As well as being very good at Wing Chun, it appears that my sifu is also a mind reader. I’d been thinking about how to develop more power in my punches and other strikes and then in last night’s class he  decided to do a little bit on developing punching power.

An Exercise For Developing Punching Power

It’s a simple exercise to do, but of course it hurts after only a very short time doing it. Here are the steps:

• hold one arm stretched out in front of you
• make a fist and squeeze tightly
• as quick as you can stretch out your fingers as far as they will go. The important points are ‘as quick as you can’ and ‘as far as they will go’. Doing this will exercise your tendons more
• snap the fingers back into a tight fist again
• repeat this cycle as fast as you can

You’ll find that you can’t do this for too long which is good. This means that you are getting a good workout in a very short space of time. When one hand is fatigued, do the same on the other hand. When that one is fatigued, return to the original hand.

You might have to get someone to feed you afterwards!

What’s Wrong With Sandbag Training?

Some people like to train their punches by punching a sandbag. There’s nothing wrong with doing this as long as you know what’s actually going on. This exercise doesn’t improve your punching power, it toughens the knuckles and turns your fists into hammers (as my sifu says). Which, again, is fine as long as you realise that punching a sandbag repeatedly over a long period of time is likely to cause joint problems in your knuckles in later life. You’d have to give up the piano, that’s for sure.

But think about it. When you punch anything, at what point in that punch are you generating the power? It’s before the impact on your target. Anything from the impact onwards, is after the power has been generated. When punching a sandbag, at the point of the impact you’ve already generated the power. This means that if you practise everything up to actually hitting the sandbag, you are still practising the generation of power. The sandbag is unnecessary. Simply punching into thin air will develop power.

So, tedious as some people might find it, a good exercise for developing punching power is to stand in a basic stance and punch with one hand and then the other. Make each punch count, it has to be strong. Don’t fall into the trap of firing off a thousand chain punches a minute. If you hit someone with those light punches, the chances are they will still be standing when you open your eyes again. So snap each punch out quickly and with force.

I’m going to have to make another revision to my new training routine to include these power generation exercises.