate contrasted with boxing

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Abstract
✓ It is known that boxers suffer a characteristic cumulative brain injury from repeated blows to the head that correlates well with the number of bouts fought. Much less is known about full-contact karate (kickboxing), which is relatively new. In full-contact karate, punches and kicks are actually landed, rather than being focused to culminate just short of an opponent, as practiced in traditional karate. Although a combatant can win on points, the surest means of victory is a knockout. Consequently, fighters strive to land blows to the head. To investigate the relative force of kicks and punches, a dummy head was mounted 175 cm above the floor (to simulate a 50th-percentile man standing erect) and 125 cm above the floor (to simulate the man in a crouched position) on a universal joint permitting motion about three axes. The mechanism was contrived to provide constant rotational stiffness, and springs provided constant restorative moments about the three axes. The texture of soft tissue was simulated by a...

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