Yeah, that whole bit really botherd me too. Just because one TKD guy kicked harder than one Kung fu guy doesn't mean TKD has the hardest kick. It just means that one TKD guy kicked harder than that on particular Kumg fu guy. That goes for all the other claims made in that show. I liked the show all except for them ending with a conclusion that this art or that art does the best anything based on a sampling of exactly one practisioner of each art. It's just not enough of a study sample to make blanket statements like that.

Just watched the MMA episode. It featured Tito Ortiz, Dean Lister, Randy Couture and Bas Rutten. They looked at different strikes, including elbows, punches, and kicks. Randy landed a straight punch that had about 500 pounds (227kg) of pressure behind it, while Bas did a hook that had about 1200 (545kg). Bas also did a Thai-style roundhouse kick that was over 2000 lbs (909kg).

They also showed that a good body slam can generate over 2000 lbs of force. And most surprisingly, that ground-n-pound strikes can generate even more force than standing ones can! Randy was putting out around 2000 lbs of force in some of his seated GnP strikes. I would not have believed that if I hadn't seen it. I really expected those to be much less, but gravity adds quite a bit to those strikes.

Interesting episode, if not strictly "scientific" ie; pretty small test pool.

Curious to know if there is a consistent power difference between straight punches and circular punches.

just saw it too. good episode. another interesting thing was the KO threshold to general areas around the head - temple, ear, jaw, straight-on, etc - not specific points, but areas. plus the force thresholds necessary pretty much convinces me that light-tap KO's are non-existant.

hitting hard has it's advantages much much more than pinpoint accuracy.

The "tests" they did on the show were very unscientific. The different stylists did not even do the same kick. Also, they varied greatly in size and weight--is anyone really surprised the smallest man (the kung fu guy) had the lightest kick?

eh? was that the same show? there was no kung fu guy. This episode was focused on MMA. unless you mean an earlier episode. we were mentioning about this one:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/fightscience/episodes.html

the only thing scientific really were the raw measurements of force/pressure.


The special ops episode made some interesting points/tests as well.

I am Pi$$ed ! Here I put the thread up to make everybody aware of this show and I forgot all about it (whats worse is my wife reminded me after both episodes aired). Did they mention if they were going re-play the episodes ?

VDJ

Next airing is Wednesday (1/30) with the MMA episode at 9:00pm and the Special Forces one immediately after @ 10:00. The next recast is Thursday morning (1/31) at like 1 & 2 am. After that, it doesn't air for another couple days until Saturday 2/2 at 5:00 and 6:00 respectively.

Thanks !

VDJ

Just saw the re-broadcast. Didn't do much for me !

VDJ