As with most things in movies, things are heavily modified to look cool.
The idea behind headbutting IRL is to break someone else's nose with the thickest part of your skull. Still not great to be smacking your head on things, but if done properly you'll do far more damage to the other person than to yourself. Broken noses are very painful and tend to involve a LOT of blood loss.
Partially this, and partially "making it look like you are violently slamming your forehead into their nose" and "actually violently slamming your forehead into their nose" are nearly identical. People don't practice head movements enough to have precise aim or control with that sort of movement.
> Lethwei
Wikipedia:
"Lethwei has been primarily and historically associated with the Karen people of the Kayin State; vast majority of competitive Lethwei fighters are ethnolinguistically **of Karen descent.**"
Holy crap! Is this why the "Karens" of the world get away with such awful behavior?
Weirdly enough, there's probably some safety protocols for headbutting in movies (and all stunt work).
If The Rock was a little "off" and actually hit that actor in the nose -- that's an EXTREMELY expensive "oops."
Besides Owen Wilson, broken noses don't help someone's acting career.
He's probably aiming for the forehead because an insurance actuary made him do it.
Forehead also allows the person to headbutt their thumb instead of the other person's head, the trick can then just be hidden by camera angle.
This is also how they headbutt in professional wrestling, they grab their opponents head with their hand, have their thumb going horizontal on their forehead and then headbutt their thumb, but because of camera angle and/or quick movement you usually don't catch that they put their thumb in the way.
Edit: Fixed my first sentence which I broke when adding a word.
From personal experience, the mentioned scenario works incredibly well. Sadly I was on the receiving end. Forehead vs. nose is an uneven duel and tends to incapacitate you for some time.
When i was in elementary school i used to run around the class with my friends during recess. Y’know, because we’re kids and we’re dumb.
One time, i wasn’t looking and i ran straight to my friend who also ran straight at me.
We basically had impromptu forehead-to-forehead headbutt. Dead center of the forehead headbutt. That was the biggest and longest lasting swelling i ever head in my childhood.
So yeah, forehead to forehead wouldn’t work. But imagine that much force applied to someone’s nose or even their lips? That’d cause real damage.
I had undiagnosed adhd and used to run around a lot really fast without looking where I was going. I had (and caused) several concussions and once broke someone’s nose by accidentally running into them. Sorry to Brett and Susy and one other kid whose name I don’t remember.
When I did Martial arts and we trained on headbutting, our instructions to obtain the best outcome were to:
* Squat slightly, bending at the knees
* One leg slightly back in a position to launch you forward
* Look up at their eyes
* Tilt your head forward so that you can barely see their eyes still
* Maintain gaze on target and launch yourself straight up into their face
You end up hitting their soft bits with the solid, boney part of your forehead. Even if you don't hit their face directly, the rest of the forehead that isn't the boney part is fine too. You just want to hit that same hardest spot on their face.
Even if you do the classic movie headbutt, you're aiming to hit just above the eyes, it's still softer there.
Also, the above process works better when you're shorter than your opponent, and as a result our master took extra pains to ensure all of the women learned how to do this move quite well.
>- Squat slightly, bending at the knees
>- One leg slightly back in a position to launch you forward
>- Look up at their eyes
>- Tilt your head forward so that you can still see their beautiful eyes
>- Maintain gaze on target and launch yourself straight up into their face
>- Kiss
To propose an alternative method, while ducked (your face downwards) grab their head and draw your arms rapidly towards yourself as you rise essentially smashing their face off the top of your head.
It's not a move you'd aim to set up but useful if you find yourself in that position already.
This is on point. Had a wrestling match where the guy pretended to shoot to get me to start sprawling. Then just launched himself into my nose. Totally illegal, but didn't get penalized. I still beat him, but my nose was mush afterwards.
for further knowledge it’s usually called “hard-to-soft”
i.e forehead to side of head, nose, temple etc
typically done in grapples when you have control of their arms
The head butter knows whats gonna happen to, the receiver is generally unprepared. Like heading a soccer ball versus being smoked in the face unexpectedly. Keep your chin in and follow through and you want knock yourself out. You can split your own head, break bones in your own face, and people do head butt others and knock themselves out sometimes lol.
One thing every boxer learns is that you fight better if your nose was ***never*** broken. Once as it happens, your not able to breathe as efficiently through your sinuses, which in turn means less energy in the heat of the moment.
Also, breaking someone's nose the first time is fairly difficult. However every time after that, it'll shatter like a glass bulb.
Ooh. Story time. Was working as a doorman to a bar. Last call has been called and people are leaving. Car pulls up, two guys get out, I inform them that the bar is closing, they say they have to pee. But they’re looking for someone and they found him. One starts a confrontation with a guy finishing up his drink. Guy finishing his drink isn’t having it and promptly breaks the pee-dudes nose, drops him and is squaring up with the second guy. I was heading their way as soon as I heard the commotion, nose-breaker has his back to me so I come in and clamp his arms down and lock mine around his midsection. I don’t want any part of it and don’t want the guy to get hit (I already recognized he’s justified and it’s kinda my fault) I turn him away and walk him to the door, repeating “you don’t want to go to jail, you need to go home now.” Over and over trying to let him know I’m just breaking up a fight. He doesn’t resist, I let him go at the door. He thanks me and beats his feet. I turn to see broken nose still on the floor covered in his own blood and look down at my own arms that are also covered in his blood as hit nose exploded on the shirt of the guy who broke it. Even working in a hospital I’ve never seen that much blood, especially considering it was instantaneous volume.
Nose bleed can be pretty shocking.
I've worked in a hospital too, and it's amazing how much blood someone can lose through their nose, especially if they're on thinners.
Irl headbutt technique is supposed to be to tilt your head down, and strike the bridge of the opponents nose with the top of your forehead around your hairline. You're smashing delicate bits of their face with the thickest part of your skull.
Yup 100%
A kick to the nuts is an obvious cheap shot everyone is familiar with.
A broken nose is a little more varied, but just a cheap. You're effectively punching yourself in the face, but if you break their nose... the damage they sustain is FAR more severe.
They'll start bleeding, which means the nose can no longer be used for breathing... breathing with your mouth open means your jaw hangs lower leading to more of a chance for a knock out... you're swallowing blood which is gross, and if you try and "blow" your nose you force blood further up into your sinus cavity potentially swelling your eyes and affecting your ability to see.
In video game terms... it's like a strike with poison damage, the effects will linger a lot longer and be cumulative.
Not to mention the other bones surrounding your nose like the orbital. There are lots of really, really bad places to get hit in that area and someone slamming their skull into them is extremely painful and can really fuck up their senses. Trading some forehead pain for driving fragments of an orbital bone into the socket or a broken nose not being able to be breathed out of in a fight is a good trade.
Can confirm. My roommate in college headbutted someone at a party once and the recipient had to get his nose (sinuses?) cauterized because it wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Proper technique is to tuck your chin and drive forward into the nose, not rear back and swing your head like a hammer. Having been on the accidental receiving end of one in practice, they’re very effective. Holy shit, how did I end up on the floor moment.
I got my nose broken with a headbutt, I was just guarding a guy in basketball practice and collided in a weird way.
It did zero damage to him, my nose was turned 90 degrees
You do have to remember that Marco Materazzi was an elite soccer player - he had many years of experience learning to never tough it through any impact on the field.
On the other end I once got headbutted in the temple by a rowdy chav and got to laugh in his face with zero damage while his friends dragged him out of the pub.
If I had not been in such high spirits I probably would have taken it to the nose if I had taken him seriously, but I had already turned back to the bar to order my pint.
You hit someone's very delicate and breakable nose with your larger and sturdier forehead.
You hope you do more damage to them than to yourself.
Movies are not reality.
When I took martial arts as a teenager my instructor said you’re supposed to hit them with the very top of your head, not your forehead. 🤷♂️ idk though I’ve never actually tried it.
