8 Hand-To-Hand Combat Myths You Probably Believe

You might want to sit down for this — some of the bone-jarring badassery seen in films such as  The Raid 2, The Raid: Redemption, and, uh, Roadhouse is slightly embellished for the screen. But they’re not all total falsehoods, believe it or not. We gave eight commonly used cinematic combative moves a fact check so you can start betting your buddies which are true or false next happy hour.  Just be careful one of them doesn’t try to pull a Dalton throat rip on you when you walk away with his paycheck ….

MYTH: You can push someone’s nose into his brain and kill him.

TRUTH: This deathblow is certainly feasible under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, those circumstances include a gargantuan amount of force, unlikely to happen in your average street fight. Add to that the fact that the nose is made of cartilage (much softer and more flexible than bone), and that there’s a bone between that cartilage and your brain (the cribiform plate), which has openings barely large enough for nerves to pass through, and the possibility becomes weaker and weaker.

Also: Badass blades that’ll make you wish for a knife fight

An easier way of damaging the brain is to jam your finger through the eye (breaking the orbital plate) which gives you access to the frontal lobe.