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Comment by svrtknst | Hacker News Reader

This is an increasingly common sentiment among hockey players too, that softer shoulder pads could be a way to decrease head trauma

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In boxing, it is argued that not wearing gloves would decrease head trauma, too.

Hitting a skull with your bare fist is more likely to break your hand than to knock out your opponent, so bare-knuckle fighters won’t go for head punches as much as boxers do.

Knuckles also cut an opponent's face to shreds which prevents a fight dragging on.

I can’t find it now, but there’s a Bobby Clarke quote about modern protective equipment being like armor. This gives players a false sense of invulnerability and the tools to hit other players harder with less damage to themselves.

Well, olympic boxing concluded that not wearing helmets is safer for the athletes.

Alas, I have no citations, but I have heard on the grapevine, as it were, that there are multiple studies showing that glove-less boxing is safer than boxing with the normal gloves.

This makes a lot of sense because, as I said in another comment this this article, bareknuckle completely changes the gameplan. The hand is very easy to break and the gloves do a great job at protecting them. When you don't have gloves you can't just go throwing haymakers since it's very likely you're going break your hands doing it. Heck, even "defending with your forehead" becomes a viable strategy against a gloveless opponent. I bet in these scenarios the fighters get exposed to much weaker shots in average. The goal here is to land that one precise punch right in the off switch.

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