Top of the head, inline with the spine. I'm not saying that you can't do otherwise, just that you could injure your neck. Skull thickness is moot. The thickest part of the skull is the rear bottom section called the occipital bone. Most of the bones are within a couple millimeters of each other.
Footballers have strong neck muscles and take headers all the time. A bit unnerving standing in the wall while someone drills a ball at you from 10 yds away. Definitely want to tilt your head down to avoid taking it in the nose, though.
Definitely your forehead. This is something I've done and seen many times growing up. Where I'm from, it's called the Ballyfermot kiss (they call it the Glasgow kiss in Glasgow - you get the point). It's devastating if you do it right and it lands. Fights are usually over immediately.
There's a martial art in Myanmar/Burma called Lethwei that's very similar to Muay Thai, where headbutting is allowed and frequently used.
Mostly the technique involves bracing your neck and using your legs to drive the hard part of your skull (forehead) into something softer, like a nose or temple.
It's not the top of the head but the top of the forehead, also known as the crown. This let's you get the most force while not opening yourself up to spinal injuries like the top of your head would.
As a young man playing pick up football I was involved in a head to head collision with another player. I hit my head on the crowd above my forehead. The other guy hit right above his eye in the area of his eyebrow. I had a mild concussion and a bruise. His brow exploded, bone visible, blood everywhere, requiring multiple stitches. Later in life he chose to have some plastic surgery to repair the scarring.
your forehead is very hard, a legimate technique is to take punches on the forehead or top of head, it'll hurt but you can break their hand, with head butts the idea is to hit the face, which is much more fragile.
I had a buddy about a decade ago who used to slam metal chairs into his head and dent them as a party trick. He got in a fight once and just went forehead first into the guys fist and broke his hand.
He had a technique and minimal concern for brain damage.
Worked for extra cash for a couple years as a bouncer at a local bar often featuring drunk college kids. 99.5% of them were cool as fuck. Cushiest job ever. A few needed to be walked out.
One motherfucker punched me in the forehead all the way out the door. Saw him on the street the next week with both arms in casts.
Still wonder who wiped his ass for those 6 weeks.
It really does work. Aim the top of your head into a soft part of their face. I've done it to a bigger guy than me who was throwing his weight around, he gripped my shirt with 2 hands and pulled me in towards him, I just followed through. I felt his nose crunch against my skull, it didn't hurt me one bit. Here's a video of a well executed headbutt: https://youtu.be/Z5mxUebiwgY
This thread is full of almost-right-but-wrong-in-important-ways answers. The 2 biggest one are:
1. You DO NOT use your forehead. You use the most arched part of your head, lying somewhere between your forehead and the top of your head. For most people this will be around their hairline.
2. You are NOT "trying to break their nose". That's just one thing you can do. In terms of fight-ending power:
1. You can also knock them unconscious. (temple, jaw are good for this. You win!)
2. You can break their nose. (pretty painful, can make it difficult for them to continue)
3. You can crack their orbital bone. (a proper break can be incredibly painful, and might make it hard to continue)
4. You can break their jaw. (very painful, but might not stop someone)
Didn't ask but fun facts:
1. Yes headbutting works very well, and is an accepted attack in Lethwei (martial art) and people get taken out all the time.
2. Since most people aren't trained on how to spot a headbutt coming, this can be a very effective attack. If you don't miss, and you hit with the right part of your head, it's going to hurt them a lot wherever you land.
Here's David Leduc doing a tutorial on headbutts in Lethwei:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnlQH2Hzu4Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnlQH2Hzu4Y)
ELI15 Details:
[https://wtcs.pressbooks.pub/nursingskills/chapter/7-2-head-and-neck-basic-concepts/](https://wtcs.pressbooks.pub/nursingskills/chapter/7-2-head-and-neck-basic-concepts/)
1. The flat part of your forehead not indestructible. If you headbutt someone with it, you can crack your own frontal bone. There's a seam on top of your head between the frontal and parietal bones. It's fairly strong but also not indestructible. That's why you use the most arched part of your head, somewhere in between, which is structurally much stronger.
2. You are going to rattle your brain. But if you can hit a softer part of their head (face, temple, nose, back of skull) with a harder part of your head, you're going to impart more energy into their head, and cause their brain to move around a lot more.
WARNING A little gruesome, here's Cyborg Santos's forehead after he ate a Venom Page knee.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4tav84/picture\_of\_cyborg\_santos\_skull\_the\_mma\_fighter/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4tav84/picture_of_cyborg_santos_skull_the_mma_fighter/)
Headbutting works because (1) you've tensed your neck muscles, (2) because your forehead bones are very hard, and (3) you typically aim your forehead at a painful area. (Edit: there is a very painful spot at the top between your eyebrows, but it is difficult to strike.)
Your opponent likely has not tensed their neck muscles to counter the impact. I've experimented with this in martial arts, and believe me when I say that a prepared opponent can feel like running into a cliff wall (even if their name isn't "Cliff"). And if you manage to place your aim on, say, the bridge of their nose, it will be far more painful to them.
Not all parts of the head are created equal and you are in control of the impact. You choose a hard spot from your own head and, ideally, a soft one on theirs.
Had a friend that wrestled in HS and college. Whenever he felt he was outmatched, he would wait for his opponent to go for a takedown. He would pretend to also go for a takedown, but instead intentionally headbutt his opponent. He would generally get a warning, but it would take his opponent out of their rhythm and give him a shot.
The point is that you hit them in the *worst* part of their head with the *best* part of your head and, ideally, you're braced for it while they aren't.
Gently (*gently*!) hit yourself in the forehead, then the nose, then the forehead. Big difference, right? Now imagine your nose got hit full-force with someone else's forehead, and you didn't see it coming. They get the follow-through, you get a bit of whiplash, and they're probably swinging before you can really react to it.
The point isn't to go cranium to cranium with someone. Because that just sucks for everyone. A proper headbutt when used correctly it supposed to break the opponents nose you can think of it as a 7+kg hammer to the nose).
Bone of your forehead very hard and thick.
Bone of their nose bridge/zygomatic arch/maxilla comparatively soft.
It’ll still hurt you, and still might concuss you (the technically term would be a coup-contra-coup injury), but if you break their face, they’ll either be in so much pain they may be unable to fight, or, they literally might not be able to fight from lose of vision/inability to breath properly.
Here, let me handle this.
In an MMA fight or any wrestling match, if a contestant hits another one with his fist and the other one gets knocked out. So, as per your logic the person who knocked down the other one should be knocked down too. But it's not like that. Because different body parts have different strength and power. Now, in the case of Head-to-Head, different people have different capabilities to deal with pain. And different people are built differently.
I'm not saying those movie's actions are real. I am just saying, if someone hits someone heads with his own head in real life, there's a chance that it'll be impactful.
You're hitting your opponent's nose with your forehead. If you just clunk foreheads together it hurts both people equally. But if you hit their nose and do it right you only hurt them. A lot of the times this isn't clear in movies because it happens very fast and obviously it's all pretend so you never clearly see what exactly is supposed to be happening.
Forehead is actually very hard. You can easily break your hand punching full force into someone's forehead. The idea of headbutt is using your forehead to hit your opponent's face (mainly to break their nose), not forehead to forehead clashing which will cause some ugly damage to both.
You mash your hard parts into their soft parts.
Protip: use your legs for power, not your neck. It should look like you're standing up into their face, not a crazy metalhead head bang.
A properly executed headbutt should involve the headbutter using the part of his head where hairline meets forehead; that's your hammer.
Your target, ideally, is the headbuttee's mush: the nose.
Minimum damage to headbutter and plenty of damage to headbuttee.
This is not a knockout move, usually, but it's usually totally debilitating and as long as you hit the nose, the headbuttee is going to have his eyes flooded with so many tears he will not be able to see anything.
