Striking Power Gauge

Plisk

Plisk

Orange Belt
Joined
Apr 8, 2006
Messages
254
Reaction score
0
I was hitting one of those power punching games at a bar the other day. It was a speedbag attached to a metal arm that hangs down at about eye level. When you hit the bag the arm flies back and gauges the power behind the punch. The highest I got was 939/1000, but I'm not bragging, because my female friend hardly tapped it and scored over 800.

I want to know where I can find a power gauge like that for training. That would be the ultimate way to track striking power. Where can I find one of these? I know there's a patent out for a portable device, but what can I purchase today?

-John
 
Punch your parents in the face.
This is for giving birth to you, secondly ask them how much it hurt, this should give you a good indication of real punching power.
 
I always wanted to hit something like that, like they do in rocky 4. lol
 
blakethemus said:
Punch your parents in the face.
This is for giving birth to you, secondly ask them how much it hurt, this should give you a good indication of real punching power.
Click to expand...

Parents are dead, bro...thanks for the suggestion.
 
Best way to test striking power: punch Mark Hunt in the head, if he goes down you've got more than enough.
 
The game is pretty fun, but unrealistic. There is no way that I can hit 939/1000.
 
I seem to remember some discovery channel show where they took some karate demonstration champion and tried to use motion capture and other new-fangled stuff to make him better, think one thing involved putting a pressure sensor attached to a laptop onto a punch bag. Anything accurate is going to be expensive though.
 
yahoo led me to: http://www.labjack.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=755

which conatained the following:

"I think an accelerometer might be your best bet. They are inexpensive and easy to use. Analog.com has some good ones:

http://www.analog.com/en/subCat/0,2879,764...F0%5F,00.html

Freescale.com is another source. They also have good pressure sensors (the "integrated" series), but pressure seems more like you would just be measuring the deflection of the bag and this might not correlate that well with punch force.

By putting an accelerometer in the center (or perhaps on the back side surface) of the punching bag, you could easily get a plot of acceleration versus time. With some simple physics you could calculate lots of interesting data for a single punch, a group of punches, or an entire workout. You could do average, maximum, total, etc. for:

acceleration
velocity
distance
force
power
energy"
 
DON'T USE AN ACCELEROMETER TO GET DISTANCE

Sorry, 4 years of engineering is hard to shake off, an accelerometer might be semi decent ,but it's going to be hard to get accuracy as you'll have the compression of the bag to worry about a pressure sensor is a much more likely technique. The other one that I just thought of would be based on a toughness gauge (hammer swings down and breaks sample, by measuring backswing you get how much energy was absorbed by the sample in breaking. Simply put a bag on a rigid pivot and set it up so that you get a measure of backswing and you'll be able to find crude measure of strength. Could be made for maybe $50 of materials from any hardware store.
 
SmashiusClay said:
DON'T USE AN ACCELEROMETER TO GET DISTANCE

Sorry, 4 years of engineering is hard to shake off, an accelerometer might be semi decent ,but it's going to be hard to get accuracy as you'll have the compression of the bag to worry about a pressure sensor is a much more likely technique. The other one that I just thought of would be based on a toughness gauge (hammer swings down and breaks sample, by measuring backswing you get how much energy was absorbed by the sample in breaking. Simply put a bag on a rigid pivot and set it up so that you get a measure of backswing and you'll be able to find crude measure of strength. Could be made for maybe $50 of materials from any hardware store.
Click to expand...

I'm just an accountant, what do i know? it sounded good.
 
Damn it all. Everything is so techy-techy. Money isn't the problem. Why hasn't someone developed one of these for training? Straight MADNESS! Thanks for all the input, guys. Maybe I'm gonna have to go MacGuyver.
 
Any engineering masterminds out there that can tell me how to develop on of these things?
 
First thing would bee to shop for pressure sensors and a way to hook them up to your PC, I've always used pre-built data loggers so i'm no help in that stage.
 
I actually saw a New Zealand television show, where they had some sort of punch force measuring device straight out of Rocky IV. Some girl hit it and then they had Ray Sefo hit it and the force was like 10 times greater or something. This was years ago though, and I can't seem to find anything on it online.
 
I bought something like this when I was younger, it looked like a boxing pad but was make to be strapped to your heavy bag and from what I remember I believe inside it was just a hollow compartment hooked to a psi gauge and when you hit it, it just measured ow much pressure was exerted (It just read 1- 10 though). Something like that could eb made but buying a pressure sensor would make more sense.

Personally I would say that accuracy isn't as important and consistency with something like this. There are too many factors to determine how hard your punch is compares to others, but if the system is consistent you can atleast see improvement in your power.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Forum statistics

Threads
1,267,432
Messages
57,471,879
Members
175,720
Latest member
athletesnation_mngt

Share this page

Back
Top