I was talking with Dr. Rowe and Rick Stone about weapon concepts in different cultures. The subject came up about taking a strike from a stick; should you let it hit the muscle or the bone? Assuming you had no chance to avoid, of course.
Marc related a conversation he and a group of doctors had in which the question was; what part of the body would they hit with a stick? As a group they decided the best parts were the bony ones. Knees, shins and elbows were their primary choices. Fingers were in there, too. The docs settled on those due to the abundance of nerve endings which would send huge amounts of pain information to the brain.
The head was not on the top of the list. It's spherical, harder to break. I've seen people cracked upside the head with a stick in real confrontations. One guy, all it did was make him mad. But crack him in the knees and the results differ.
I'm passing this along because I thought it was interesting that a group of non-martial artists, looking at it from a medical standpoint, would select the same targets we teach. They did it based on what they know of the body and how it works. I speculate we figured it out a thousand or more years ago purely from hitting people and watching their reactions.
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