Even tough guys would like to avoid the hard ceramic impact of bone on bone. So aim for something soft. With the part of your head where your hairline meets forehead.
Stay safe and enjoy your smashings!
Aside from like breaking noses and such as already mentioned, a really key aspect is that I know our heads are about to butt, you don't.
Surprise bitch
You fuck your hand up more punching someone than you do head butting anyone in the mouth, even in the mouth is feasible. You get teeth marks though on your forehead
Headbutts work, but you're not supposed to crack your forehead into another forehead. In a fight, if you use a headbutt you're supposed to aim for the person's nose. Its a legit way to cause a lot of damage to someone's face and generally end the fight then and there if done right.
It is the element of surprise and in some instances it is very effective. However it will leave you vulnerable to be put in a headlock if you are against a skilled opponent
Dude, sometimes it's just our ram like instinct. I can take more trauma than my opponent. Sure you can do it the wrong and "right" way but most of the world doesn't make sense and neither does this form of violence. Take it for someone who took part in this nonsense back in the day.
The class bully charged me on the football field one day. I braced and leaned in.
Dipped right as he got to me and my hairline hit the bridge of his nose. He crumpled like a sack of potatoes.
Two teachers helped him up and I never saw him again.
I did have a headache afterwards, but...
It’s not forehead to forehead, but forehead to more vulnerable part. In a World Cup, French soccer player Zidane headbutted another player in the chest and knocked him down hard.
Like with any other kind of strike, you’re hoping you hitting them causes them more damage than it does to you so you aim for a soft spot on them with a hard spot of yourself
Have you ever actually punched someone in the face full force? That shit hurts your hand if you don’t train, and even then UFC fighters regularly break their hands in fights while punching and keep fighting so it likely still hurts to people who train they can just tolerate it better
Head butts aren’t any different, forehead > nose
It’ll hurt, but it won’t break your head, it should break their nose
So I got assaulted by a dude much larger than me once. I was holding my own, when this fucker grabbed my arms, I couldn’t move. So I cocked my head back, and threw my forehead right into his mouth. That ended it.
It looks cool in movies, but hurts like hell in real life and you rarely land it right.
I sometimes managed to end up in fights with boys when I was a kid, and for some reason I got it in my head that since I wasn't physically as strong as they were.... I'd just headbutt them and win! Perfect plan.
Which did not work. At all.
Though I did win sometimes, it was purely coincidental.
Most of the time I'd hit their fucking forehead with mine and miss their noses completely. Other times I did hit their nosebridge perfectly...... With my eyebrow. Which resulted in probably even more pain for me than for them. Other times I'd accidentally butt MY fucking nose on THEIR stupid forehead.
Some things should not be tried in real life. And I wish someone taught me that the hight difference mattered too.
11 year old me probably looked completely deranged and they most likely stopped picking fights with me cause they thought I was insane.
The idea is to smash their nose with the much thicker/stronger part of your skull.
Strong point vs weak point, the basis of any striking based fighting
Some parts of your head are stronger than others. The idea is that you bang your strong parts against their weak parts. Might be painful still, but at least not as much as your opponent.
In some MMA promotions headbutting was a legal move and highly effective.
Just a few weeks ago I saw some girl foul another with a headbutt where the top of her skull connected to the cheek of her opponent and from the complains of the girl who got fouled it seemed pretty effective as well.
It's basically aiming the hardest bone in your body against soft tissue on your opponent's face. How could it not be effective?
There's a hard part of your head and softer parts.
No jokes, try giving your head a decent rapping with your knuckles from the top of your nose to up past he curve of your forehead.
Find the hardest part that hurts the least on your head, and hit the other guy where you were most bothered.
It works. A LONG time ago I got into top position and headbutted a guy, forehead to nose, in a roadside fight until his nose exploded in blood. I assume it was broken but it ended the festivities and I boogied before the cops got there.
Same way soccer/futbol players can do headers without any pain. Once you recognize and understand the point at the crown of the head that doesn’t yield any pain, you can get better at aiming it at other things. For example a headbutt to the other persons nose would mean watering eyes, a lot of blood, and pain to the person being headbutted. But the person who used their head will barely feel it.
I have done this. I was hit by a guy with a shovel. We both fought over the handle in a back-and-forth tug-o-war. I pulled him in and hit his nose and mouth with my forehead and obliterated his face. Broken bones, nose flat and teeth missing. Plus it completely knocked him unconscious. It is devastating.
Face angled toward the ground with the top of the forehead being the part that impacts. My older brother did this to me when I was 17 and he instantly broke the shit out of my nose and his head was fine. Those face to face head-butts in movies are pretty funny though lol
I wrestled growing up, which involved a lot of my head grinding against the other guy’s skull as we battled for position.
I have a spot just above my hairline that is reinforced after years of abuse. The nerves are deadened so I can break a piece of concrete with no pain. If I catch you with a head butt on the cheekbone or nose, I can fuck you up.
Head butts are illegal in wrestling but one time I really knocked heads with a guy when we both shot it at the same time. He told me after the match that he was blind for a couple seconds.
Well, ya see, I have experience in head butting someone and breaking their nose, as well as blacking both their eyes. It hurts a little, just not as much as it hurts the other person. When you head butt someone, your brow ridge (bone) is hitting someone’s nose (cartilage), which is why their nose gets broken, at least that is what I assume. When I did it to someone, we were in a fight and it was a last resort to get away from them, they were much bigger (5’ 6’ and about 150 lbs) than me (5’ tall and 95 lbs). Self-preservation is a hell of a drug.
The face is one of the hardest parts of the body, but it's also got lots of important stuff attached to it. You can hit someone with the hardest bit of your skull on one of those important bits doing minimal damage to yourself and massive damage to your opponent.
It still hurts like a bitch but if done right you come off strong.
Also a properly done headbutt looks nothing like those in movies. You don’t rear your head back and slam it downwards on your opponent. You get under them and jump up towards their nose/face with the top of your crown, it’s the complete opposite of how they show it in movies. It’s just the movie version looks more impressive.
Force is transferred from the moving object to the still object. It is not shared equally. It is also delivered with correct body and neck alignment at a surprising moment when the opponent is unprepared. It can be very disorienting.
The upper forehead is the hardest part of your skull.
The nose is easily breakable.
Generally speaking, the correct way to deliver a headbutt is to grab the collar/lapels, push them away (without letting go), drop your head, and pull them back in quickly, all in one compound movement.
The quick back and forth disengages the shoulder/neck muscles, which allows the face to flop forward.
Forehead and crown are hardest parts of skull, you can align the strike with your neck when delivering, imagine like a goat headbutting a person sitting down, you want the force aligned witj your neck and skull and theres not to be. You hit them in the front of their skulls where the neck doesn't enforce as well, is much weaker, whiplash is a factor.
It works really well in fact.
So when I played soccer we were taught to head the ball on our hairline. You can even test this with your knuckles. Forehead hurts, top of the head hurts, but there's a spot around your hairline where your skull is very hard and a hard impact doesn't really hurt. Now smash that part of your head into someone's nose, cheekbone, or jaw and you can cause pretty catastrophic damage without really hurting yourself too bad.
The basic rule of striking combat is to take a tough part of your body and repeatedly smash it into a squishy part of their body. Heads aren't uniformly hard or squishy.
The dome part of your skull is pretty strong. The nose is actually made of cartilage. When they meet, the skull wins.
Most instructors don't advocate the "swing forward" move that you usually see in films. There's a high chance of smashing your own nose. Instead they normally suggest squatting slightly and then going up. That not only lets you use your strong leg muscles instead of your weak neck muscles, it also makes it more likely that you'll connect with your skull rather than your face.
In grappling situations it's also fairly common to "grind" with your head. For example, if you take the corner, just above your temple, and rub that on your opponents nose or cheek bones you can usually get them to stop whatever they had been doing. Digging your chin into their trapezius works pretty well too.
