Hello All,
3am and no sleep in sight, so I might as well ask a question or two. I just got through reading the thread about concussions and it got me thinking. How hard is it to knock someone out? Watching movies, they always show the bad guy sneaking up behind someone and hitting them in the back of the head with the butt of a pistol or some such object. The victim immediately falls to the ground unconscious. Well, I have been hit in the head plenty, even saw “stars” once, but never been knocked out. Is it possible (yes, I know anything is possible), or should I say realistic that you can knock someone out by giving them a good thump on the skull or do you really have to whack 'em good and hard to get it done?
From what I understand, it’s pretty danged hard to knock someone unconscious without also badly injuring. I know that in the Air Force, if a pilot is rendered unconscious due to a head injury, he is immediately grounded until he can go through a whole physical examination to make sure there is no long-term damage. You don’t want a guy flying a plane while his head is all jacked up and not working right.
EDIT: Definitely wouldn’t recommend it as a sleep aid. Dunno if you were considering it, but given the context at the beginning of the question… 
An excellent question which has bothered me in idle moments too. I have the impression that CQB (close quarter battle) techniques focus on constricting the carotid arteries to induce unconsciousness. A choke hold.
Another thought, when I was in Basic, we were taught that a rifle butt-stroke (stop giggling) to the head was considered a use of Deadly Force, and should never be done except when the Rules of Engagement say so. Instead, we were told that if we had to do that, to go for center-of-mass. You are still likely to break some ribs and knock the wind out of the other guy, which might be just what you need to get him away from you, but you are much less likely to cave his skull in and kill him.
Sorry no cite, but I’ve read that in real life it is almost impossible to give someone a typical Hollywood knockout. You are most likely to either not hit them hard enough and not knock them out, or hit them too hard and seriously injure them or possibly even kill them.
I fail to see he difference. How does a good hard whack differ from a good thump?
To answer what I think is your question, yes, you can knock someone out by hitting them with a fist or a small club. If someone is standing still and lets you do whatever you like, or if you sneak up behind them, then knocking someone out deliberately isn’t at all difficult. You simply hit them as hard as you can in a few select places, such as the temple, the back of the head or the base of the neck. Instant knockout 99% of the time.
In a fight, it’s also not all that hard to do, but it is extremely difficult to do intentionally. Anyone who has watched much boxing knows how rare knockouts are, and that is in fights between trained fighters in which there are multiple head strikes every match.
You aren’t going to reliably knock someone out with a James Bond style karate chop. You need to hit full power to have a good chance of success. Even a big man needs to hit full power.
The first problem is that the line between “knocked out” and “brain damaged” is so fine that many medical types argue that it doesn’t exist. Any knockout from a blow can and probably does cause permanent brain damage. There’s also no way to judge how much damage is done. Some people have suffered severe brain damage or even died from a single punch. Others have been knocked out multiple times with no detectable injury at all. Basically it’s a crapshoot. You might get lucky and just knock the person out, you might kill them, you might leave them with brain damage of varying degrees. There’s absolutely no way of predicting the results.
The second problem is that a person who is knocked out without suffering serious brain damage will only be out for a few minutes at most. In all the real life cases I’ve seen and the vast majority of TV fights, a person knocked out will be fully unconscious for less than 30 seconds. They will be stunned for some time, but unlike the movies a person does not typically go yo sleep for hours when they are knocked out. That only happens with some pretty fierce concussion, and the risk of long-term damage is very high.
There are less risky ways to render someone unconscious though choking, strangling and a few other neat moves. These don’t appear to carry much risk of permanent injury, mostly because they rely on reflexes rather than nerve damage to cause unconsciousness. If you feel you may really need to knock someone out, learn these.
The thump meaning the typical Hollywood version. Hit on the back of the head with a blunt object, victim eventually awakes with a headache, but able to function quite well.
A “hard whack” otoh will certainly knock 'em out, but more than likely will either kill them or give them permanent brain damage.
