BKB, Hit Chip Tech Show How Hard Pro Boxers Really Punch

Boxing fans everywhere have an idea how hard their favorite fighter hits, at least when they see them in the ring snapping someone's head back. There are a lot of variables with boxing, making the severity of a punch open to interpretation. Is Gennady Golovkin's jab really than harsh? Is Ruslan Provodnikov as devastating as it seems, or is he just a suffocating brawler? New tech may answer that for us. In a recent BKB boxing match, the Rosado/Stevens title fight saw puches with as much as 600 lbs of force.

While 600 lbs of force might be the top-end we saw last night (the picture above was from a previous fight), the average force was just as brutal. Curtis Stevens threw punches with an average force of 402 lbs of force. Rosado's flew with about 326 lbs of force.

Those punches also came at up to 26mph. For comparison, the average human running speed is about 15mph. Usain Bolt has been clocked at 28mph.

This comes courtesy of Hit Chip technology, which puts a small sensor in the boxing glove, well out of the scoring area. Measuring force and acceleration, the chip can give us real-world data on in-round action.

It could usher in a new era of excitement for boxing, too. Like we see with baseball, it could be possible to revisit shots between rounds, replete with the tech to make it contextually relevant. Was the punch that hard, or was the recipient off-balance like they tend to say post-fight? Hit Chip might be able to let us know.

What Hit Chip does is put the 'science' into 'The Sweet Science'. Rather than hearing the same tired cliches from announcers, we might soon know exactly what 'guard crushing power' really is. Hit Chip was developed exclusively for BKB, but as a boxing fan and tech enthusiast, I'd love to see this become as standard as compubox.