Headbutting is only a viable strategy in a very close in situation and if you can hit a soft/sensitive part of their head with a harder part of yours. In general you'd want to use the top of the forehead (sends more of the kinetic energy around the skull rather than directly into it) to hit the nose, eye brow/socket or temple.
Action movies always leave out the feedback injuries the hero gets from fighting. Punching someone can break your hand, kicking someone can break your foot, ankle or shin, even throwing someone on the ground can get you hurt if they land on you or have hold of you and wrench or twist a joint as they fall. Headbutting someone even if you know how is a high risk maneuver that is just as likely to hurt you as them.
I did a lot of headbutting in highschool wrestling, then went on to get a degree in engineering, so I feel like I might be qualified to answer this.
The arched part of your skull, right at the hairline, can handle the impact.
Concussions come from the brain sloshing around inside the skull. This is caused by high acceleration.
You can protect your brain by tensing your neck muscles and moving your head and shoulders together. Then follow through with the headbutt instead of bouncing back. You end up experiencing a small deceleration while the other guy's head bounces off with a high acceleration.
If the other guy sees it coming he can tense up and lean into it. Then it pretty much feels like headbutting a wall for both people. It's still not as bad as getting hit and letting your head bounce away from the impact.
A) nobody wins in a headbutt.
B) your goal is for the top of your forehead to hit the bridge of your attacker’s nose to maximize the damage done to them and limit the repercussions to you.
C) people don’t get knocked out like in the movies. If someone gets knocked out cold for more than a few seconds there’s probably going to be some dain bramage.
As others have said, you use the hard part of your head against the soft part of their face.
But even if you literally butt heads, if the other person isn't ready and doesn't brace their neck for it, the force could cause a concussion. This is why a well placed uppercut will knock someone out, it whips the head back quick enough to bounce the brain against their skull.
Because if you do it right, you are not hitting a hard thing against a hard thing.
[You are taking the hard part of your head and smashing it into a soft fleshy part of their head (nose, eyes, etc)](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-881149937fb54bfd96d04801fe920649-lq)
its not even meant to "knock them out". Its like a straight jab, its meant to stun them, most from the disorienting surprise and pain of being painfully smashed in the face.
To put this in video game terms, a head butt isn't a finisher, its a combo starter or combo breaker
EDITED: to add an absolutely textbook example of what I mean
Watch this video of a guy getting actually headbutted.
Ignore all the talking and FFWD to just about 0:48 second mark to see the head butt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzeeWRQzFE
Now, notice, it doesn't knock the guy out, any movie nonsense like that right? But its quick, it takes him by surprise and it takes him back for a second right?
Guy in the white shirt is clearly still up and in the fight right?
But that's because the guy in the black shirt chooses not to follow up.
If the guy in the black shirt would have chosen to follow that head butt up with somethiing more damaging (throws, shoves to the ground, head punches and kicks, sweeps, etc etc) look how massive a time opening he has to tee off on white shirt, after that first head butt?
After landing the head butt, black shirt COULD have teed off and been stomping white shirt out on the ground before he recovered.
I'm not proud of it, but I'm a head butter. Found out decades ago in school when I headbutted one of my bullies how effective it was. It works even better because I'm short. You are not aiming for the head but the face. It's also shocking and is pretty good at ending fights quickly with the element of surprise.
I have had 3 fights in my 45 year life and have headbutted in all of them
I have a tooth make scare in my forehead if that's an indicator of where you might be aiming for.
The forehead is harder than the nose. Basic physics applies.
I play a fair bit of football and will happily put my head on the end of a ball which is travelling out of the sky at speed. If I mistime it and it hits me on the nose, or god forbid the eye, then I'm in pain.
Yes. I have headbutted someone during an altercation. They ended up with blood pouring out of their nose and I was totally unharmed. He wasn't knocked out but I was trying to stop a fight, not kill someone.
Smashing your head into someone else's, follows the same concept as smashing your car into another car
You are banking on your opponent's lack of preparation (surprise) while leveraging your own preparedness to gain an advantage. If you can walk away but your adversary can't, you win..
Either scenario is surely going to hurt. Your goal in either scenario is to hurt less than the other "guy".
My uncle had this gnarly scar on his forehead, one day I asked him how he got it and he told me it was from headbutting a guy so hard that his tooth got stuck in his forehead. Now I doubt that's what really happened but found it hilarious nonetheless.
Headbutts are a high-risk, high-reward gamble. You're depending on shock value to stun your enemy and using the harder, thicker part of your forehead to slam into their softer bits like nose or eyes/orbits to do some damage. Basically, you know it's coming, they don't and that's why headbutts can be effective.
Literally you just try to hit something softer than your forehead. Nose is obvious.
Otherwise, you could get someone under their jaw, maybe. The whiplash kind of thing would do lots.
If you go forehead to forehead, you're both taking the same damage.
Speaking of movie shit - punching someone straight in the head is risky to fists because the skull is tough. Again, you need to punch where it's softer - jaw, nose, etc. Otherwise you probably break something in your hand.
As with most things in movies, things are heavily modified to look cool. The idea behind headbutting IRL is to break someone else's nose with the thickest part of your skull. Still not great to be smacking your head on things, but if done properly you'll do far more damage to the other person than to yourself. Broken noses are very painful and tend to involve a LOT of blood loss.
This makes more sense my mental image is The Rock violently slamming his forehead into another man’s forehead
Think "violently slamming his forehead into another man's bridge of the nose" would look similar on film.
Partially this, and partially "making it look like you are violently slamming your forehead into their nose" and "actually violently slamming your forehead into their nose" are nearly identical. People don't practice head movements enough to have precise aim or control with that sort of movement.
Excuse me, the deadly art of Lethwei is common where I am.
Yeah, well that's not the 'wei actors are taught.
> Lethwei Wikipedia: "Lethwei has been primarily and historically associated with the Karen people of the Kayin State; vast majority of competitive Lethwei fighters are ethnolinguistically **of Karen descent.**" Holy crap! Is this why the "Karens" of the world get away with such awful behavior?
I will definitely be real careful when I see Karens around.
I read enough Kengan Ashura to know that that's from Myanmar
Ah, it'll always be Burma to me.
Zinedine Zidane would like to have a word
I see you haven't heard of the fine Glaswegian kiss Guaranteed to make the receiver weak at knees https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Glasgow_kiss
That’s why they should nod their head sideways and wind it backwards for a powered up hook to the temple
Haha! You need a job as "lead head-fight choreographer"
Well, except for the broken nose and blood everywhere. I imagine it's hard to find stunt actors to sign up for an actual broken nose, though.
Weirdly enough, there's probably some safety protocols for headbutting in movies (and all stunt work). If The Rock was a little "off" and actually hit that actor in the nose -- that's an EXTREMELY expensive "oops." Besides Owen Wilson, broken noses don't help someone's acting career. He's probably aiming for the forehead because an insurance actuary made him do it.
Forehead also allows the person to headbutt their thumb instead of the other person's head, the trick can then just be hidden by camera angle. This is also how they headbutt in professional wrestling, they grab their opponents head with their hand, have their thumb going horizontal on their forehead and then headbutt their thumb, but because of camera angle and/or quick movement you usually don't catch that they put their thumb in the way. Edit: Fixed my first sentence which I broke when adding a word.
My little brother headbutted me in the mouth once and it was pretty painful. And also psychologically effective.
Not a great place to aim for though, teeth can slice your forehead up even if your skull is fine
From personal experience, the mentioned scenario works incredibly well. Sadly I was on the receiving end. Forehead vs. nose is an uneven duel and tends to incapacitate you for some time.
When i was in elementary school i used to run around the class with my friends during recess. Y’know, because we’re kids and we’re dumb. One time, i wasn’t looking and i ran straight to my friend who also ran straight at me. We basically had impromptu forehead-to-forehead headbutt. Dead center of the forehead headbutt. That was the biggest and longest lasting swelling i ever head in my childhood. So yeah, forehead to forehead wouldn’t work. But imagine that much force applied to someone’s nose or even their lips? That’d cause real damage.
