shin bone

The shin bone is the larger of two bones in the lower leg (the other one is the calf bone). This bone can easily be felt underneath the skin on the front side.

The shin bone is the only bone that connects the ankle with the knee, the calf bone is connected with the ankle but not with the knee.

The shinbone in Muay Thai (Thai Boxing/Kickbocking)

Because the shin bone is directly underneath the skin, there is not a lot of buffer to dampen impact. Therefor if somebody hits you on your shin bone with her/his shin bone, this can be extremely painful. Also if you hit somebody on the hips, arms, ribs or head with the shin, this will probably hurt you a lot.

On the other hand, the shin bone is one of the hardest part in the lower body and it can therefor easily be used for defense. The shin is one of the main defense body parts in martial arts like Muay Thai.

Killing the nerves and hardening the shin bone

(Please always be careful with yourself. I did some research for this text, but I am NOT a docter.)

Many Muay Thai artists in Thailand have been "hardening" the shin, presumably by hitting banana tree trunks hard with the shin. Because of the soft fibrous material that the banana tree is made of, this will hurt, but not damage the shin bone. Nerves on the other hand are damaged this way, and people who have been training like this from a young age (Thais sometimes start at 10 years old) will be able to hit really hard with their shins without feeling a lot of pain themselves. This way the shin becomes a real weapon.

Many people claim that the shin bone is also made harder this way. This is probably true for the top surface of the bone, but in my opinion this will not help anybody in a fight. When you hit somebody hard with the shin, the large pulling forces (that can break the bone) will be on the backside of the shin bone, which is the part that is not hardened. Some sources also suggest that the bone gets harder but also more brittle in the hardening process.

The downside

Broken shin bones is a relatively common injury for Muay Thai boxers. This might be because these fighters don't feel pain anymore and therefor don't know when to stop.

Anyway, intentionally damaging your body is almost always a bad thing to do. You might cause yourself a lot of health problems when you get older, and you must realize that the damage done is probably not reversible.

Also the shin has a lot of meridian points that are connected with many organs in the body. Hurting these points may cause you seemingly unrelated health problems in these organs.

As a last point of caution, somebody suggested that you might even cause blood clogs when hitting to hard. Blood clogs can cause a stroke and therefor even be fatal.

----- e-mail from a reader -----

I came across your site recently and have noticed a few slight problems on your page about shin bones. Ideally, when hardening the shin bone--or any stiff striking object--you want to have a hard striking edge and a somewhat softer back. Think back to the master blacksmiths making katanas; Ideally the katana would have a hard blade--to better hold an edge--and a softer back so that it would not snap when striking something. If the back was hard, as you suggest might help, the entire object becomes much more brittle. Think of hitting a tree with a long-dead small tree branch, the tree branch is consistently hard the entire way through, and snaps. A live tree branch bends when it hits an object however, and avoids snapping.

Good luck,
Kevin