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Finlay
Finlay's picture
Holding and hitting

Hello Took a very short video of one of our drills the other night and thought I would share even though it may be basic to a lot of you The idea behind the drill is to practice holding and hitting the target area. I introduce this idea for Do San, but it can be found in many other patterns In the clip the drill is done with eyes open. The next stage is to ptactics with eyes closed without losing speed or power.

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

Nice video! I think that many martial artists morph into boxers when on the pads, and while there is a place for that, we also need drills that employ the non-striking hands in an active way because that is more relevant to close-range self-protection. Always better to have the hand clearing a path, or locating the target, than being held in a passive guard. This is a nice simple drill to allow people to practise this concept.

Finlay wrote:
In the clip the drill is done with eyes open. The next stage is to practice with eyes closed without losing speed or power.

Great! At close-range, feeling is both faster and way more accurate than seeing. However, my experience has been may people ignore the “feeling” and run on sight alone. Getting them to shut their eyes means there only is feel … and it does not take long until they realise that are more accurate on feel alone. Proprioception is an innate ability and using it works incredibly well. It’s also the natural way to strike. The hand can either be a club or a clamp, proprioception is innate, and hence grabbing and hitting is the natural way to punch.

Thanks for sharing Finlay!

All the best,

Iain

JD
JD's picture

Hi Finlay,

Good vid! You put in your post ''it may be basic to a lot of you'', I tend to believe the basics are sometimes overlooked and should be trained more, after all when it comes to a real fight ''fancy'' and ''over complicated'' techniques tend to go out the window and what works is what's simple.

I love to grab an arm, Gi or head during sparring and deploy the ''hold and hammer'' techniques like in your vid, sometimes I'll use my fist or other times I use a palm. I also think an overlooked part of this effective skill is feeling the opponent and off balancing them with that holding/grabbing hand whilst also striking.

One of my fav things about this concept is when you bridge that gap from point scoring distance style fighting and you grab a hold of your opponent, some of them aren't used to this and so not only can't they defend or resist effectively, but frown as if it's totally illegal ha! ''send that man jail for holding and striking!'' lol 

All the best,

JD

Wastelander
Wastelander's picture

I do a lot of holding-and-striking padwork, although it's usually part of combinations, rather than focused like this. Thanks for sharing!