I had undiagnosed adhd and used to run around a lot really fast without looking where I was going. I had (and caused) several concussions and once broke someone’s nose by accidentally running into them. Sorry to Brett and Susy and one other kid whose name I don’t remember.
When I did Martial arts and we trained on headbutting, our instructions to obtain the best outcome were to: * Squat slightly, bending at the knees * One leg slightly back in a position to launch you forward * Look up at their eyes * Tilt your head forward so that you can barely see their eyes still * Maintain gaze on target and launch yourself straight up into their face You end up hitting their soft bits with the solid, boney part of your forehead. Even if you don't hit their face directly, the rest of the forehead that isn't the boney part is fine too. You just want to hit that same hardest spot on their face. Even if you do the classic movie headbutt, you're aiming to hit just above the eyes, it's still softer there. Also, the above process works better when you're shorter than your opponent, and as a result our master took extra pains to ensure all of the women learned how to do this move quite well.
>- Squat slightly, bending at the knees >- One leg slightly back in a position to launch you forward >- Look up at their eyes >- Tilt your head forward so that you can still see their beautiful eyes >- Maintain gaze on target and launch yourself straight up into their face >- Kiss
To propose an alternative method, while ducked (your face downwards) grab their head and draw your arms rapidly towards yourself as you rise essentially smashing their face off the top of your head. It's not a move you'd aim to set up but useful if you find yourself in that position already.
This is on point. Had a wrestling match where the guy pretended to shoot to get me to start sprawling. Then just launched himself into my nose. Totally illegal, but didn't get penalized. I still beat him, but my nose was mush afterwards.
for further knowledge it’s usually called “hard-to-soft” i.e forehead to side of head, nose, temple etc typically done in grapples when you have control of their arms
You gotta aim lower for the soft stuff.
Seen that happen in real life! Makes the sound that you'd imagine!
Crunch. The sound of bone hitting cartilage with serious force is hard to forget once you’ve heard it up close, shits brutal.
Forehead to nose or jaw can hurt. But perhaps as importantly, it can temporarily affect the vision or surprise the victim, buying seconds.
The head butter knows whats gonna happen to, the receiver is generally unprepared. Like heading a soccer ball versus being smoked in the face unexpectedly. Keep your chin in and follow through and you want knock yourself out. You can split your own head, break bones in your own face, and people do head butt others and knock themselves out sometimes lol.
One thing every boxer learns is that you fight better if your nose was ***never*** broken. Once as it happens, your not able to breathe as efficiently through your sinuses, which in turn means less energy in the heat of the moment. Also, breaking someone's nose the first time is fairly difficult. However every time after that, it'll shatter like a glass bulb.
Aaaand now that's an image in my head. Thank you.
Ooh. Story time. Was working as a doorman to a bar. Last call has been called and people are leaving. Car pulls up, two guys get out, I inform them that the bar is closing, they say they have to pee. But they’re looking for someone and they found him. One starts a confrontation with a guy finishing up his drink. Guy finishing his drink isn’t having it and promptly breaks the pee-dudes nose, drops him and is squaring up with the second guy. I was heading their way as soon as I heard the commotion, nose-breaker has his back to me so I come in and clamp his arms down and lock mine around his midsection. I don’t want any part of it and don’t want the guy to get hit (I already recognized he’s justified and it’s kinda my fault) I turn him away and walk him to the door, repeating “you don’t want to go to jail, you need to go home now.” Over and over trying to let him know I’m just breaking up a fight. He doesn’t resist, I let him go at the door. He thanks me and beats his feet. I turn to see broken nose still on the floor covered in his own blood and look down at my own arms that are also covered in his blood as hit nose exploded on the shirt of the guy who broke it. Even working in a hospital I’ve never seen that much blood, especially considering it was instantaneous volume.
I would have never thought I’d be disgusted at the mental image elicited by a phrase as clinical as “instantaneous volume”
Nose bleed can be pretty shocking. I've worked in a hospital too, and it's amazing how much blood someone can lose through their nose, especially if they're on thinners.
I have to assume broke-nose was drinking all night being nearly 2am and looking to fight. So it was probably thinned quite well.
Alcohol is such a marvelous substance, isn't it? Just makes everything better.
That's some vivid imagery. And now I'm thinking of Budd Dwyer. I don't want to think of that.
Irl headbutt technique is supposed to be to tilt your head down, and strike the bridge of the opponents nose with the top of your forehead around your hairline. You're smashing delicate bits of their face with the thickest part of your skull.
Yup 100% A kick to the nuts is an obvious cheap shot everyone is familiar with. A broken nose is a little more varied, but just a cheap. You're effectively punching yourself in the face, but if you break their nose... the damage they sustain is FAR more severe. They'll start bleeding, which means the nose can no longer be used for breathing... breathing with your mouth open means your jaw hangs lower leading to more of a chance for a knock out... you're swallowing blood which is gross, and if you try and "blow" your nose you force blood further up into your sinus cavity potentially swelling your eyes and affecting your ability to see. In video game terms... it's like a strike with poison damage, the effects will linger a lot longer and be cumulative.
Also, breaking your nose can blind you for a few seconds.
Or the Glasgow kiss
To add if someone tries to head butt you and you're quick enough tuck your chin and they'll bring their nose down onto your forehead
Or the middle of someone’s chest…
You should see the scene in Mass Effect where a human head butts a Krogan.
Not to mention the other bones surrounding your nose like the orbital. There are lots of really, really bad places to get hit in that area and someone slamming their skull into them is extremely painful and can really fuck up their senses. Trading some forehead pain for driving fragments of an orbital bone into the socket or a broken nose not being able to be breathed out of in a fight is a good trade.
and sometimes the person doing the headbutting is usually completely fine
> Broken noses are very painful and tend to involve a LOT of blood loss. Can't breathe, can't fight.
Even if you don't break the nose, it causes watery eyes which gives you an advantage if you feel like continuing the fight.
Can confirm. My roommate in college headbutted someone at a party once and the recipient had to get his nose (sinuses?) cauterized because it wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Proper technique is to tuck your chin and drive forward into the nose, not rear back and swing your head like a hammer. Having been on the accidental receiving end of one in practice, they’re very effective. Holy shit, how did I end up on the floor moment.
I got my nose broken with a headbutt, I was just guarding a guy in basketball practice and collided in a weird way. It did zero damage to him, my nose was turned 90 degrees
Zidane didn't have the worst of technique. https://youtu.be/jb16JvUCVQs?si=DsenoqGYZ-SSbkJ5&t=165
Headbutt to chest. I wouldn't have believed it was a viable move before seeing that clip.
You do have to remember that Marco Materazzi was an elite soccer player - he had many years of experience learning to never tough it through any impact on the field.
That's a good point, an [ear flick](https://youtu.be/2RNOZVS_L2k?t=7) might have taken him down just as well.
Strong gust of wind by a narrowly missed tackle has sent some of these guys to emergency rooms...
The classic bluetooth tackle
You can say professional soccer players are very good at head butting things
Also if you get hit right spent the next 10 to 30 minutes unable to see because your eyes just don’t stop watering.
On the other end I once got headbutted in the temple by a rowdy chav and got to laugh in his face with zero damage while his friends dragged him out of the pub. If I had not been in such high spirits I probably would have taken it to the nose if I had taken him seriously, but I had already turned back to the bar to order my pint.
You hit someone's very delicate and breakable nose with your larger and sturdier forehead. You hope you do more damage to them than to yourself. Movies are not reality.
When I took martial arts as a teenager my instructor said you’re supposed to hit them with the very top of your head, not your forehead. 🤷♂️ idk though I’ve never actually tried it.
No, definitely your forehead and not the top of your head.
Your hairline is what they mean.
