When it comes to fighting, whether that’s a form of martial arts, boxing, or simply to defend yourself, having strong and conditioned knuckles is one of the key elements in order to dominate your opponents. However, conditioning them is the trickiest part since they’re made up of some pretty fragile bones and joints that can easily break if you put too much pressure on them. With that being said, some people think that punching hard objects will make your knuckles stronger, is that really the case?
Punching hard objects can certainly lead to an increase in terms of hypertrophy of the skin over the knuckles which makes them stronger, however, it is heavily associated with decreased wrist mobility and can seriously damage them.
In this article, we’ll talk about if punching hard objects can make your knuckles stronger, and if it’s a good way to condition them.
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Does Punching Hard Objects Make Your Knuckles Stronger?
In order to answer this question, we first need to understand what “stronger knuckles” mean. Since that area, in particular, contains little to no muscles, you can’t necessarily train them to become stronger. The only way that you can increase their strength is by stimulating bone density which is essentially what knuckles are made of. It’s just a bunch of bones and joints that allow the movement of the hand. In other words, “stronger knuckles” means “stronger bones”.
Now that we got that out of the way, another thing that needs to be understood is how to stimulate bone density which is the key element of making knuckles stronger. Well, bone density is stimulated using two essential methods: damaging them and resistance training.
Damaging Your Knuckles
The human body is such a fascinating biological system that has the ability to do a lot of amazing and miraculous things. One of these things is healing. It happens almost every day whenever you fall and injure yourself, get sick, get bitten by a mosquito, or more importantly, damage one of your body parts.
The most interesting thing about this complex system that we call the human body is that it is “programmed”, if something is damaged in it, to instinctively heal it by using tougher material so that the damage never occurs again since, according to it, what you had before wasn’t enough to protect you. The body adapts to its environment and naturally overcomes all challenges.
The best way to put this into perspective for you is to think about weight-lifter, especially the ones that manage to transform their body by training. That doesn’t magically happen, every time you hit the gym, the cells in your body are tirelessly working and healing the damaged muscle tissues and making them stronger. With time, this effect snowballs, and your body starts growing in size since the muscles that you had before weren’t enough to overcome the challenge of lifting heavy weight.
And this happens also to bones. When you damage them, they automatically heal. And since your body doesn’t want that to happen again, it will produce denser and stronger bones.
What does this has to do with hitting hard objects you say? Well, hitting, let’s say a wall, using your knuckles will definitely trigger the “adaptation effect” of the body which will make, not only the bones but also the skin around them stronger than they were before.
However, damaging your bones doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll always heal, there is a solid chance that they’ll stay that way forever which is why this method of making your knuckles stronger has a huge risk.
Resistance Training
Another way of increasing bone density is by resistance training. This doesn’t only happen in the gym or when we’re training our body on purpose, this also happens in our daily life because of the different activities that we do and that involve gravity most of the time (walking, jumping, lifting a chair, and so on).
This is the exact reason why most people advise those that struggle with bone loss to start resistance training since it’s the best way to increase bone density. And there are a lot of exercises that increase bone density around the knuckles which include hitting hard objects.
If you think about it, punching a solid object is closely related to resistance training. Let’s take a look again at the example of hitting a wall. When you perform a punch, you’re carrying a lot of power and momentum which is then stopped by the unanimous object that acts as a resistance. In that case, the bones around your knuckles will get stronger. But since you’re damaging them, this method still presents a risk which is why you should just stick with basic resistance training instead of hitting hard objects. It pretty much offers the same benefits but it will require a lot more time.
Is Hitting Hard Object a Good Way Of Strengthening Knuckles?
As I mentioned in the beginning, there are two main methods of increasing bone density that play a huge role in making your knuckles stronger. Damaging them and using resistance training.
When you damage your knuckles which is essentially what you’re doing when you’re hitting hard objects, you’re taking a huge risk in terms of joint damage. This risk may not appear instantly, but it will definitely over time.
Since knuckles are only made up of small bones and joints, when you use them to punch hard objects and they get damaged, the body will instinctively make them stronger so that never happen again. It does that by remodeling the bones and increasing their strength and density. When that happens, the joints will start developing calcium deposits which will essentially prevent you from moving well.
The best way to avoid all this is by using the second method which is resistance training, or if you still want to hit hard objects, start with something simple and work your way up. For example, start by using hand wraps and small boxing gloves on a punching bag. As soon as you become used to it, take off the gloves and use hit the punching bag using only hand wraps. After that, I would always recommend keeping them on even if you get used to them to prevent any serious damage to your knuckles.
Conclusion:
As you can see, even though hitting hard objects does make your knuckles stronger, is it really worth it in the long term? Probably not, you’ll just damage your bones and joints and it’s not really efficient. The best way to go about it is by using resistance training or by taking things slowly by using hand wraps or boxing gloves.