Monday, August 17, 2015

A Dichotomy of Human Punches

The science for this one is not too tough, but it does seem to catch a lot of people off guard, so I figured I would turn it into a short video:


It turns out that punches are not like projectiles. Your muscles make a trade-off between adding to the velocity of a strike or adding to the effective mass, and this trade-off gives us a dichotomy based on quantities that we usually think of as changing together in simple classical mechanics scenarios.

If you want to get into the details, it is an incredibly interesting and rich topic with a lot of unanswered questions.