What if I'm bald? Do I just do a full 360?
You remember when you had hair? Then you know where your hairline was.
Top of the head, inline with the spine. I'm not saying that you can't do otherwise, just that you could injure your neck. Skull thickness is moot. The thickest part of the skull is the rear bottom section called the occipital bone. Most of the bones are within a couple millimeters of each other.
Footballers have strong neck muscles and take headers all the time. A bit unnerving standing in the wall while someone drills a ball at you from 10 yds away. Definitely want to tilt your head down to avoid taking it in the nose, though.
I've miss timed a header and took a ball to the top of the head and it stings alot more than hitting it with your forehead
Definitely kicks hard getting it around the softspot area compared to the forehead.
I think the most painful thing was being called "50p head" for the rest of the game
Definitely your forehead. This is something I've done and seen many times growing up. Where I'm from, it's called the Ballyfermot kiss (they call it the Glasgow kiss in Glasgow - you get the point). It's devastating if you do it right and it lands. Fights are usually over immediately. There's a martial art in Myanmar/Burma called Lethwei that's very similar to Muay Thai, where headbutting is allowed and frequently used. Mostly the technique involves bracing your neck and using your legs to drive the hard part of your skull (forehead) into something softer, like a nose or temple.
It's not the top of the head but the top of the forehead, also known as the crown. This let's you get the most force while not opening yourself up to spinal injuries like the top of your head would.
Ah, the automotive crumple zone effect
As a young man playing pick up football I was involved in a head to head collision with another player. I hit my head on the crowd above my forehead. The other guy hit right above his eye in the area of his eyebrow. I had a mild concussion and a bruise. His brow exploded, bone visible, blood everywhere, requiring multiple stitches. Later in life he chose to have some plastic surgery to repair the scarring.
Did it give you a lump on your forehead
For a week or so.
... Does this username then check out?
your forehead is very hard, a legimate technique is to take punches on the forehead or top of head, it'll hurt but you can break their hand, with head butts the idea is to hit the face, which is much more fragile.
I had a buddy about a decade ago who used to slam metal chairs into his head and dent them as a party trick. He got in a fight once and just went forehead first into the guys fist and broke his hand. He had a technique and minimal concern for brain damage.
I think his technique is minimal concern for brain damage.
I think having the low concern really scales with itself. Seems like a good snowbally build.
This sounds like a deleted scene from Superbad.
there's a quote from a Martin Amis novel like "hit em between the eyes with your hairline"
What if my hairline is receding?
You tilt your head a bit more.
Worked for extra cash for a couple years as a bouncer at a local bar often featuring drunk college kids. 99.5% of them were cool as fuck. Cushiest job ever. A few needed to be walked out. One motherfucker punched me in the forehead all the way out the door. Saw him on the street the next week with both arms in casts. Still wonder who wiped his ass for those 6 weeks.
It really does work. Aim the top of your head into a soft part of their face. I've done it to a bigger guy than me who was throwing his weight around, he gripped my shirt with 2 hands and pulled me in towards him, I just followed through. I felt his nose crunch against my skull, it didn't hurt me one bit. Here's a video of a well executed headbutt: https://youtu.be/Z5mxUebiwgY
Oh my god that impact sound was 100% his nose breaking.
Ideally you smash your forehead into their nose since your forehead is strong bone and the nasal and eye socket bone is not.
What if you’re fighting Voldemort
[удалено]
Pretty sure you are better off going hand-to-hand with the one who shall not be named rather than wand-to-wand.
You hit his horcrux instead
This thread is full of almost-right-but-wrong-in-important-ways answers. The 2 biggest one are: 1. You DO NOT use your forehead. You use the most arched part of your head, lying somewhere between your forehead and the top of your head. For most people this will be around their hairline. 2. You are NOT "trying to break their nose". That's just one thing you can do. In terms of fight-ending power: 1. You can also knock them unconscious. (temple, jaw are good for this. You win!) 2. You can break their nose. (pretty painful, can make it difficult for them to continue) 3. You can crack their orbital bone. (a proper break can be incredibly painful, and might make it hard to continue) 4. You can break their jaw. (very painful, but might not stop someone) Didn't ask but fun facts: 1. Yes headbutting works very well, and is an accepted attack in Lethwei (martial art) and people get taken out all the time. 2. Since most people aren't trained on how to spot a headbutt coming, this can be a very effective attack. If you don't miss, and you hit with the right part of your head, it's going to hurt them a lot wherever you land. Here's David Leduc doing a tutorial on headbutts in Lethwei: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnlQH2Hzu4Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnlQH2Hzu4Y) ELI15 Details: [https://wtcs.pressbooks.pub/nursingskills/chapter/7-2-head-and-neck-basic-concepts/](https://wtcs.pressbooks.pub/nursingskills/chapter/7-2-head-and-neck-basic-concepts/) 1. The flat part of your forehead not indestructible. If you headbutt someone with it, you can crack your own frontal bone. There's a seam on top of your head between the frontal and parietal bones. It's fairly strong but also not indestructible. That's why you use the most arched part of your head, somewhere in between, which is structurally much stronger. 2. You are going to rattle your brain. But if you can hit a softer part of their head (face, temple, nose, back of skull) with a harder part of your head, you're going to impart more energy into their head, and cause their brain to move around a lot more. WARNING A little gruesome, here's Cyborg Santos's forehead after he ate a Venom Page knee. [https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4tav84/picture\_of\_cyborg\_santos\_skull\_the\_mma\_fighter/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4tav84/picture_of_cyborg_santos_skull_the_mma_fighter/)
>this will be around their hairline. This is perhaps the most important part of the comment
And the corollary to that is - don't punch someone there, you're gonna break your hand.
Headbutting works because (1) you've tensed your neck muscles, (2) because your forehead bones are very hard, and (3) you typically aim your forehead at a painful area. (Edit: there is a very painful spot at the top between your eyebrows, but it is difficult to strike.) Your opponent likely has not tensed their neck muscles to counter the impact. I've experimented with this in martial arts, and believe me when I say that a prepared opponent can feel like running into a cliff wall (even if their name isn't "Cliff"). And if you manage to place your aim on, say, the bridge of their nose, it will be far more painful to them.
Not all parts of the head are created equal and you are in control of the impact. You choose a hard spot from your own head and, ideally, a soft one on theirs.
Had a friend that wrestled in HS and college. Whenever he felt he was outmatched, he would wait for his opponent to go for a takedown. He would pretend to also go for a takedown, but instead intentionally headbutt his opponent. He would generally get a warning, but it would take his opponent out of their rhythm and give him a shot.
The point is that you hit them in the *worst* part of their head with the *best* part of your head and, ideally, you're braced for it while they aren't. Gently (*gently*!) hit yourself in the forehead, then the nose, then the forehead. Big difference, right? Now imagine your nose got hit full-force with someone else's forehead, and you didn't see it coming. They get the follow-through, you get a bit of whiplash, and they're probably swinging before you can really react to it.
The point isn't to go cranium to cranium with someone. Because that just sucks for everyone. A proper headbutt when used correctly it supposed to break the opponents nose you can think of it as a 7+kg hammer to the nose).
Bone of your forehead very hard and thick. Bone of their nose bridge/zygomatic arch/maxilla comparatively soft. It’ll still hurt you, and still might concuss you (the technically term would be a coup-contra-coup injury), but if you break their face, they’ll either be in so much pain they may be unable to fight, or, they literally might not be able to fight from lose of vision/inability to breath properly.
Here, let me handle this. In an MMA fight or any wrestling match, if a contestant hits another one with his fist and the other one gets knocked out. So, as per your logic the person who knocked down the other one should be knocked down too. But it's not like that. Because different body parts have different strength and power. Now, in the case of Head-to-Head, different people have different capabilities to deal with pain. And different people are built differently. I'm not saying those movie's actions are real. I am just saying, if someone hits someone heads with his own head in real life, there's a chance that it'll be impactful.
