High Incidence of Hand Injuries From Blocking in Elite Taekwondo Despite the Use of Protective Gear

The medical question

How do hand and wrist injuries happen in elite taekwondo, and how much training time do they cost?

The Fight Medicine Research Institute uses this evidence to frame questions about how hand and wrist injuries happen in striking sports, including the part played by blocking and by protective hand gear. The study followed elite taekwondo athletes at one training center, which determines which questions it can inform.

Summary

Over five years at one national taekwondo training center, most recorded hand and wrist injuries affected a finger or its metacarpal bone and happened while blocking, and the injury rate was higher in competition than in training.

What the work reports

• Medical staff recorded hand and wrist injuries in training and competition at one national Olympic taekwondo training center over 5 years. Of 107 athletes, 79 were included in the final data set. Hand gloves and forearm protectors were mandatory for all of them.
• 75 injuries were recorded in 48 athletes. The authors report 13.9 injuries per 1,000 hours of exposure overall (95% CI 10.5 to 17.5), 4.0 in training and 33.2 in competition. Finger rays (a finger with its metacarpal bone) accounted for 68% of injuries, fractures for 43% and joint ligament injuries for 35%. 71% of injuries happened while blocking.
• Athletes took a mean of 15.7 days to return to full-contact training, and 39.7 days after a fracture of the distal radius. The authors conclude that injuries to the finger rays came mostly from blocking despite the protective hand gear, and that better blocking technique, tactics and protective gear appear to be essential for prevention.

Limits to keep in mind

• The athletes came from one national training center, and 79 of the original 107 were included in the final data set. The authors say both may have introduced selection bias.
• Several people collected the data. The authors say some injuries may have been missed, especially milder ones such as bruising.
• Whether an injury came from striking or blocking was established by interview, which the authors say may have introduced recall bias.
• All athletes wore the same mandatory protective gear, so the study cannot show what difference the gear made.

Source issues recorded

• The article reports 75 injuries and 8,495 hours of total exposure, and gives the rate formula as the number of injuries divided by hours of exposure, times 1,000. That calculation gives 8.8 per 1,000 hours. The article reports an overall rate of 13.9 per 1,000 hours, which it describes as adjusted for exposure to fight time. This record gives the figures as the source reports them.

Publication status and notices

Published in Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal. Original research article in Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine.

Form of this work: Version of record. The version of record is the final article as issued by its publisher.

No correction or retraction notice was found in Crossref or Europe PMC when this record was checked.

Fight Medicine Research Institute contribution

Fight Medicine Research Institute selected and catalogued this study, prepared an original research summary, verified its bibliographic details, and maintains the associated citation record.

PDF files

Article details

Relationship

External research catalogued by the Fight Medicine Research Institute. The original authors, journal and DOI are unchanged.

Published online

25 January 2021

Issue date

1 January 2021, volume 9, issue 1

Repository date

25 January 2021 (Europe PMC first-publication date)

Date used here

25 January 2021 (Crossref publisher deposit, online publication date)

Rights

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), as recorded by Europe PMC and the licence link in the source record. The licence does not cover commercial reuse or adapted versions. The summary on this page is Fight Medicine Research Institute’s own wording. No text or figure from the article is reproduced here. Licence terms.

Source check

12 November 2026, against PubMed Central full text, Crossref and Europe PMC. Checked under the direction of Casey C. Sears, Founder. An LLM was utilized as a research tool with direct human oversight.

Appraisal

The check covered bibliographic details, links, licence and notices. It is not a formal critical appraisal of the full paper.

Clinical review

None. This record is a research summary, not clinical education.

Funding and conflicts

The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article gives no funding statement.

Catalog

FH-064, added 12 November 2026

Cite the original work

These files cite the work by its own authors, journal and DOI. Fight Medicine Research Institute appears only in a note, as curator of this catalog page.

Markus Geßlein, Johannes Rüther, Michael Millrose, Hermann Josef Bail, Robin Martin, Philipp Schuster. High Incidence of Hand Injuries From Blocking in Elite Taekwondo Despite the Use of Protective Gear: A 5-Year Descriptive Epidemiology Study. Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine. 2021;9(1):2325967120973996. https://doi.org/10.1177/2325967120973996

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Related on this website

• Fighter Health: Hand and wrist injuries