Martial Arts: How do I punch harder?

The actual experience of a "hard punch" is deceptive. It's like hitting a baseball just the
right way. When you do it right it seems effortless and the ball just flies. When you do it
wrong, it hurts a lot and the ball seems unimpressed.

The key to that delivery is balance. I don't mean balance-beam balance, although that's
important too. I mean a balanced contribution to the punch from the various parts of your
body working on the project - and some are not so obvious.

The highest level of contribution to a "hard punch" looks something like this:

Anatomy of a hard punch

1. Mass
2. Hardness / rigidity
3. Bracing
4. Speed
5. Surface concentration
6. Penetration
7. Targeting
8. Angle

So, there you go! It's simple enough! Except it's not. It's easy to make a list, but execution
is tough. There are lots of little nuances to remember, and commit to muscle memory until
they become automatic, and some of them are really counter-intuitive. But we can punch
this elephant one jab at a time (note: it's is not recommended to punch elephants as you
are likely fighting out of your weight class).

I will write mostly about a straight punch here, because while all of these principles apply
to all punches, the way to get the best result for a hook is different than for a power-hand
cross. I will also focus on a pure power punch, but it's important to know that a fight is not
just about hitting hard, it's about hitting the target, and that often requires setting up a
power punch so it actually hits something important. That means that there is a place for
light jabs, feints, etc..

Mass
The bad news is, people bigger than you hit harder than you. The good news is that's only
true if they actually hit you with their weight.

Most inexperienced people punch with big wild swings. This kind of punch is called a
haymaker. It kind of looks fun, but it's not all that effective as a power move. It has its uses
to get around a guard and do some damage, but don't mistake it for a "hard punch"

A hard punch has mass behind it. That means instead of isolating the arm from the rest of
the mass of the body, you need to punch so that the arm is more like an extension of the
body that can deliver the bulk of your mass into a target.

An easy way to think about it is like this. If you were trying to dig a hole with a shovel,
would you hold it way off to the side and swing like a haymaker, or would you tuck your
elbows in tight and push straight in with the mass of your body behind it? Right.
Haymakers suck for digging holes. Here's a guy who is setting his feet correctly, and
putting his weight behind his punches.

Here's a list of tips for digging in and doing damage with a straight punch.

Get a balanced stance, don't lean or move off balance

1. Keep your elbows tucked in close

2. Punch from your pecks - if you think of your punch driving from your chest you
will keep your body behind your fist better
3. Rotate your hips into your strike - this lets you move your center mass into the
punch
4. Trigger the punch with an explosive shove from your feet so that your whole
body is moving into the punch in a short, tight movement

Why is this hard part hard / confusing for people? We all know how to dig a hole, right?
Nobody uses a shovel wrong?

1. Wide punches make instinctive sense because you see the guy has hands up in
front of his face and you assume it's better to go around. (NOTE: a HOOK punch
and a haymaker are not the same. The hook is a way to go around someone's
guard WITH your mass behind the punch. But people throwing haymakers don't
know the difference.)
2. Big wide arm motions look impressive and threatening, so they seem like the
right thing to do.
3. It's much easier to get practice making contact digging a hole with a shovel than
punching people.
4. If your weight is on your forward foot too much and your stance is too wide,
then when you drop your weight to strike, the action of dropping your weight
evenly onto your feet can actually pull your body backwards away from your
target while your fist is moving towards it.
5. If you over-rotate your hips into a punch then you are actually accelerating the
mass of your body parallel to the target even though your fist is still on target.
6. Many people rotate their shoulders and hips (and therefore their mass) away
from the target rather than cork-screwing TOWARDS the target. This generates
conflicting momentum. Their arm and forward shoulder are being thrown
towards the target, but their center of gravity is being pulled away from the
target. When you rotate hips and shoulders, rotate INTO the target, not away.
 This means using your legs to project forward a bit, but does NOT mean leaning
at the waist.

Hardness / rigidity
You can put your mass behind a bean bag, but you are unlikely to knock anybody out with
it. On the other hand, you can take a gentle swing with a baseball bat and be pretty
dangerous. This is the point of brass knuckles... well, that and protecting the small bones
of your hand.

If you want to hit someone "hard" then hit them with something harder than they are.
When it comes to a punch, we're talking about the fist. If you don't want to be hitting with
a comparative bean bag, then there are a few things you should do.

1. Learn to tighten your fist at the point of impact. You don't want to tense before
impact because that interferes with speed, but you do want a hard fist when
you hit. If you want to see this in action, try working a speed bag, and hit it with
a loose hand a few times - now, without changing anything else, just tighten
your fist as you hit.
2. Hit with the "rams" or the biggest two knuckles of your hand. People often hit
with the wrong part of their hands. The rams are hard and strong.

While hitting with the hard part of your hand is a good idea, it is explicitly a BAD idea if
you're hitting something harder than your knuckles, e.g. the top of someone's head, or
directly into teeth. It's gonna hurt.

