Has punching power improved during history?

Most agree boxing techniques have improved after early 1900s. Some say their peak was around 50s-60s whereas others see the techniques of 70s and 80s being the highest level of the sport. Very few consider this generation as the best.

What about punching power? Some points to consider:

# It is impossible to tell from TV or even in live audience who hits hard. You can easily compare the two boxers, but not different fights. Even telling who has the best technique can be misleading (Froch, Ali, Vitaly etc) but about power it is all guessing game.

# Production of explosive power has dramatically developed in other sports. That is because of more knowledge, better nutrition and better drugs.

# Punching power is about technique too, but the people who can teach the best defensive skills are not necessarily the same who can teach best punching skills.

So, is it POSSIBLE that fighters of the 90s hit generally harder than the fighters of the 1970s, or the other way around?

 

Knockout/stoppage criteria has also evolved, adding to the difficulty.

 

I would assume the guys that fought in the 40’s and 50’s with that sideways karate stance were, on average, considerably harder punchers than today. The whole idea was to be a smaller target and generate big power by rotating your body so every punch could be cocked back.

If there were any real difference in power we’d see a lot more KO’s and ring deaths now because you can’t train a guy to get hit and not get knocked out.

 

Good thread.
Also in addition to these replies, surely the composition of boxing gloves over the last 70 years would make some difference?

 

There were more top end punchers in the 70s than in the 90s, so definitely no to that question.

No, I dont see any real evolution in power.

The technique used to generate fight ending power hasn't really changed much in our sport in the modern era, at least.

Definitely the technique has evolved since the 20s and 30s, but there hasn't been any huge leaps since the 60s.

 

Bad logic, since ring death and serious injury are mostly caused by accumulation, hence a great puncher has less chance to cause one.

I would tend to think its the case, cause drug usage is much more prévalent now than it was, and it can help explosivness and punching power

 

If punching power had actually evolved beyond what people are naturally capable of to a noticeable degree people would be getting hurt. Not just from huge world class punchers but in boxing in general. How could it not be so?

If young pampered prospects that had access to high level modern training and nutrition were really punching like the world had never seen before they’d be punching holes in the journeyman with day jobs they fight coming up and it would cause concern and change the way matchmaking is done. It’s not happening.

 

I can't say I've noticed any significant improvement or decline really, at least from the 30's onwards. If you hit hard, you hit hard.

 

Well stoppage ratio has increased iirc. And no, injury come from accumulation, not power. Thats why they are a lot less death and injury in mma, cause they get koed too quickly to receive sustained damage. So an improvement in puncbing power would actually result in less ring death

 

I think most boxing fans are delusionnal if they dont think ped has affected boxer performances.

Theres a reason why boxer take them

 

We still don’t see quite as many KO artists, in spite of PED use.

 

If this were the case, boxing would be a very unique sport.

In sports such as baseball and tennis striking has developed a lot since pitches and serves have developed too

 

Looks that way.

 

Has it? A lot of weight lifting and powerlifting records haven't been touched in decades, dido field records. Chance outliers aside, Track performance improvement is probably mostly down to equipment/tracks. What would Jesse Owens have run out of blocks, on a modern synthetic track, with air-light cleets?

Where records/standards tend to imptove often and quickly - for instance in strength sports presently- is when a sport gets a big influx of new participants as a pool to draw freakish bellcurve-departing outliers from; not because of training advances. Boxing has seen the opposite phenomenon since the 60s, although it's being counteracted now by the influx of Soviet block talent

 

Due to three factors that aren't applicable to boxing below heavyweight, imo - equipment, talent pool increases, size increases (steroid use being one contributor to the latter).

To the extent heavyweights have increased increased im muscular size they'll definitely hit harder now on average but that can't really apply below heavy.

