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Thanks to the work of a team of impact engineers from the University of Manchester, Hatton has shown that his moniker is as real as his world championship belts.

Ricky gets ready

Acting on a request to find out just how hard Ricky hits, the team, led by Dr Qingming Li, set about making a test area for the boxing champ, which meant sticking a force sensor to something Hatton knows only too well – a 30kg punch bag. The sensor sent data to a laptop, where specialised software measured and analysed the results.

That result was pretty impressive to say the least. According to the study, Ricky punches with a massive 400kg of instantaneous force.

That’s just under half a tonne of power cracking into his opponent’s jaw, an amount that Dr Li described as "“quite astonishing".

The punch hits home and the data is collected

When you bear in mind that the average man in the street with no boxing experience has an impact of about 40kg, that means Ricky is ten times harder than most of us. And if that didn’t make the point, his punching force is also twice that of the power in the average Premiership footballer’s kick!

Fast and furious

Boxing isn’t just about power though. It’s all very well if you can punch with the power of an elephant if you’re too slow to land the punch. Anyone who’s seen Hatton fight will be pretty sure that isn’t the case, but thanks to the engineers, his punching speed has been pinned down too.

Ricky makes some repairs to the bag

Using video technology normally put to work tracking projectiles in laboratory conditions, the experts clocked his average speed at 25 miles per hour, with a top shot of 32 mph – that was one of his knock-out left hooks, in case you wondered.

That means his reaction time is less than a tenth of a second. To put it in layman’s terms, he’d have you on your back before you even knew he’d moved!

And don’t think you’d have chance to get a punch in first. The average bloke can only manage to move at about half of Hatton’s speed, with a maximum of around 15mph.

An indisputable hit man

Unfortunately, because of Ricky’s training schedule ahead of his fight with Jose Castillo, the researchers couldn’t do the tests under scientific conditions and the boxer didn’t have his hands bandaged like he would have in the ring, but even so, they’re striking results and the scientists are eager to make them official when Hatton returns from Vegas.

Ricky, Dr Li and the team analyse the results

For Ricky, it was a welcome distraction from his preparations and an enjoyable experience.

"It was my first visit to the University of Manchester and I was impressed with the facilities there," he said.

"It was great working with the experts and the technology, and for me, it was really interesting to see how fast and how hard I can hit."

And was it hard enough to be called the Hitman? Definitely; after all, with power and speed like that at his disposal, would you like to argue otherwise?