This Cracked article explains why it’s difficult outside Hollywood and not to recommend:
The most likely way to give someone a concussion is actually to create “rotational” force on their head: ie. to get their head turning. If someone gets kicked in the side of the head, or punched on the side of the chin, that’s much more likely to give them concussion than taking a punch straight to the front or the back of the head. It’s why the chin is called the “knockout button” in boxing - if you take a hard punch to the chin with a large boxing glove, it’s always going to create those rotational forces and it’s likely to induce a concussion. I don’t know how easy that is to replicate though.
This. See “haymaker” on this list of punches.
Having recently suffered a head trauma myself, I would describe it more as being “stunned” than knocked out.
Just adding my agreement to the other voices here.
The distance between “enough force to knock out” and “enough force to kill” is very, very small, and in some cases, nonexistent.
Rattling the brain is bad enough. You can get neuronal shearing, which doesn’t necessarily appear on an MRI or CAT scan, because it’s damage at a cellular level, but when the neural connections are broken, the neurons don’t talk to each other, and that’s a bad thing. There’s more and more evidence showing this type of trauma is difficult to recover from and cummulative, and the closer together the injuries are in time, the worse the damage is.
Smacking someone on the head with a blunt object like a blackjack might sound more reasonable, but it’s not. Instead of rattling the brain, you’re concentrating all that force in a relatively small area of the skull. Skull fractures are bad enough. Skull fractures with a bit of bone depressed and pressing against the brain are worse. Skull fractures with bruising of either the membranes around the brain or the brain itself is a recipe for death. The skull does not allow for swelling, so if something new - like a pocket of blood - begins to grow, either the brain gets smushed, or it gets forced through the opening to the spinal cord, squishing the brain stem and pretty much killing you.
I almost knocked myself out by falling while running once, and that was what it was like for me, too - I sort of lay on the ground for a few minutes because I couldn’t get it together and get my legs under me. I was injured; I damaged my shoulder quite badly, as well as cutting my lip and getting some road rash on my arm.
I believe twisting the spinal column is the major reason for unconciousness from a punch to the chin. I don’t think there even has to be a concussion involved. The effect can come from a punch like a hook that rotates the head, or an uppercut that snaps the head back. The uppercut sounds more likely to involve a concussion also.
watched a boxing title fight wherein one boxer was knocked out by a right upper cut. the slow mo clearly showed him out while he was still standing and his eyes were blank as he fell. ferdie pacheco explained it:
- the punch to the jaw jerks the head upwards and compresses the lower half of the brain at the bottom of the skull.
- the brain then bounces upwards and its upper half is compressed at the top of the skull.
- that sudden vertical compression takes you out of the fight.
I’m seeing it both ways out on the web. This wikipedia sectiontalks about the brain stem and rotation. I believe I’ve heard that from Ferdie also. I’m not sure what he’s describing above, but it wouldn’t take place with a hook to chin.
This clip of a rugby player getting knocked out demonstrates the exact type of strike that’s most likely to cause concussion/unconsciousness. You can see on the replay that the contact isn’t particularly hard, by professional rugby standards, but the tackler makes solid contact with the side of Digby Ioane’s chin, creating the type of rotational forces on the head and spine I was talking about. You can see Digby’s out cold instantly, long before he hits the ground.
You do know that you can get knocked out for a period of seconds? In fact, if it’s longer than seconds, it’s getting serious.
You can get a concussion without thinking you’ve been knocked out at all.
If you hit someone in the right place, all it takes is a tap. They won’t be out very long, but possibly long enough for you to either panic or make your escape, whichever applies.
Well it really does not have to be extra hard if you know which part you are going to target it. We have all seen how one could get knocked out with a single punch to the jaw, though is easier said than done.
In theory, fighters are a lot tougher to knock out because they are already used to a level of pain running through their head. Even a simple bump can even knock you out cold, always remember that.
Thanks for the link. Of course you sent me to Cracked, which resulted in my staying up another 2 hours chuckling my head off, making the Great Dane stare at me while tilting his head.
Why yes, yes I am a 45 year old child.