Although bare-knuckle boxing seems more brutal than its gloved counterpart, Tetreault claims that there are misconceptions.
“The fighters have to be taking care of their hands. They can’t hit as hard,” he said.
Whereas professional gloved boxing events involve a maximum of 12, three-minute rounds, in BKB, bouts are capped at a maximum of six, three-minute rounds while BKFC bouts involve two-minute rounds.
Tetreault cites the shorter duration of bare-knuckle fights as another mitigating factor when answering safety concerns.
“The difference is it’s not the continual punching,” he said.
Dr. Louis Durkin, president of the Association of Ringside Physicians, who is also a stitch doctor for BKB, shared data from a study conducted by the ARP in 2025. It looked at 2,000 fighters across BKB and BKFC and compared the rates of injury with previously conducted studies from gloved boxing and MMA.
The study found that the percentage of concussions was lower in bare-knuckle boxing (5% in BKFC and 4.76% in BKB) than gloved boxing (12%) and MMA (14.7%).
Conversely, there was a much higher rate of laceration found in bare-knuckle boxing (34.3% in BKFC and 35.9% in BKB) than gloved boxing (8.7%) and MMA (13.5%).
However, consultant neurosurgeon Peter Hamlyn says there is a lack of data in general in bare-knuckle boxing.
“Hitting someone with equal power with an ungloved fist delivers more energy to the head, more brain injury,” he explained.
“However, you’ve then got all those confounding factors – it hurts your hands, so you tend to hold back a bit, and there is the number of blows that are landed, the number of rounds.
“When you add that all together, you end up actually with a conclusion that reads something like, ‘I don’t know’.”
Hamlyn also mentioned that it is difficult to make conclusive judgements on brain injury in the short term.
“The difficulty we’ve had in sport is that that data doesn’t emerge until they’re in their later life,” he said.
Headway are unequivocal.
“If you’re deliberately trying to cause a brain injury in order to win a bout, that can’t be right,” Griggs said.
