Ready for some controversy?
Here goes.
Everyone (that is, in boxing and the MMA world) is teaching wrong insofar as punching is concerned.
The safest and most powerful punch you can throw is JKD’s leading straight punch. It’s not the hook, the overhand or the cross. Nope. Those strikes appear heavier, but they’re not. Let’s take a look at the reasons.
First, the chin is the gateway to the KO since getting caught on the jaw causes more rotational force than a strike to the middle of the face. This rotation results in the brain moving more within the skull and, therefore, a KO can result. It’s for this reason that boxers are trained with near religious fervency to keep their chin down. The leading straight punch, on the other hand, since it catches the enemy dead-center of the face, doesn’t result in the rotational force of hooks and crosses. That leads people – wrongly – to think it’s not as powerful as those other blows. Some disregard it altogether as a power punch.
Second, the leading straight punch is the mark of a master. Wild swings are easier for novices and a solid straight punch takes time to develop. Since many fighters are impatient and aggressive, they don’t always devote the needed time to develop their most essential fighting tool – the leading hand. It’s a very human conundrum. It’s easier to spend money than to save it. It’s easier to eat chocolate and carbs than fruits and veggies. What’s good for us requires discipline. Skill is not, repeat not, normal.
None of us arrived at the delivery room ready for combat.
When the doctor went to smack us on the bottom we didn’t parry, and counter with quick shot to the jaw and say, “no one touches my baby butt, you perv!” Nope. We all have to learn. We have to practice. This is a little of what Sijo Lee meant when he spoke of unnatural naturalness. All great truths are paradoxical, by the way. (Forgive me my philosophical/theological nerdiness…I can’t help myself.)
Anyway, there’s a third consideration and that’s the advent of the gloved era.
The straight punch is the hallmark of self-defense. It keeps the hitter a smaller target than other punches. It travels less distance to the enemy, so it’s faster. It hardly (or at all) disrupts the balance of the hitter and is easier to transport (that is, integrate into one’s footwork). It’s less telegraphic and fully automatic, which is to say you can whip out furious combos with ease.
The other exigent issue is that the straight punch is safer for the hand. For one, it lands properly. Modern punching methods rely on the glove entirely too much for both punching and defense. The curved design of modern gloves protects – and, therefore, encourages – bad technique. A good punch requires a three-knuckle landing, thereby keeping the optimal alignment and reducing risk of injury to the hand and wrist. Roundhouse and all angle blows increase the risk of a bad landing, which is to say a busted paw.
And breaking one’s hand because of bad technique isn’t exactly a smart self-defense tactic. Yeah, sure, there’s always a risk of hurting one’s hand when punching but the goal of fistic science (Jeet Kune Do) is to minimize or even eradicate that risk. Modern punching technique is all but a guarantee for breaking one’s hand. That is, of course, unless you walk around wearing hand wraps and gloves. Good luck with that.
Old-school boxing manuals (see Colonel Monstery, for example) speak of coaches/professors closely monitoring sparring sessions so that pupils didn’t fall into bad habits. The gloves (mufflers as they were called then) were like having sweets in the house. It’s easy to snack too much if there are treats in the pantry. Likewise, the glove protected the hand from the physics of bad landings and students would be tempted to abandon their discipline and resort to angled swings in order to score.
A coach was advised to warn the pupil at that point and if the problem persisted, they’d pull them from the sparring exercise. In more extreme scenarios, for obstinate students, they’d have them work on the pole, which was a lightly padded support column in the building.
Without the glove.
Hitting a harder object with the bare fist would quickly force them to use proper technique. Some people have to learn from experience. But never, never forget that experience is a terrible teacher because it gives the test first and the lesson later.
So, with that said, we must point out that the majority of boxing and combat sport schools are teaching students to break their hands with bad punching technique. Moreover, by teaching poor technique they erode one’s defensive structure, which leads to positional issues that they try and fix with more technique. This is precisely how simplicity goes out the window. It’s better not to have the problem in the first place than to try and fix it later, right?
The leading straight punch is the answer to all this. Once it’s properly developed, the student has a fully transportable bomb! And the strike zone of this bomb is the middle of the face. A heavy smash to the nose with a bare fist will rearrange the recipient’s face as though Mr. Potato Head fell down the stairs. Twice.
Parenthetically, besides encouraging poor technique, gloves give us a false sense of security. A fist to the nose is nasty business. Boxers talk about having a good chin and all that but a heavy JKD straight lead to the beak will turn one’s face into hamburger meat in short order.
Maximum payload comes from the short thrust of the powerline. The key is to make sure the knuckles are facing the same direction the body weight is moving at impact. The proper mechanics of the straight lead require a thrust, not exaggerated shoulder-whirl. Too much shoulder turn destroys the power-line of the straight punch. Use pure shoulder-whirl with the hook. The hip and shoulder will twist into the straight lead, yes, but the action is a sharp forward thrust. Many novices use too much twisting/turning action with the straight lead, mistakenly thinking they put body behind their punch. More is better, they think. On the contrary, all they’ve done is throw an expensive arm-punch. For maximum wallop, the body weight must be moving into the punch and that’s achieved through the coordination of the weight going forward, not circling across one’s centerline.
It’s the thrusting action that makes the straight lead such a beauty. To the uneducated it doesn’t look like you really did anything at all.
The jab isn’t to be confused with the straight lead. The jab is an arm punch. It’s pure speed and requires no follow through, nor hip/shoulder thrust. Many JKDers make the mistake of confusing the tactical use of these two strikes. The jab and straight lead aren’t like your girlfriend and your mistress. You aren’t cheating on one with the other. You don’t always have to throw the straight lead rather than the jab. Use them tactically. The straight lead is a heavy but super fast bomb. The jab can easily set up its heavier cousin.
Great care should be taken in the development of the straight lead. Many students will try and get power by telegraphing. This is a sign of a weak on-guard stance. The proper ready-position is a mobile power station! Once the student has the hang of the non-telegraphic jab, they should be introduced to the straight lead. Once they have the mechanics of the punch, footwork should be added. By adding the forward step, the straight lead becomes a nightmare for the enemy because not only will you be bringing shoulder and hip into the punch, but momentum from your whole body moving forward. (This can also be achieved by simply countering him as he moves forward, thus getting the “falling step” lead to work in reverse…his footwork instead of yours).
The “push-shuffle” straight lead is something that requires its own column, but suffice it to say that the JKD straight lead is, when executed properly, the most powerful punch one can throw! As well as the safest. It’s for this reason Sijo Lee called it the backbone of JKD.
Get this down and you can sing, “I got the power!” Or you can hum it in your head. Suit yourself.
Either way, happy training.