How To Punch - Part 1

 Pick any martial art, self-defence system or combat sport to train, and one of the first things you will be taught is how to throw a punch. It’s almost an instinctive thing that most of us feel like we’ve been able to do our whole lives. Balling up our hand into a solid object to hit with seems simple, yet it’s easy to get wrong.

For striking in Wing Chun Kung Fu for example, we say it takes longer to train the fist than the palm and it takes longer to train the fingers than the fist. The palm is the simplest because when we hit with our palm, we leave the hand open. Even babies can slap away things that they don’t like with their palm. It is also the easiest because we are less likely to hurt ourselves when striking with the palm

If we look at the opposite end of the difficulty scale, striking with the fingers takes a great deal of practice. Striking with the fingertips requires much more precision to hit the target than a punch or palm strike. It also requires you to know exactly when and where you can strike with the fingers. Even if you condition your fingers to be strong, if they strike against bone or hit at the wrong angle, you could injury or even break them.

A punch sits in the middle of these, because while the closed fist protects the fingers, there is smaller surface area to strike than with the palm. There is also a higher risk that if the angle of the strike is not correct or the fist not properly closed, we can injure our wrist and fingers.

Different styles of martial arts have different punches, and we will look at Tai Chi and Wing Chun punches in the next article, but for any type of punch, there is a basic structure that needs to be followed

First, we must keep the fist closed tightly. This protects the fingers from the shock of the impact. Next, we must keep the thumb wrapped around the end of the fingers. We do this to prevent it catching on or striking anything and it is almost as susceptible to injury as the rest of the fingers. Finally, we keep the fist aligned with the wrist and forearm. If the wrist is twisted, up, down or to the side when the fist makes impact, the force of the impact can twist the wrist further and injure the joint.

These are the basics we must know to form the punch. The next step is to decide how it is thrown.