Rigidity is the other part. You want structural reinforcement. Think of it this way, if you
jabbed someone with a stick that has a hinge in the middle and it just folded, it wouldn't
hurt much. Guess what your arm is? Yep! A stick with a couple of hinges.

When you punch you don't want any kind of shock absorption to take the power out of
your punch. So work on these things:

1. Line the knuckles up with the radius bone.

2. Straighten the arm (without locking out the elbow competely) so that the
resistance to the punch pushes straight back into your body.
3. Tense your body during the impact for just the split second it takes to deliver the
force and push the shockwave back into the punchee's body.
4. Compress your breath and tighten your core so that your torso doesn't become
a big shock absorber.
Why is this difficult?

Because people think that they should be punching with their arm instead of their whole
body, so they never think about structural reinforcement. It's also difficult because people
have poor timing and distance control. If you are mechanically throwing an "outside"
punch that is meant to be delivered at full extension even though your opponent is in
close, then you fail to achieve rigidity at the moment of impact.

Bracing
Power comes from the ground! Well, not really, but it does get projected back into the
target instead of rebounding into you if you are braced correctly. If you have rigidity /
structural reinforcement, you might as well brace yourself against something strong... like
asphalt... instead of a trampoline.

1. When you punch, drop your heels and plant your feet.
2. As your feet drop, let the wave of power it generates ignite your hip rotation
and arm extension
3. As you strike, make sure you punch with both feet, staying grounded
4. Brace yourself against the ground like you would if you were pushing on
something heavy... but with more balance and do it explosively
5. Gravitational marriage - sink a bit as you strike. This will settle your body into a
solid brace against the ground and add one more movement of your body mass
into the strike while "borrowing" energy from gravity.

Speed
Some people say that power hurts, but speed kills. A lead pipe might be heavy, but a
bullet is fast. The truth for a punch is that you are going to need mass since you are not
going to be as fast as a bullet, but you need speed too.

Expressed mathematically, the kinetic energy in a punch is:

k = 0.5 * mass * velocity^2

So the contribution of speed to this equation is squared. Squared is good.

Tension is the enemy of speed. It's why the marines like to say that "slow is smooth and
smooth is fast". They don't actually mean slow. What they mean is that if you train
slowly, stay relaxed, increase your speed as you go and avoid tension then you will
develop speed. You will also stay precise and avoid costly mistakes.
You will definitely be faster than a big, sloppy, tense mess of an effort. Think about any
truly legendary Olympic athlete. They make it look easy, right? That's lack of tension.

When you tense you contract opposing muscle groups to try to be strong and you end up
fighting yourself. I like to think of it this way... suppose you wanted to knock some teeth
out with a baseball. Now suppose that you could either throw a slow but "strong" hit with
it, or you could whip that baseball into my face with arm speed like a major league pitcher
and tense up only at the last second to brace for impact.

Yeah... I'd rather be the pitcher, too. Or at least not the teeth.

Some tips for speed:

1. Let your body react. If you have ever accidentally touched a hot stove, you have
experienced a Reflex arc. One thing about a reflex arc... it's not interested in
what your conscious mind thinks is fast. In the most elastic and relaxed way,
only the set of muscles required for maximum speed fire and BAM your hand is
now NOT on the stove. Let your punches trigger and extend like a reflex arc.
Don't let opposing tension get in the way.
2. Train explosively. You want fast twitch muscle developed to help you explode
with power.
3. Let a "wave" of motion build speed in your body as you trigger that heel plant,
hip rotation, shoulder roll, arm extension. Let it all flow and build speed.
4. TIME YOUR OPPONENT. Two cars colliding head on is worse than one car hitting
a parked car. Your speed + your opponents speed means more power. That one
thing can probably add more incremental speed to your punch than anything
else you can do yourself once you are decently fast.
5. Manipulate your opponent into moving into your strike. For example, a gut shot
makes him bend over, so meet his descending chin with an upper cut.

Surface concentration

What works better, the tip of a knife or a beer can?

Yeah... I'd rather have the beer, too. But I mean for damage.

The smaller the contact point, the more the power you generate will concentrate in the
opponent. So digging one knuckle into someone's temple while punching is more effective
than your whole fist crashing into their gut.
Penetration
If you hit fast and concentrated, with a hardened fist, rigid and braced with all of your
mass... and you penetrate 1/2mm into someone's face, what do you get? Not much.

You need to get about 1.5" into the target to create the effect you want. If you punch
shallow you won't get much out of it.

On the other hand, if you try to hit about 6" into the target what you're actually doing is
making solid contact with the opponent while your body is all out of alignment. You won't
get mass, rigidity or bracing to feed into the impact. You will just bounce off of them.

Targeting
Punching someone's shin is a bad idea. Punching their temple, a kidney, the solar plexus,
the eye, etc. is effective. If you want the effect to be a "hard punch" then hit something
that counts.

Tips on targeting

1. When you practice, hit the heavy bag, etc., don't just "hit the bag". Hit a spot on
the bag.
2. Know what your target is as you swing.

