Archonsod said:
Not really, smashing the sternum head on is more likely to split than break, and the muscle tissue between it and the heart will send it the other way. If you're hitting hard enough to do that in one punch, you should have enough force to literally punch through the victim.
Sorry, but here you're quite wrong. You can just smash the sternum inside the heart and/or lungs and pierce them without so much force to pierce it. This very often happens in many car/working accidents. It was one of the reasons airbags were invented.
Also, there are not much muscular tissues
behind the sternum, just a thin band of intercostals, that won't stop anything at all. That's the reason why many ribcage injuries are at risk for lung piercing, btw.
Tachycardia is the only one which is likely to cause a near-instant cardiac arrest. The others are most likely to cause pain more than anything else, at worst you might manage to knock the victim unconcious.
Where are you taking your sources from? Tachycardia is quite a normal event, it's just the heart beating faster, it happens every time you feel fear or anger, and nobody will die because of it. Atrial fibrillation may kill you, but mostly, as I already said, arhymia is just the last event of a cardiac arrest.
Killing the cells or massive trauma is only a viable option if you've pushed your fist through the ribcage and directly attacked the heart.
Again, why you say that? Are you a medic? I'm not attacking you, don't misunderstand my word or my tone, but it just seem your assumptions come from some profound knowledge on the matter, while I keep finding them wrong. Either your knowledge is even deeper than mine (and you can only be a medic then), or you're supposing things wich you don't know enough. I tried to put this sentence in the fairest way so again don't feel attacked!
Anyways, cells may start to die because of anoxia, as an extended flogistic process, a bad reaction to the trauma, excessive compression of vases, and many,
many other causes. You don't need to destroy a whole tissue to make it stop working, or at least to cause so much discomfort to drop a man outright (maybe causing his death later, if untreated). Many damages are auto-induced and that's called positive feedback, in simple words, a couple of cells die, then the ones near them die too because of various effects, and so others keep dieing etc. This won't happen in 10 seconds for sure, but you won't put up much a fight after you start suffering an heart stroke.
Any force hitting the outside has to go through the ribcage, the muscle sheathe around it and finally the protection around the heart itself. If you could punch that hard, you'd be better off smacking the head, since you should have the power to shatter the skull.
Again, this is not the case, not at all. Skull is many times more resistant than ribcage! Not only the skull itself has a better shape to deflect blows, it's much thicker (it's the thickest bone of the body, indeed), and it's a different kind of bone. Sternum is a flat bone, and its... pardon my poor english... spongy. Ribs are elastic, sure, but not thick, nor strong, they break and split quite easily too (compared to skull at least), and both ribs and sternum are articulated by fixed cartilages wich are not so much resilient against blunt traumas. Not as the skull at least, by far.
I agree you can better smack the head tough, mostly because you will snap the neck of your foe with such a blow, but you can't pierce the skull of a person with a punch, I will never believe such a monstruosity...
...Unless you're talking about Mike Tyson punching Woody Allen's skull.
Positive feedback is only possible if the heart cells are already defective.
Why?!?
Shock too would rely on a defective heart, since it would need to overcome the natural checks and balances built into the heart.
This is not true, healty people die of shock, but...
Even then, I doubt you'd cause a large enough shock reaction simply by punching someone in the chest.
... I agree upon that. Still, as I said, it's only speculation.
It requires a lot more force than you estimate, at least in a healthy subject. Like I said, you're relying on a heart in which the cells are either abnormal or degenerated enough to fail to send a signal at the correct pace. To be honest, if this was a danger then the victim should have been fitted with a pacemaker...
I've heard most baseball speed roam around 90 mph wich translates to 140 km/h roughly. It should suffice expecially, if the ball is large and you're a stunty.
The same compression would be enough to cause collapsed lungs too, however I don't think the human body is actually capable of producing that kind of force. Maybe if you were fighting a chimpanzee, but then it's strong enough to rip your arms off and disembowel you too
Yes that's probably true, indeed. But who do you think is stronger:
Him:
Or him?
...you know the answer....
Again, a pre-existing medical condition is required. Maybe they should rename it to Touch of Euthanasia
This awarned a lol
Anyways, keep in mind that after the age of 35-40 both heart and blood vessels start to take the toll of aging, even if you're healty, and I suppose that in the time of chi-masters even on his thirties a man was quite aged.
