Basic Punching Drills

This post is fairly self explanatory: the attached video gives a number of drills that can help you to improve your punching, even if you don't have a pad holder or bag to hit.  Punching practice is worthwhile on a number of levels.

Dr. Paul K Smith punching an instrumented makiwara board circa 2008

First, it can help you with your punching mechanics so as to make your punching more effective. I remember years ago when I was training in Baltimore with a well known instructor, he walked in on a black sash class and said the equivalent of "none of you all can punch properly."  We then spent the next hour learning how to punch all over again so that our mechanics were correct and we were able to issue more power in the punching.  In the drills shown below, there are a number of key principles demonstrated, among them the idea that you need to connect with the ground, the hips and waist must turn, and the motions must all add together to support the punch.


In 2008, Dr. Paul K Smith from West Chester University and I thought we'd take a look at the coordination involved in effective punching.  We recruited 10 expert martial artists, 5 from Shotokan Karate and 5 from Longfist Kungfu, attached electrodes to their muscles, and filmed them using 2D motion capture as they punched a makiwara board.  The goal was to see which factors best predicted the magnitude of peak acceleration.

"The findings suggest that a sequential pattern of muscular activation from the trunk to the fist was present to obtain the highest fist accelerations. The bicep brachii and triceps brachii were the stronger predictors such that the earlier peak acceleration of the fist is reached, the higher it will be."

Additionally, we found that the erector spinae muscle on the punching side was important to stabilizing the spine while punching.  And this brings us to our second idea.

If you are actually supporting your punch with your stance work, you are getting a fairly good leg workout at the same time.  Strong legs make for stronger punches.  Although we didn't instrument the abdominal muscles, one only needs to look at boxers when they punch to understand that punching (properly and with rotation) is a great ab workout.  The juxtaposition of good stances, body turning, and intensity means that punching can give you a really good workout even when you're not doing bag work.  I'll leave the rest for the video below.

By the way, regarding differences between the Longfist and Shotokan guys in the study, we didn't find any.  It turns out that when you want to hit a makiwara board effectively, the body does pretty much the same thing regardless of the style.  However, one of our Longfist guys did break a makiwara board on his first punch. :-)