Squattin600
That is an excellent little article you posted. Such information is rare.
Since people are talking about ways to hit an opponent more easily I thought I would add my two pennies.
Good fighters make use of the following skills to hit their opponent more sucessfully, foot movement, combination punching e.g. body-head to drop the guard, set up the punch (jabs), using different punch angles, feints, counter punching.
Always use punch discipline meaning don’t telegraph your punches, don’t pull your hand back, don’t tense up, don’t lift the elbow, vary the attack,an experienced opponent will pick up on all these cues and have more time to react. Also vital is accuracy for obvious reasons.
In addition good handspeed will augment these skills tremendously and make it alot easier to successfully hit your opponent. All the best fighters had superb handspeed. Muhammed Ali, Roy Jones, Oscar De la hoya, Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Shane Mosely e.t.c.
Patricia is right on, here!
There is no replacement for simple technique training. Commit to punching a set number of punches every day, just in the air, without the heavy bag yet. Also, exhale sharply as you reach full extension.
The theory is that once you do something 3000 times, it’s in your muscle memory. So once you’ve punched 3000 punches, you can start practicing on the heavy bag for additional power. What you want to do on the heavy bag is not push it back, but rather make it bend in the middle. That comes from a fast chamber (VERY fast chamber).
Make sure that the number of punches that you do everyday is an easy amount, so each punch is of high quality. Otherwise, you commit a bad punch to muscle memory.
Another thing that can increase your speed as well as power is the ripcords. They are rubber bands that provide additional resistance.
After you have good technique, good speed, and good accuracy, you can start adding in the weight training and plyometrics.
After the technique training, ripcords, and heavy bag training, plyometrics and weight training will add only miniscule, almost insignificant amounts, but nonetheless, you can still use them.
Whoah
Ripcords to add resistance!! NO DO NOT DO THIS IT DOES NOT WORK
It will slow you down. The resistance gets harder as you extend the punch this is the opposite of a non-loaded punch, you end up pushing not punching. By all means use it to assist.
Great advice from all, but I’d like to add in a quick question: why do you want to increase your punch speed?
If your goal is boxing or some other type of “sparring” sport, then you’re right to work on that type of improvement. For actual “street” or “combat” fighting, however, power and accuracy are far more important than speed. A typical street fight, unlike a ring fight, is over in 5-15 seconds. So you basically have a very limited window in which to land a decisive, crippling blow. You also don’t want to have the other guy land his. So standing toe to toe and trying to outspeed the other guy is folly.
A better solution is to manuever through feints and footwork into a position of advantage (i.e. where he can’t immediately strike you…to his side, at his back) and then end the fight with a powerful, accurate blow to a prime target.
None of this is easy, as it takes good technique and lots of reps. But there’s always someone bigger, stronger, and faster than you, so you’re better off training to end the fight quickly and safely.
Then again, if you’re training for a ring event, such forget everything I just said!!
Creed has a point. Sorry I didn’t elaborate on the ripcords. He’s right that when you extend it beyond approximately 80-85%, it becomes more pushing than punching. So what I do is extend it just a slight bit past 80-85% where I feel an extra bit of resistance. I don’t extend all the way. I wouldn’t recommend doing this too often, but just to give you that little extra power.
‘So standing toe to toe and trying to outspeed the other guy is folly.’
If you have the faster handspeed you will beat the other guy to the punch, very important even in a street fight.
Power is a function of speed and strength. That is a good reason to try and increase speed. That would explain why someone like Bruce Lee who was a small guy (although strong for his size)could hit so hard.
However it is more genetically limited though as Coolcol says. Tudor Bompa is of the opinion that improvements in power come 95% from strength gains and 5% from speed.
So yes you would be better off training for strength to increase power, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want to increase speed it is just not as easy too.
If you are not born with speed unfortunately it is difficult to improve it.
Agreed, Creed, but how can you be certain you’ll always be the faster guy?
