So one of our three teams made it to states and they have been working really hard to improve their robot. They have a punch ball launcher and as does one other of the three teams. They have both fully TWISTED a square axle 180 degrees and the team going to states recently snapped an axle in half and they cannot figure out how to reduce strain. any ideas?
Oh and recently;
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Are you sure this was supposed to be tagged with VEX IQ General Discussion?
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Move to High Strength Axles?
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HS axels. If not feasible (for whatever reason), this team could try to distribute the force twisting the axle over a larger area, such as screwing together gears to that they can take some force.
Another solution would be to try to reduce space between axle supports. I twisted an axle until it snapped once (oopsie) because I was trying to put a lot of strain on it with the supports more than 1.5" away on each side.
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We had a puncher also that would cause the shafts to get twisted also. What we had to do was add more gears to the shaft so that all of the motors torque was not concentrated in one spot but distributed acrop a greater area.
My team also put the motor that was driving ghe puncher right next to it so the shaft did bot have to stretch over a distance.
MHP Twisted Axles at your service. 
If you have the torque motor driving the smaller gear, that’s a lot of force to drive the larger gear. I suggest using direct drive with rubber bands to return the puncher to the reset position, but not too many bands to avoid twisting in the future.
With the gears you have you should be able to use high strength axles. You could try to lessen the strain with using more gears.
That axle looks just like one my students were using. I wondered what it would look like in the end when I saw they were using it, but I let them go ahead. They switched to a high-strength axle. There wasn’t enough room to fit in good collars, but there is enough force acting on the axle enough of the time that they never seem to have to worry about it slipping.