This article is about how I want to work together with anyone willing to create open source fight gear that enables fighters to gather data on their striking like hand speed, reaction time, and power, without breaking the bank and then using open software to crunch the numbers and provide fighters with insight into how they can use this information to improve their game. But before that I want to explain how I got here. If you’d like to skip to the end, you’re more than welcome to skip to the section titled The Gear.

As a long time, let’s say, nerd-who-trains in mixed martial arts (I simply cannot say that I am either a “fighter” or a “mixed martial artist”) it has frustrated me as far back as I can remember that we lack any data on at least three main aspects of the fight game which I think are far more important than most of the other metrics we use (like reach, height, and maybe even weight if Conor McGregor is to be believed). Whenever I watched people like Muhammad Ali, Roy Jones Junior, Floyd Mayweather, Anderson Silva, etc. I couldn’t help but notice what seemed like a superhuman reaction time. People would talk about their unique styles and strategies and the relative merits of keeping your hands low and out of sight as opposed to high and protecting your face. But few seemed interested in talking about how you can only keep your hands low if your reaction time is faster than the time it takes for your opponent to extend their fist from wherever it is to your face or body (hand speed). What is truly remarkable is just how similar these times clearly are. Doing some back of the envelope math (aka quick google math) we find that the average reaction time is about .25 seconds. A random boxer’s punch (Ricky Hatton in this case as that’s what google gave me real quick and dirty) is 25 mph. 25 mph is 440 inches/sec and 110 inches in .25 seconds. But this raw speed isn’t actually the whole story. Take, for example, the mixed martial artist Nate Diaz. Nate Diaz’s reach is 76 inches. If his reach were 440 inches long, then knowing that his punch travels at a speed of 440 inches/sec (which we don’t) is useful. But it’s not, it’s 76 inches which means that it takes him .17 seconds to fully extend his arm assuming his punches are as fast as Hatton’s. Bearing in mind that fighters don’t generally like to hang out within striking distance of their opponents we find that the amount of time it takes to “send” a punch, is surprisingly close to the amount of time it takes to react to one. And yet, we don’t ask ourselves questions like: Is my reaction time better than my peers? If so, how can I leverage that to my advantage by crafting my style and strategy to take advantage of it? Is it worse? If so how can I alter my style and strategy so as to neutralize or hide this deficit? If my reaction time is weak, can I do anything to improve it? Can I measure that improvement? If my reaction time is weak, but my hand speed and power are strong, how does that change things?

There’s still a lot of unknowns here. For example, since we deal in the most rudimentary forms of data like “reach” we don’t think about the things that really matter like, “What is the average distance a punch actually travels?” My reach may be 76 inches but presumably this is from shoulder to fist — almost NO fighter actually keeps their arms this tightly coiled. In addition, almost no fighter FULLY extends their arms when striking. Most of us aim for a few inches behind the target otherwise we risk overcommitting to the strike as well as hyperextending our arm. So maybe the average strike is actually about 60% of our reach. But even though it is SO measurable, we just don’t know. Not only do we not know the averages, but we certainly don’t know OUR OWN averages. But this data is not technically difficult to acquire. All of our phones have tiny gyroscopes and accelerometers that sense all of the data we need to gather this information. This sensor, for example, only costs $25 and it would be able to tell us most of what we need to know to answer these questions, but I’m not a physicist or engineer so take this with a grain of salt. By mapping our fists or feet as they move through 3 dimensional space and time we could learn, quite easily, how long our average punch is, and how fast it is and we could experiment with ways of making our punches longer or shorter, faster or more powerful. Now imagine that the app which analyzes the data (let’s just assume it’s a smartphone app) can emit a sound which we are supposed to react to by throwing a punch. The time difference between the emission of the sound and when the punching fist begins to move from rest (which would be determined by the accelerometer) would tell us our reaction time in the most relevant context. In addition, we would be able to learn how long it takes between the stimulus and contact with the target. I really don’t care how fast I can hit a button in response to some prompt on my computer screen, I want to know how long it takes me to respond to a stimulus by throwing a punch that finds its target. And I want to know if I can improve it. I want to know if I sacrifice power for speed, or if I generate more power when reacting to my opponent or being an aggressor. I want to know if my jab is really as fast as I think it is, if my right cross is as powerful, and if my left hook is as slow and weak as I sometimes think. If I’m performing well above average in the first two, maybe it’s time to invest more in my left hook, and if I’m performing below average on them then it’s probably time to start reevaluating how I train these far more important punches. Further we can aggregate all of the data we collectively generate to gather even more insight into our game and the games of our peers. What I believe I am actually talking about is bringing a technological revolution to fight sports and doing it in a way that benefits fighters directly without the perverse incentives that come along when a large corporation decides it wants to use your passion to fuel its profits.

The Gear

Conceptually it’s really not that difficult. A $25 sensor literally taped to the back of a glove or a shin pad would give us infinitely more information than we have previously had about our skills. Add to that a third sensor on a punching bag (I think it would be enough to just use the same accelerometer+gyro combo and then just input the weight of the bag to calculate the power of any strikes) that syncs with the sensors in the glove and you have everything you need to understand your punches and kicks at all, not just “better.”

We have to admit to ourselves that as a sport and as athletes (and I am including boxing here) we have been relying far too heavily on hunches, feelings, and “beliefs” for far too long.

Your coach might say, “You’re not extending your arm enough,” but how does he know? Does he realize you have short arms? “Keep your face protected.” Shouldn’t that depend on whether you have a good or bad reaction time? After all, if you have a good reaction time and fast hands, maybe you should be practicing keeping your hands very low like Jones or Ali, or high and outside like Conor McGregor does. Both strategies exaggerate their already exceptional hand speed while leveraging their fast reaction times to avoid taking damage. Why do we just accept that everyone has to start off practicing a traditional stance despite the fact that almost all professionals quickly abandon it? If I have fast hands (which I think I do) but a mediocre reaction time (which I think I might but I just don’t know), how does that change things? Without the data we can’t even ask these questions and just because we think we have the answers that doesn’t come even close to meaning that we actually do. After all, how many people have we been training with for years who think they’re the shit despite obvious evidence to the contrary? Who knows, I may very well be that guy! In the game we play these are mistakes that can cause us physical harm and mean countless hours, even years, wasted learning bad strategies and techniques.

The problem isn’t that fighters are stupid. I train with engineers, financial analysts, stock brokers, architects and computer programmers. But many of us don’t have a ton of money to burn, especially not on fancy gloves that we’re just going to throw away after we burn through them, and no company is going to invest the kind of resources that would be required to give them to us, because if they could have, they would have, and they haven’t. Even if they did, it wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be what we need it to be because it wouldn’t be made for fighters by fighters. But possibly for the first time in history, we are more than capable of building this ourselves. We need an engineer (or 10 engineers splitting the load) to find the right components that will work together to produce the necessary data in a cheap enough, small enough, and light enough package that is capable of withstanding sufficient abuse. We need a computer programmer (or 10) capable of writing the software necessary to enable a computer (like a smartphone) to receive the data generated by the sensors and input it into the relevant, and simple, physics formulas that output the data in a useful format. That’s essentially it! A web developer would certainly help, but we don’t need anything fancy.

I’m more than willing to contribute my time and even capital, but after some quick research, there’s no way I have the knowledge or patience to do this right, though I will likely try regardless. It is my hope that this article will pique the interest of other fighters and we can work together to all invest just a little time and energy to solve this problem. As I said before, I am neither an engineer or a physicist. Everything I have said may be completely wrong. So tell me! Let’s brainstorm!