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HI all Had a lot on my plate, still do, but wanted to clear up some confusion regarding the introduction of gloves and wraps into fighting. I am doing this analysis from a combat perspective.
Originally hand protection in the form of "Mufflers" or gloves was introduced because students of the upper classes did not want markings on the face from matches. At this time what was called a boxing match was, as James Figg conceived, a form of self defense where all types of techniques were allowed.
Figg used a fencing vocabulary... Force being generated from the body transferring weight with, or without a step. Boxing at that time would have looked like a form of Chinese boxing, like hsin yi for example, with weight dropping, stepping and the hand gaining power through extending...much like a stab from a blade would depend on extension. Figg conceived of the corpus of techniques to be for self defense, and not for sport. BUT the only way to show the art of boxing off was to operate with bouts, in a ring, etc.
At this time there were forms of wrestling around used for self defense. If one looks at Welsh miners for example, the art of kicking the shins to settle disputes may well sound silly, but, in order to kick the other man's shins, one had to grapple into the correct position and turn the body, settle the weight properly. So there was knowledge of fighting, its just that to appeal to different classes, there had to be a way to perform the techniques in a manner that would not be offensive...No good looking Lord would want to lose his teeth in a match... LOL!
One of the first things to come out of Figg's practice was the observations regarding the hands and the affect impact had upon the hands. Again, there are a couple of methods available to human beings when we use the hands to hit: Universally we can hit with proper form, or we can condition the hands to take more force than normal to deliver a powerful blow. It is instructive that the most sophisticated hand conditioning methods have been utilized by China and these methods involve slowly, gradually working up to hitting targets that are increasingly hard...One starts with rice, iron or lead shot, eventually concrete. Japanese methods used by karateka who took Okinawan Kara-Te Went a different route, conditioning the two knuckles on the fist to withstand force on a relatively small area.
But neither the Karateka nor the Chinese Boxer had, as a goal, a sustained level of throwing punches. On the contrary one important difference culturally between the European boxer and other fighting men concerned with blunt force (not wrestlers), was the amount of punches to be delivered during an episode where the techniques were applied. This difference is not only in hitting... The blade arts in Japan, as opposed to South East Asia, and Western Fencing, were more resolute and concerned with perfecting one strike for the kill.
I do not want to pigeonhole all the arts spoken of, but... If one looks at the battlefield and the advent of the middle ages in Europe, one can see that fencers split into a couple of camps (not schools), on one hand were the crude users of the Bastard Sword, an ugly looking thing that served the purpose of closing distance and killing admirably, or the Renaissance perfected blades that were elegent, thin and long, and not particularly useful in combat.
At any rate, boxing took the lessons learned with the sword: It had the footwork that fencers needed to maintain distance and set up attacks and it had the grapple, the close quarters techniques utilized by practically minded individuals who would have been at home on the battle field.
One problem that became apparent was that in boxing one strikes hard and soft targets with the fist. If one looks at the way a lead was thrown, and the way the other blows developed before the modern techniques perfected by trainers during and after Dempsey, there is great emphasis on alignment, and postioning. Not all blows are even designed to necessarily be thrown at full strength, the lead was originally a KO blow that utilized the tip of the chin as the target. This action causes the brain to slam into the back of the skull on impact and...when done properly not a lot of power is always needed, it is more the placement of the blow.
Yet in a contest, a man would inevitably resort to the grapple, and to throwing punches with bad intentions. Even at the time of its origins already people in boxing were complaining about men who sparred with the gloves and had no impact to deliver on the blows. Dempsey became perhaps the biggest critique of this approach.
But to throw a blow as such, the hands were opened up to injury and this was the first concern, not to protect the face, or the opponent in any way. In other words, how could a man throw his blows, hit elbows, forheads, and other hard areas, and not break the hands up? Oscar Wilde famously wrote a story about this, a man who is a virtuosa violinist and a master fighter..alas he must choose because to fight will make him unable to play his violin.
