When I read that headline, which compared a hard fist to a shotgun blast to the face, I laughed, and I groaned. I laughed because it was so over the top that it would pull in tons of readers. I groaned because it is so far away from what a real Powerful Punch is.
The headline came from one of these internet pages. You know the ones I’m talking about. They hit you with the headline, then splash you with ‘Gee, I’m like you,’ and if you give me money you can kill the bullies.’
Now, aside from the fact that killing, even of a bully, is a little frowned upon, there is the misrepresentation of what a punch is. Do you know how much power there is in a shotgun blast? Do you know how much roid rage you’d have to incur to actually punch somebody in the face as hard as a load of buckshot?
And, if you were fighting ten guys, would you be able to get that much rage, and sustain it through hitting ten guys in the face? Can you see that this overkill is not really logical? Can you see that it plays to the emotional child within, offering a solution that is pure comic book?
I’ve written probably a hundred thousand words on how to punch. I’ve written these words in taekwondo articles and kung fu books, and, beyond that spoken a few hundred thousand words on the subject in martial arts DVD courses. So let me give you the real skinny on what a punch is.
Body alignment. Intention. Using as little energy as possible.
Go on, read that last paragraph again, because it says it all. On one of my courses I teach a fellow how to punch. No, it’s not three months of only punching, it is only five minutes of how to punch at the beginning of some twenty odd lessons, and concentrating on how to actually accomplish those three concepts I mentioned in the last paragraph.
The punching part of the lesson is four minutes and fifty seconds of working, until he understands, and the next lesson is four minutes and forty seconds of working, and then four minutes and thirty seconds until he understands, and so on, until he finally does his perfectly aligned, intense, effortless punch the first time. Personally, I don’t think training somebody to launch a shotgun blast to the face is very much fun, or very efficient; I would much rather train him how to make a powerful punch with no effort, a perfectly aligned body, and the correct knowledge of what a punch is.
I teach the correct method for how to punch in the Three Month Black Belt course. Check it out at Monster Martial Arts.
Matrix Martial Arts 