RingoTo gap or not to gap. That is the question.
Whether it is nobler in the list to suffer the pain of defeat
or to take arms against a sea of Booties
and by targeting them, clap cheeks of thine bro.
One of the main perpetual discussions that float around the sport of steel fighting is the moral value in gapping opponents. It was just such a discussion that prompted me to put a survey out asking people to describe their injuries. The survey was meant to collect information on fighters age, years fighting, the types of injuries in 3 categories, competition in armor, training in armor, and training out of armor. It was also meant to provide some way of measuring the severity of the injury by collecting information on recovery process and length. If you did not participate originally and would like to now I’ve re-opened the form for submissions.
For the people no interested in the process of analysis, I’ll give a TL;DR of my personal take on the results. It confirmed for me that gapping was not currently one of the more significant threats of injury, though it does appear to be somewhat risky when gapping shoulders, biceps, wrists, and possibly calves. That could be due to the fact some members of the community do not target gaps and that if more were to start it would become the leading cause of injury, but I personally doubt that. The three most significant types of injuries I saw were hand or finger issues, concussions, and joint tears of varying degree. A number of injuries from strikes came from armor failure, but just as many seemed to come through armor. Most of the joint injuries occurred from falling, usually in a grappling situation. In general the worst injuries in times of recovery seemed to be joint tears and concussions, though there were some outliers. Shoulder injuries also had long recovery when led to a broken bone. If you want to look at the results yourself you can do that here.
Still with me? Cool lets get deeper into the specifics of the survey. Before getting to the meat of the results we should establish some limitations. First and foremost, the limited data set. This is primarily US steel fighters and limited to those exposed to my facebook posts. It has 57 responses which is a decent representation of the 500-1000 fighters there are probably in the US, but it is still not a large sample set. Next issue is that all the answers are self reports. This means there is both no way to verify the information and that a number of people did not fill out the survey as intended. A significant problem was that the instructions were not very clear nor were terms clearly defined, leading to a lot of confusion. The last significant issues I see is that there is no way of determining how often people are fighting or training, so we don’t have a very accurate way to determine rates of injuries. We can look at injuries per year of fighting, but without breaking out fighters that fight once a year from those that fight multiple times a month, its not a very meaningful stat.
Ok so by the numbers, the majority of respondents were between 21-30. The majority had also been fighting 3 years or less, with a significant plurality fighting 2 years or less. This skews the data slightly in that we should expect fewer injuries total with fewer years fighting and also fewer injuries in a younger crowd. I did not break injury type down by years fighting or age as that requires more data clean up than I felt like doing but would be interesting to see. One thing I wasn’t expecting but in retrospect makes total sense is that the longer people have been fighting the rate of injuries generally trends downward, though after 5 years it slants up. That tail end though may simply be due to so few respondents in those categories skewing the results.
When trying to compare armored practice to armored competition the data basically has to be thrown out. Multiple people referenced sparring as how they got injured in what was supposed to be the competition portion. Even with manual clean up to put those in the appropriate section there would be no way to tell if other people were referring to a practice or not. It also would not be very valuable without comparing the frequency of armored practice to armored competition. That said the in or out of armor does appear to mostly understood and I was initially surprised that there were almost half as many injuries out of kit as in; 62 to 127. However 30 of the out of armor injuries and 27 of the in armor come from just 2 people. Remove those and it seems more reasonable third of the injury rate. 32 to 100. Of those 32 only one injury was reported as keeping a person out for more than a month and that was an ACL tear.
Let’s talk the details of gapping now. Only 3 people explicitly mentioned injury from gap shots, one deep tissue damage, one a bare ass shot, and the other a “fracture” though the specific bone not mentioned. The deep tissue damage kept the person out for a week. The ass shot did no mention recovery. The fracture was ignored and the person got back to fighting a few weeks later. One of these is a significant injury but does not appear that major based on the speed at which the fighter returned and the other is a minor expected injury from fighting in my opinion. From these alone it would seem there is not much evidence to conclude gapping is dangerous or more dangerous than not gapping at least.
That said, there are a few others that might be gap shots. 2 broken wrists, a broken clavicle, a cut on a bicep, and a broken collarbone. The two shoulder injuries both seemed to take multiple months to heal and the bicep 2 months, indicating major injuries. The broken wrists were 6 weeks, so a serious injury but I would not say that debilitating. Approximately the same as a bad sprain that would happen in any sport. The take away here for me is that it is not gapping itself that is inherently dangerous, it is shots thrown at weak points, particularly if they are gaps. Joints such as shoulders and wrists in particular. The bicep cut is interesting as it might indicate danger to flesh shots, but at the moment I’m not calling it clearly that. It could be broken armor, a weapon not to spec, some anvil and hammer action, etc as opposed to the standard pressure cut from an impact. It does poke some holes in my argument that gapping is safe however.
Let’s look at the alternatives though. There were 10 concussions reported and while 1 person claimed to be fighting in a month and another took no time, most claimed more than 2 months, with a few in the 6 – 10week range. Of the dozen or more joint injuries from falling, many were more than 2 months with some lasting a year or more if ACL tears. Most of the injuries in falling seemed to involve multiple people falling together, so we can assume they were tangled in a grapple. There were also a number of cracked ribs or other torso injuries(which we can assume were through armor) lasting 2 – 8 months. With both brains and joints becoming more and more fragile with subsequent injuries I feel it is pretty clear that trying to use pain tolerance via gaps like the ass to either drop someone or cause them to move in a way makes a grapple easier to finish without being tangled, will result in fewer and less severe injuries than simply grappling or striking to the head(or perhaps even the body).
The last thing I want to look at is hands. There were 18 hand injuries and while many were quick to heal, less than a month, some took multiple months, up to 5 in one case. Of them, maybe half were reported as the gauntlet not working as designed (finger sticking out, too small, etc) but many seemed to be legal gauntlets with no issues besides they couldn’t protect the wearer. This to me suggests that if we were to have any sort of sportsman agreement it would be to not target hands or event weapons near hands. Most jobs require hands and while many also require not breaking an arm or leg, or even having a bad joint tear, nothing seems as fragile as hands and fingers. I would also like to see a higher safety standard for gauntlets though I do not have the engineering or medical background to know what requirements should be added.
To wrap up, falling badly is the most dangerous thing in the sport, so practice safe falls IN ARMOR TOO. And be careful in your grappling. Try to be aware of other peoples limbs when you fall. Next is hands and head. Protect them. Do not skimp on the protection. Strengthen your neck and try to rig up a system that keeps your helmet from rocking. Practice not blocking with your hands, catching shots on hafts and quillions. Also be wary of armor failures as that was another significant source of injury. Check your straps before and after every event and do preemptive maintenance(even if thats just adding a quick back up retention system like tape). When it comes to taking care of your opponent, its up to you what you consider sporting that’s within the bounds of the rules, but if you want to reduce the chance of injury I would say avoid targeting the head, shoulders, and wrists, and hands for strikes and do not suicide with them. Make throws clean and strikes to fleshy parts of the body whether covered in armor or not.
Thats it from me. See you in the lists.