The original idea then was not so much to make the hands hard, rather it was to protect the hands and this is very important to realize. What developed next is part of a whole history of quakery, hyperbole and magical claims: Elixers that contained Laudium and alcohol... Freud himself advocated the use of Cocaine as a tonic until he had a problem (he later took this back), etc. Out of this came the special institution of trainers who had magical ways of making the fighter's hands into stone!
Sullivan was said to use a solution of pickle brine, turpentine, and various other ingredients on his hands... the claims for these magical properties probably went up into Dempsey's time and beyond. The problem with these claims is that on the whole most of these formulations probably did little to nothing. What did save fighters was the work of such men as Jem Mace, Daniel Spinoza, Corbett, and many others who advocated scientific body placement and understanding of the hand placement when delivering a blow.
Much like tonics that cause youth, hand wrapping was a pseudoscience. This is something that has to be understood when there are sincere arguments for Dempsey for example having magically hardening tapes on his hands. The truth is that fighters might well put something hard in their wraps... Nothng magical about the preparations, no magical tapes. Tape can be wrapped tightly but generally the hand also needs space to move and clench and relax as well.
Much of what was used on hands might have been bone setting materials used at the time, again these help structurally, but given the hyperbole about claims made regarding hand treatments and given that even with the fantastic notion of hardening the fists, the real issue was to protect the hands, not to harden them... It can be hypothesized that fighters became aware of how to throw blows properly quickly and that wrappings became rigid enough, but not too much, to afford the wrist protection.
To this day one of the first lessons one learns in the martial arts and in fighting, is how to make a fist, though the closed hand is just one of many ways to hit.
what Dempsey, or any other fighter had in their hands is guesswork .... It would be like trying to go down to New Orleans and get Marie Laviou's recipe for a particular spell!! But we do know the atmosphere surrounding fighters and we know what was available to them.
Eventually it became apparent that gloves would allow fighters to hit harder when protecting the hands....this was not common knowledge at the time. This observation was perhaps why the trainers developed specific punches and combinations to train with. I hope this helps people understand this issue with some clarity and depth.
Originally hand protection in the form of "Mufflers" or gloves was introduced because students of the upper classes did not want markings on the face from matches. At this time what was called a boxing match was, as James Figg conceived, a form of self defense where all types of techniques were allowed.
Figg used a fencing vocabulary... Force being generated from the body transferring weight with, or without a step. Boxing at that time would have looked like a form of Chinese boxing, like hsin yi for example, with weight dropping, stepping and the hand gaining power through extending...much like a stab from a blade would depend on extension. Figg conceived of the corpus of techniques to be for self defense, and not for sport. BUT the only way to show the art of boxing off was to operate with bouts, in a ring, etc.
At this time there were forms of wrestling around used for self defense. If one looks at Welsh miners for example, the art of kicking the shins to settle disputes may well sound silly, but, in order to kick the other man's shins, one had to grapple into the correct position and turn the body, settle the weight properly. So there was knowledge of fighting, its just that to appeal to different classes, there had to be a way to perform the techniques in a manner that would not be offensive...No good looking Lord would want to lose his teeth in a match... LOL!
One of the first things to come out of Figg's practice was the observations regarding the hands and the affect impact had upon the hands. Again, there are a couple of methods available to human beings when we use the hands to hit: Universally we can hit with proper form, or we can condition the hands to take more force than normal to deliver a powerful blow. It is instructive that the most sophisticated hand conditioning methods have been utilized by China and these methods involve slowly, gradually working up to hitting targets that are increasingly hard...One starts with rice, iron or lead shot, eventually concrete. Japanese methods used by karateka who took Okinawan Kara-Te Went a different route, conditioning the two knuckles on the fist to withstand force on a relatively small area.
But neither the Karateka nor the Chinese Boxer had, as a goal, a sustained level of throwing punches. On the contrary one important difference culturally between the European boxer and other fighting men concerned with blunt force (not wrestlers), was the amount of punches to be delivered during an episode where the techniques were applied. This difference is not only in hitting... The blade arts in Japan, as opposed to South East Asia, and Western Fencing, were more resolute and concerned with perfecting one strike for the kill.