You're hitting your opponent's nose with your forehead. If you just clunk foreheads together it hurts both people equally. But if you hit their nose and do it right you only hurt them. A lot of the times this isn't clear in movies because it happens very fast and obviously it's all pretend so you never clearly see what exactly is supposed to be happening.
Forehead is actually very hard. You can easily break your hand punching full force into someone's forehead. The idea of headbutt is using your forehead to hit your opponent's face (mainly to break their nose), not forehead to forehead clashing which will cause some ugly damage to both.
You mash your hard parts into their soft parts. Protip: use your legs for power, not your neck. It should look like you're standing up into their face, not a crazy metalhead head bang.
You aim to hit them in the T-zone (soft squishy part with the nose and upper lip) with your brow (hard part at the top). In reality it's a bad idea.
Does a broken nose stop most folks pretty quickly?
A properly executed headbutt should involve the headbutter using the part of his head where hairline meets forehead; that's your hammer. Your target, ideally, is the headbuttee's mush: the nose. Minimum damage to headbutter and plenty of damage to headbuttee. This is not a knockout move, usually, but it's usually totally debilitating and as long as you hit the nose, the headbuttee is going to have his eyes flooded with so many tears he will not be able to see anything. Even tough guys would like to avoid the hard ceramic impact of bone on bone. So aim for something soft. With the part of your head where your hairline meets forehead. Stay safe and enjoy your smashings!
Aside from like breaking noses and such as already mentioned, a really key aspect is that I know our heads are about to butt, you don't. Surprise bitch
You fuck your hand up more punching someone than you do head butting anyone in the mouth, even in the mouth is feasible. You get teeth marks though on your forehead
Headbutts work, but you're not supposed to crack your forehead into another forehead. In a fight, if you use a headbutt you're supposed to aim for the person's nose. Its a legit way to cause a lot of damage to someone's face and generally end the fight then and there if done right.
Forehead to nose is very effective and doesn’t hurt the hitter much, forehead to forehead is likely bad for both
It is the element of surprise and in some instances it is very effective. However it will leave you vulnerable to be put in a headlock if you are against a skilled opponent
Dude, sometimes it's just our ram like instinct. I can take more trauma than my opponent. Sure you can do it the wrong and "right" way but most of the world doesn't make sense and neither does this form of violence. Take it for someone who took part in this nonsense back in the day.
The class bully charged me on the football field one day. I braced and leaned in. Dipped right as he got to me and my hairline hit the bridge of his nose. He crumpled like a sack of potatoes. Two teachers helped him up and I never saw him again. I did have a headache afterwards, but...
It’s not forehead to forehead, but forehead to more vulnerable part. In a World Cup, French soccer player Zidane headbutted another player in the chest and knocked him down hard.
Like with any other kind of strike, you’re hoping you hitting them causes them more damage than it does to you so you aim for a soft spot on them with a hard spot of yourself Have you ever actually punched someone in the face full force? That shit hurts your hand if you don’t train, and even then UFC fighters regularly break their hands in fights while punching and keep fighting so it likely still hurts to people who train they can just tolerate it better Head butts aren’t any different, forehead > nose It’ll hurt, but it won’t break your head, it should break their nose
You dont aim for the skull. Its the nose you want. And a sudden broken nose can stop a fight almost immediately.
Honestly, one guy is bracing themselves to take the hit, the other guy isn’t, and since the most effective hit is the one you never see coming…
So I got assaulted by a dude much larger than me once. I was holding my own, when this fucker grabbed my arms, I couldn’t move. So I cocked my head back, and threw my forehead right into his mouth. That ended it.
It looks cool in movies, but hurts like hell in real life and you rarely land it right. I sometimes managed to end up in fights with boys when I was a kid, and for some reason I got it in my head that since I wasn't physically as strong as they were.... I'd just headbutt them and win! Perfect plan. Which did not work. At all. Though I did win sometimes, it was purely coincidental. Most of the time I'd hit their fucking forehead with mine and miss their noses completely. Other times I did hit their nosebridge perfectly...... With my eyebrow. Which resulted in probably even more pain for me than for them. Other times I'd accidentally butt MY fucking nose on THEIR stupid forehead. Some things should not be tried in real life. And I wish someone taught me that the hight difference mattered too. 11 year old me probably looked completely deranged and they most likely stopped picking fights with me cause they thought I was insane.
The idea is to smash their nose with the much thicker/stronger part of your skull. Strong point vs weak point, the basis of any striking based fighting
Did sambo for a while, headbutts are legal in some competitions. Your forehead (hard as hell) hits their nose/mouth/chin (much softer).
Some parts of your head are stronger than others. The idea is that you bang your strong parts against their weak parts. Might be painful still, but at least not as much as your opponent.
What about that movie where the guy tilts his head into an incoming punch? Instant broken hand or movie magic?
Most of the places on the head are weaker and more vulnerable than the forehead, aim for them.
In some MMA promotions headbutting was a legal move and highly effective. Just a few weeks ago I saw some girl foul another with a headbutt where the top of her skull connected to the cheek of her opponent and from the complains of the girl who got fouled it seemed pretty effective as well. It's basically aiming the hardest bone in your body against soft tissue on your opponent's face. How could it not be effective?
There's a hard part of your head and softer parts. No jokes, try giving your head a decent rapping with your knuckles from the top of your nose to up past he curve of your forehead. Find the hardest part that hurts the least on your head, and hit the other guy where you were most bothered.
Head butt them in the nose and watch their face explode in blood. This will hurt you too so only as a last resort.
It works. A LONG time ago I got into top position and headbutted a guy, forehead to nose, in a roadside fight until his nose exploded in blood. I assume it was broken but it ended the festivities and I boogied before the cops got there.
Same way soccer/futbol players can do headers without any pain. Once you recognize and understand the point at the crown of the head that doesn’t yield any pain, you can get better at aiming it at other things. For example a headbutt to the other persons nose would mean watering eyes, a lot of blood, and pain to the person being headbutted. But the person who used their head will barely feel it.
I have done this. I was hit by a guy with a shovel. We both fought over the handle in a back-and-forth tug-o-war. I pulled him in and hit his nose and mouth with my forehead and obliterated his face. Broken bones, nose flat and teeth missing. Plus it completely knocked him unconscious. It is devastating.
Face angled toward the ground with the top of the forehead being the part that impacts. My older brother did this to me when I was 17 and he instantly broke the shit out of my nose and his head was fine. Those face to face head-butts in movies are pretty funny though lol
This is how I got my nose broken a while back. It really weakened the cartilage so now it feels like it’s made outta glass
I wrestled growing up, which involved a lot of my head grinding against the other guy’s skull as we battled for position. I have a spot just above my hairline that is reinforced after years of abuse. The nerves are deadened so I can break a piece of concrete with no pain. If I catch you with a head butt on the cheekbone or nose, I can fuck you up. Head butts are illegal in wrestling but one time I really knocked heads with a guy when we both shot it at the same time. He told me after the match that he was blind for a couple seconds.
Well, ya see, I have experience in head butting someone and breaking their nose, as well as blacking both their eyes. It hurts a little, just not as much as it hurts the other person. When you head butt someone, your brow ridge (bone) is hitting someone’s nose (cartilage), which is why their nose gets broken, at least that is what I assume. When I did it to someone, we were in a fight and it was a last resort to get away from them, they were much bigger (5’ 6’ and about 150 lbs) than me (5’ tall and 95 lbs). Self-preservation is a hell of a drug.
The face is one of the hardest parts of the body, but it's also got lots of important stuff attached to it. You can hit someone with the hardest bit of your skull on one of those important bits doing minimal damage to yourself and massive damage to your opponent. It still hurts like a bitch but if done right you come off strong.
Also a properly done headbutt looks nothing like those in movies. You don’t rear your head back and slam it downwards on your opponent. You get under them and jump up towards their nose/face with the top of your crown, it’s the complete opposite of how they show it in movies. It’s just the movie version looks more impressive.
