Fail Proof Groin Strikes that Wont fail and Liver Condition Explained
662 views · Published 19 November 2018 · 5:25 · Indexed 8 November 2026
Channel: Practical Combat · 2018 · Sports
[The degree of pain from a groin strike] has to do with the afferent nerve fibers—the sensory fibers. There are a lot more sensory nerve fibers per area of tissue compared to, let’s say, the back of your hand or your shoulder. And there are so many implications with trauma to the groin area if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective: if you lose the ability to procreate, the species would cease to exist, so it’s very important at a primitive level to pass your genes on to the next generation. The extra sensation in that area evolved over time. And for most men, that’s predominantly an area of pleasure, not pain. There are two basic structures that are primarily involved, the testicles and the penis, and the pain sensation from a blow is different in each. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system innervate different areas of the genitals, and they have different functions. The best way to put it, if you use the analogy “point and shoot,” is that the parasympathetic input is responsible for the pointing part. The shooting part—or the ejaculatory part of the reproductive function—is related to the sympathetic parts of the nervous system. The reason why that’s significant is if you trace the nerve fibers from the parasympathetic nervous system, they predominantly come out up by your cervical spine through the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve, etcetera, and they also come out down by the sacrum, on both sides of the lowest part of the spine. The testicles connect all the way up to the vagus nerve. It can be a sensation that goes up through the vagus nerve and give you that very nauseous feeling, whereas if you have trauma to the penis itself, you usually don’t get that sickening visceral type of pain. It’s more like, “Oh that hurts,” but it’s not the deep pain you feel on the insides of your gut, and that’s because of the different innervations. A shot to the testicles or just beneath the testicles to the perineum affects the parasympathetic nervous system, giving you that visceral type of pain. When you get a really hard blow or pain to a visceral organ—the groin, liver, kidneys—it’s not the same situation as it would be if you had injured an extremity and you could fight through it. It gets complicated, but with any of those visceral organs, you don’t have the ability to block the ascending pain signals to the brain. Any severe blow to these organs can cause a vasovagal reaction, where you have a dilation of blood vessels and a drop in heart rate, so you actually get decreased blood flow going up to the brain. Not everybody will pass out from that, but it does immediately affect your ability to function.