Even if you reach your ultimate speed potential, odds are someone else will always be faster. Just as someone else will always be bigger, uglier, smellier, etc. Given that all of us only has so much time to devote to training, I’d opt for focusing on the stuff that a) ensures I won’t get hit, and b) ensures that when I do land a blow it counts. Far too many guys who train for speed do so at the neglect of full impact penetration, accuracy, etc.
And none of what I’m proposing suggests that speed is a bad thing, nor that power’s speed component can be neglected. My point was merely that too many fighting arts view speed as the be all, end all (which is further propogated by “contact” tournaments that end up being like a kid’s game of tag).
I’m not not an expert but I would say skill work as well as sparring, should take precedence over your weight training as of now, include it but slow down if it hinders your skill work.
One option that will help, that was not mentioned was shadow boxing with light weight dumbbells. One tip on this, when doing this DON’T SNAP YOUT PUNCHES, but go slow. Sounds dumb but don’t knock it until you try it.
Shadow boxing with dumbbells doesn’t have the training effect most people think it will.
The direction of gravity is down. All you will do by punching with dumbbells is train the delts to resist fatigue induced by gravity, so you might as well do isometric front raises.
You are better off training with ballistic smith bench presses or plyometric push ups for this effect, even then the movement is not the same because you can’t involve the legs. You are better off using a heavy bag.
Shadow boxing with dumbbells? Uh, no. As creed stated: bad idea.
Listen: anytype of weight training will only enhance your conditioning for boxing. Boxing is enhanced by “boxing training”; i.e., heavy bag work, sparring, shadow boxing, etc.
It’s really simple. VERY simple. To improve your punch, you work on your punching skills. Period. To improve your conditioning/strength add weight training.
And I should chime in too that punching with dumbells is unsafe. If you punch slow, you aren’t working on the “speed.” If you punch fast with a dumbell in your hand, count on some sharp pain in your front/rear delts (from what I felt when trying this).
Lots of good advice here, and not to hijack the thread but if your thinking of street fight applications then why not spend time on knees/elbows/open hand/low kicks?
Punch with a closed fist and most likely you’ll break something in your hand.
I think possibly the best dumbell exercise for punching is laying dumbell presses…flat bench. Try to explode the dumbells (alternating punches) to the top and stop short of locking the elbows, thereby, while actively preventing injury, also practicing correct punching form…
Myslinski’s info is key for simple hand speed training. Try this.
Get a 3-5lb dumbbell and get in the bent db row position. Starting at the top of the db row position DROP the dumbbell. NOW CATCH IT AS FAST AS POSSIBLE as you PUNCH through it in a downward motion and grab it HARD and RIP IT BACK to start and repeat. This is obviously done as fast as possible and jacks my CNS more than coffee. It can also be done in the front and lateral raise position (you know the bodybuilder shoulder exercise) and whatever other position. Light db and SPEED is key for this.
Other technique, distance, timing and tricks to use with respect to your opponent that are mentinoed above are necessary as well and can be developed with sparring drills. Isolate different aspects you want to train so you’re not always trying to learn this stuff in an all out fight. And nothing beats punching people in the face when they do something wrong. it just feels good and it trains away that pesky hesitation…hahaha
Scrappy
that sounds like a great exercise, going to give that one a try. I guess that would work as a form of overspeed training, using gravity as the external force to assist and allow you to punch faster than normal.
Ever tried bands? Only problem is you need to ‘set’ yourself for one effort then ‘set’ for the next.
“A self-supported db row+rebound, is an exercise we got from Jay Schroeder, is a loaded movement to an unloaded movement. Use a staggered stance and the leg that is out front is your support leg. You rest your elbow of the same side on your knee and perform a db row. After the required number of reps drop the db and grab a 3-5# db, hold at your hip and let the db drop, SHOOT your hand to grab the falling db(do not catch) and put back to your hip as fast as possible and repeat for 5 reps. Essentially a loaded to unloaded movement…Coach X”