 

I can't speak for tennis but equipment has changed a lot in baseball (it is now common to use a 29 oz bat with a thin little handle and try to swing it as fast as you can... a 29 oz bat would've been something a kid would use as recently as the 80s... Dick Allen used a 42 oz bat in the 1970s... in modern Major League Baseball, a 34 oz bat is considered massive); the dimensions of the parks are smaller (because owners know people like home runs) and now every player tries to hit one all the time because it's never been easier to hit one. This past season was the first time in history where there were more strikeouts than hits... striking out a lot used to be something only prolific power hitters did (Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, etc) ... now guys who devote lots of time to weight training look buff and strike out 140 times and hit 13 home runs instead of looking less buff striking out 65 times and hitting 8 (with a batting average 30 points higher) ... the big difference now isn't that home runs are hit any farther or faster, just that more guys hit them because they're all devoting extra attention to trying to hit them and have the equipment and park configurations to do it

In tennis, the actual materials used to make rackets have changed dramatically, no? Baseball bats are still made of wood

 

In little league at 12 years old, I used a 32 ounce bat. That's a big heavy bat among grown men playing baseball professionally right now

 

I mentioned this earlier, but there's a huge difference between being hit by an 8oz leather glove containing horsehair in the 50s up to 80s as opposed to a modern glove.
They had a much, much smaller profile than the ones used today and pretty much all of them were filled purely with horsehair.
Foam-filled gloves didn't become prevalent until the 1990s, coinciding with glove companies finally caring more about fighter safety and looking towards materials other than horsehair to combat the ridiculously widespread problem of hand injuries in boxing.
The 90s also marked the death of the pure horsehair filled glove, and ever since then all gloves advertised as being a horsehair model are in fact filled with a combination of foam and horsehair. Not a single horsehair fight glove used today isn't filled a blend of horsehair and foam, whether it's a Cleto Reyes, Everlast MX, Grant, Winning. It's worth noting that while the difference between the gloves used today and in the 70s is big, that difference is nothing compared with the difference in the gloves used then and in the early 20th Century, in the times when guys like Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney fought. The glove were even smaller (far too small really), filled only with a meager amount of thin horsehair, and worst of all, weighed no more than 4 to 5 ounces, even for heavyweights. Not only that, but the weights of gloves were never checked stringently back then so in all likelihood many fighters got away with using gloves that weighed even less. Essentially these guys were fighting with their bare knuckles, and I can't fathom how something like that could slide today. How boxers in those days could fight and fight so often when there was so little protection is really a testament to how insanely tough they were. It's no fucking wonder that so many of the boxers in that era ended up with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

So yeah, punching power is different from then and now but balances out when you factor in PEDs, weight-training, etc

 

The earliest standing records are from 80s and results of 70s would still be solid results in some events. But the athletes of 1950s wouldn't be competitive at all

 

Case in point:
The gloves used in Ali v Frazier III are like night and day compared to those used in Fury-Wilder.
Ali and Frazier used 10oz (possibly lighter) horsehair Everlast gloves that hardly protected one's hands but helped deliver a hell of a punch.

The Fury-Wilder Everlast MX gloves were the complete opposite--they were accurate 10oz foam gloves with patented multi layered padding that are specifically designed for hand protection.
Inflicting damage and to a degree, delivery of power per sq" is of only secondary importance with that model.

 

Fights are also far more likely to be stopped now

 

Yeah, and these sports were among the first to use ped

 

Why would the sport most directly connected to pure strength and with such simple stats be the one sport that hasn’t “advanced”?

 

That being?

 

Dempsey's gloves were clearly loaded when he faced Willard.

 

Weight lifting.

 

The transferability of strength increases to power has a pretty low genetic ceiling tho and the quicker and more unweighted a movement - ie a punch- the lower that is. Outside of increases in size, I'm not convinced weight training would lead to much improvements in punch power.

 

Strength has relatively little application in boxing outside the clinch, and even there technique is at least as important. There are few if any contact sports where strength is less directly relevant in fact.

 

Obviously the last part is absurd as strength is really important in boxing... Much more than in basketball, soccer, etc

But what I’m asking is why the sports most directly linked to pure strength with the easiest stats to interpret have records intact from the 70’s. You’d think those are the sports where records would be broken every week with the latest PED.

 

Track and field is among the very few sports where the international federation has actually and seriously tried to get rid of doping