Medical Sciences Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professionals in medical and allied health fields, students of those professions, related academics, and others with a sound understanding of medicine and healthcare-related sciences. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
If skin is constantly scraped or rubbed, callouses form and the body better deals with future scrapes and rubs.
Is there any process in which we adapt to being hit by blunt objects? When I am hit hard by something blunt I will bruise, is there any process in which we get better at dealing with this?
Yes and no.
These are your skin's layers and components. When being hit by something, everything you see gets either damaged or destroyed. Bruising is caused by the blood that escapes the broken capillaries.
In a "recurring blunt force trauma" those capillaries are not allowed to heal.
Same thing happens to everything you see above including the sensory nerve fibers and in the long run, touch sense is affected. You might call this an "adaptation" but it's certainly not beneficial.
Now regarding the bones underneath all this, there's Wolff's law which states that bone in a healthy person or animal will adapt to the loads under which it is placed. If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading.
Load though doesn't mean hit, so it doesn't apply to that!
In conclusion, your body certainly kind of adapts to situations like "being hit blunt objects" by losing the sense of touch, but you don't "get better at it", you just feel the damage a little bit less because you've already destroyed a lot of sensory nerves.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruise#Mechanism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunt_trauma