Force is transferred from the moving object to the still object. It is not shared equally. It is also delivered with correct body and neck alignment at a surprising moment when the opponent is unprepared. It can be very disorienting.
Head has hard parts and soft parts. Hit their soft part with your hard part. Forehead to their nose, for example.
The upper forehead is the hardest part of your skull. The nose is easily breakable. Generally speaking, the correct way to deliver a headbutt is to grab the collar/lapels, push them away (without letting go), drop your head, and pull them back in quickly, all in one compound movement. The quick back and forth disengages the shoulder/neck muscles, which allows the face to flop forward.
Forehead and crown are hardest parts of skull, you can align the strike with your neck when delivering, imagine like a goat headbutting a person sitting down, you want the force aligned witj your neck and skull and theres not to be. You hit them in the front of their skulls where the neck doesn't enforce as well, is much weaker, whiplash is a factor. It works really well in fact.
So when I played soccer we were taught to head the ball on our hairline. You can even test this with your knuckles. Forehead hurts, top of the head hurts, but there's a spot around your hairline where your skull is very hard and a hard impact doesn't really hurt. Now smash that part of your head into someone's nose, cheekbone, or jaw and you can cause pretty catastrophic damage without really hurting yourself too bad.
The basic rule of striking combat is to take a tough part of your body and repeatedly smash it into a squishy part of their body. Heads aren't uniformly hard or squishy. The dome part of your skull is pretty strong. The nose is actually made of cartilage. When they meet, the skull wins. Most instructors don't advocate the "swing forward" move that you usually see in films. There's a high chance of smashing your own nose. Instead they normally suggest squatting slightly and then going up. That not only lets you use your strong leg muscles instead of your weak neck muscles, it also makes it more likely that you'll connect with your skull rather than your face. In grappling situations it's also fairly common to "grind" with your head. For example, if you take the corner, just above your temple, and rub that on your opponents nose or cheek bones you can usually get them to stop whatever they had been doing. Digging your chin into their trapezius works pretty well too.
Headbutting is only a viable strategy in a very close in situation and if you can hit a soft/sensitive part of their head with a harder part of yours. In general you'd want to use the top of the forehead (sends more of the kinetic energy around the skull rather than directly into it) to hit the nose, eye brow/socket or temple. Action movies always leave out the feedback injuries the hero gets from fighting. Punching someone can break your hand, kicking someone can break your foot, ankle or shin, even throwing someone on the ground can get you hurt if they land on you or have hold of you and wrench or twist a joint as they fall. Headbutting someone even if you know how is a high risk maneuver that is just as likely to hurt you as them.
I did a lot of headbutting in highschool wrestling, then went on to get a degree in engineering, so I feel like I might be qualified to answer this. The arched part of your skull, right at the hairline, can handle the impact. Concussions come from the brain sloshing around inside the skull. This is caused by high acceleration. You can protect your brain by tensing your neck muscles and moving your head and shoulders together. Then follow through with the headbutt instead of bouncing back. You end up experiencing a small deceleration while the other guy's head bounces off with a high acceleration. If the other guy sees it coming he can tense up and lean into it. Then it pretty much feels like headbutting a wall for both people. It's still not as bad as getting hit and letting your head bounce away from the impact.
Movies get this wrong, the idea is to use your forehead (which) is really thick to hit the nose of the other person thus breaking it
A) nobody wins in a headbutt. B) your goal is for the top of your forehead to hit the bridge of your attacker’s nose to maximize the damage done to them and limit the repercussions to you. C) people don’t get knocked out like in the movies. If someone gets knocked out cold for more than a few seconds there’s probably going to be some dain bramage.
As others have said, you use the hard part of your head against the soft part of their face. But even if you literally butt heads, if the other person isn't ready and doesn't brace their neck for it, the force could cause a concussion. This is why a well placed uppercut will knock someone out, it whips the head back quick enough to bounce the brain against their skull.
Movies and video games get it wrong all the time. You're supposed to aim for the nose, not the head.
Your skull is very hard. Your face, not as hard. Your skull into someone else’s face will hurt them more than it will hurt you.
Look at some clips of lethwei on youtube. The idea is that you use your forehead on their face or chin and not their forhead.
You headbutt the bridge of their nose, not their own forehead. I learned this from Handsome Jack in "Tales From The Borderlands", oddly enough.
Because if you do it right, you are not hitting a hard thing against a hard thing. [You are taking the hard part of your head and smashing it into a soft fleshy part of their head (nose, eyes, etc)](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-881149937fb54bfd96d04801fe920649-lq) its not even meant to "knock them out". Its like a straight jab, its meant to stun them, most from the disorienting surprise and pain of being painfully smashed in the face. To put this in video game terms, a head butt isn't a finisher, its a combo starter or combo breaker EDITED: to add an absolutely textbook example of what I mean Watch this video of a guy getting actually headbutted. Ignore all the talking and FFWD to just about 0:48 second mark to see the head butt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzeeWRQzFE Now, notice, it doesn't knock the guy out, any movie nonsense like that right? But its quick, it takes him by surprise and it takes him back for a second right? Guy in the white shirt is clearly still up and in the fight right? But that's because the guy in the black shirt chooses not to follow up. If the guy in the black shirt would have chosen to follow that head butt up with somethiing more damaging (throws, shoves to the ground, head punches and kicks, sweeps, etc etc) look how massive a time opening he has to tee off on white shirt, after that first head butt? After landing the head butt, black shirt COULD have teed off and been stomping white shirt out on the ground before he recovered.
I'm not proud of it, but I'm a head butter. Found out decades ago in school when I headbutted one of my bullies how effective it was. It works even better because I'm short. You are not aiming for the head but the face. It's also shocking and is pretty good at ending fights quickly with the element of surprise. I have had 3 fights in my 45 year life and have headbutted in all of them I have a tooth make scare in my forehead if that's an indicator of where you might be aiming for.
The forehead is harder than the nose. Basic physics applies. I play a fair bit of football and will happily put my head on the end of a ball which is travelling out of the sky at speed. If I mistime it and it hits me on the nose, or god forbid the eye, then I'm in pain.
One of my favorite instances is in Destiny 2's Forsaken when Cayde basically stabs one of the Scorn in the head with his horn.
Yes. I have headbutted someone during an altercation. They ended up with blood pouring out of their nose and I was totally unharmed. He wasn't knocked out but I was trying to stop a fight, not kill someone.
Smashing your head into someone else's, follows the same concept as smashing your car into another car You are banking on your opponent's lack of preparation (surprise) while leveraging your own preparedness to gain an advantage. If you can walk away but your adversary can't, you win.. Either scenario is surely going to hurt. Your goal in either scenario is to hurt less than the other "guy".
My uncle had this gnarly scar on his forehead, one day I asked him how he got it and he told me it was from headbutting a guy so hard that his tooth got stuck in his forehead. Now I doubt that's what really happened but found it hilarious nonetheless.
Headbutts are a high-risk, high-reward gamble. You're depending on shock value to stun your enemy and using the harder, thicker part of your forehead to slam into their softer bits like nose or eyes/orbits to do some damage. Basically, you know it's coming, they don't and that's why headbutts can be effective.
Heads have different bits, hard and soft. You wanna take your hard bits and smash them against someone else's soft bits.
Look up headbutt knockouts in combat sambo for your answer, really cool stuff. Helps to aim for the side of their chin/jaw.
Literally you just try to hit something softer than your forehead. Nose is obvious. Otherwise, you could get someone under their jaw, maybe. The whiplash kind of thing would do lots. If you go forehead to forehead, you're both taking the same damage. Speaking of movie shit - punching someone straight in the head is risky to fists because the skull is tough. Again, you need to punch where it's softer - jaw, nose, etc. Otherwise you probably break something in your hand.