Today we did a striking drill that I’ll dub “my arm keeps getting shorter”. You throw an eyepoke, then a straight punch, then a wrist strike, then an elbow and finally a body check with the shoulder. Don’t like eyepokes or wrist strikes? Then just throw a punch, an elbow and a shoulder butt.
What’s the purpose of this drill? To get students to think about all the different weapons they’ve got with just a single arm! So many of us get hung up on our fists as the only weapon we’ve got – which is true if we are boxing but we aren’t so let’s expand our range and play a bit.
With our new found weapons, we did bit of four count street and chi-sao, seeing if we could make any of it work while also thinking of the idea of the closest target. Questions like: “should I punch my partner in the fist?” or “should I do a rising wrist strike to the chin?” cropped up. The answers to all these questions were: try it with a little bit of contact and see if it has any effect. Now you’ve got knowledge and knowledge is power, yes?
See the student’s thoughts here.