My Arm Keeps Getting Shorter!

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.