I do not want to pigeonhole all the arts spoken of, but... If one looks at the battlefield and the advent of the middle ages in Europe, one can see that fencers split into a couple of camps (not schools), on one hand were the crude users of the Bastard Sword, an ugly looking thing that served the purpose of closing distance and killing admirably, or the Renaissance perfected blades that were elegent, thin and long, and not particularly useful in combat.
At any rate, boxing took the lessons learned with the sword: It had the footwork that fencers needed to maintain distance and set up attacks and it had the grapple, the close quarters techniques utilized by practically minded individuals who would have been at home on the battle field.
One problem that became apparent was that in boxing one strikes hard and soft targets with the fist. If one looks at the way a lead was thrown, and the way the other blows developed before the modern techniques perfected by trainers during and after Dempsey, there is great emphasis on alignment, and postioning. Not all blows are even designed to necessarily be thrown at full strength, the lead was originally a KO blow that utilized the tip of the chin as the target. This action causes the brain to slam into the back of the skull on impact and...when done properly not a lot of power is always needed, it is more the placement of the blow.
Yet in a contest, a man would inevitably resort to the grapple, and to throwing punches with bad intentions. Even at the time of its origins already people in boxing were complaining about men who sparred with the gloves and had no impact to deliver on the blows. Dempsey became perhaps the biggest critique of this approach.
But to throw a blow as such, the hands were opened up to injury and this was the first concern, not to protect the face, or the opponent in any way. In other words, how could a man throw his blows, hit elbows, forheads, and other hard areas, and not break the hands up? Oscar Wilde famously wrote a story about this, a man who is a virtuosa violinist and a master fighter..alas he must choose because to fight will make him unable to play his violin.
The original idea then was not so much to make the hands hard, rather it was to protect the hands and this is very important to realize. What developed next is part of a whole history of quakery, hyperbole and magical claims: Elixers that contained Laudium and alcohol... Freud himself advocated the use of Cocaine as a tonic until he had a problem (he later took this back), etc. Out of this came the special institution of trainers who had magical ways of making the fighter's hands into stone!
Sullivan was said to use a solution of pickle brine, turpentine, and various other ingredients on his hands... the claims for these magical properties probably went up into Dempsey's time and beyond. The problem with these claims is that on the whole most of these formulations probably did little to nothing. What did save fighters was the work of such men as Jem Mace, Daniel Spinoza, Corbett, and many others who advocated scientific body placement and understanding of the hand placement when delivering a blow.
Much like tonics that cause youth, hand wrapping was a pseudoscience. This is something that has to be understood when there are sincere arguments for Dempsey for example having magically hardening tapes on his hands. The truth is that fighters might well put something hard in their wraps... Nothng magical about the preparations, no magical tapes. Tape can be wrapped tightly but generally the hand also needs space to move and clench and relax as well.
Much of what was used on hands might have been bone setting materials used at the time, again these help structurally, but given the hyperbole about claims made regarding hand treatments and given that even with the fantastic notion of hardening the fists, the real issue was to protect the hands, not to harden them... It can be hypothesized that fighters became aware of how to throw blows properly quickly and that wrappings became rigid enough, but not too much, to afford the wrist protection.
To this day one of the first lessons one learns in the martial arts and in fighting, is how to make a fist, though the closed hand is just one of many ways to hit.
what Dempsey, or any other fighter had in their hands is guesswork .... It would be like trying to go down to New Orleans and get Marie Laviou's recipe for a particular spell!! But we do know the atmosphere surrounding fighters and we know what was available to them.
Eventually it became apparent that gloves would allow fighters to hit harder when protecting the hands....this was not common knowledge at the time. This observation was perhaps why the trainers developed specific punches and combinations to train with. I hope this helps people understand this issue with some clarity and depth.
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