Angle
The angle of your strike can cause radically different effects on the target. Think about
punching a pencil held in a vise, but punching it right on the tip. Even if it's not
sharpened! OUCH! Now think about punching the pencil broadside - snap, no big deal.
Compressing the whole length of that pencil is difficult. Snapping the relatively thin width
of the pencil is easy.

You are probably interested in punching some things are aren't pencils. Unless you just
have a weird fetish. So, some thoughts on angle versus target:

1. Hitting the tip of the chin from the side is bad for the chin. It's an angle that will
torque the jaw.
 2. Hitting the ribs with a downward thrust is bad for the ribs because it collapses
them and crushes the organs underneath. Ribs are designed to flex with a
straight-on impact. They are not designed to be folded up like an accordion.
3. Hitting the jaw in a way that rocks the head back is bad for the brain. It causes it
to slosh around and hit the inside of the skull causing unconsciousness.

Think about and learn what the proper angle of attack is for a target and use it.

While all of these factors are important individually, the balance and the timing of them
are essential. Triggering speed without getting your mass moving, or moving your mass
into the punch before the snap of contact means that each factor is only hitting in
isolation. You need to shift weight, snap speed, harden fists, brace legs, extend to rigidity,
etc. etc. all culminating at the moment of impact.

If the hip goes first, the hand follows. If the hand goes first, the hip follows. Would you
rather be driving your hand with your hip, or dragging your hip around with your hand?

It's like cooking a great meal. Serving the whole plate as one glorious experience with
every element fresh from the grill/pot/oven at its perfect moment requires starting
everything at the right time so they finish together. Otherwise, some of the food is cold
and soggy while only the last thing on the plate is perfect.

SO! Once you've got all of that down, bam! You can hit like a truck! Or Bruce Lee! Or
maybe Paul Mills!

This question can be answered on a few different levels. I'll take you as far down the rabbit
hole as I can.

The first, and most important, is what I call angular generation. You strike "with your hip
and not your arm", allowing the power to be generated almost entirely by the rotation of
your body and only secondarily by your arm and shoulder. This is the bread and butter
method of power generation. Note that your torso doesn’t rotate altogether with the hip;
it should be more like a “wave”, where the jerk of the hip initiates and then it travels up
your abdomen and flings your arm forward (i.e. there’s a phase shift).

The second is what I call translational generation. You shift your weight stepping/bursting)
into the strike.

This method generates less power than the first and requires that you pay additional
attention to get the distance and extension just right so you don't jam yourself, to make
sure you're on target, and to make sure you don't over-weight your stance and leave
yourself open to a take-down or sweep; that extra attention can be a serious liability in a
fight.
This should primarily be used when your footwork provides you with an opportunity, and
then only with due caution.

The third and fourth are what I call selective tension and proper structure. When you tense
your body you feel "strong," but each muscle in each paired group is actually fighting the
other (slowing you down and reducing your power). Your strikes should be like "rope with
a hammer at the end." You relax the opposing muscle groups and only engage those
needed for a particular set of movements (rope). Just before you strike, you tense only the
hand and forearm (hammer) to protect them from damage, but remain otherwise relaxed.
Further, by properly aligning your bones and joints and impacting at the proper extension,
you ensure that no undesirable "springy-ness" is back-absorbing some of the power you
meant to impact with.

When these are used in conjunction with angular generation, your strikes become
devastatingly strong and fast. Even a small, light person can generate enough power to
crack ribs or dislocate jaws.

The fifth is the "internal power" of the Internal Chinese Martial Arts, what I call vermicular
generation. It is not exactly distinct from the first and third/fourth, given that all are
almost always used in conjunction, but it can be categorized separately for didactic
purposes. Vermicular generation is achieved by creating a worm-like motion along the
spine (thus the name). Basically, this is done by arching the back and then quickly
contracting the abdominal muscles, whipping the shoulders/arms forward. Be careful as
exaggerating this motion can hurt your spine. The motion isn't limited only to back-front;
when you rotate as you (carefully and properly) whip your spine, you also create a similar
motion from side to side using your obliques/intercostals and lats.

A great master (regardless of art) will combine these five with devastating consequence.
The first, second, and fifth are all methods of generating power, while the third and fourth
are concerned with minimizing loss during transmission. The timing in combining them
must also be extensively trained so that they work as a unified whole to produce the
maximum output. Used together at the highest level, they give the appearance of the body
"shuddering" and the striking arm "bouncing" forward yet all in a single fluid motion.

I think every martial artist should strive to master these five elements of power, but most
persons will only ever learn (and probably never master) the first two. This is OK,
considering the large time investment required and thus the relatively small benefit to cost
ratio (compared to simply learning to strike vulnerable points, for instance). But a rabbit
can dream!

This video demonstrates all five of the elements, albeit in exaggeration and without the
snap of a real strike. They don't always have to look exactly this way but can be
incorporated into any art and any movement.

Addendum:
In addition to these elements of power, you can increase the effectiveness of your strikes
using some other relatively simple principles (though not directly related to punching
harder).
Knockouts are caused most easily by rotational acceleration (see How does one render
another unconscious with a single punch?).

Strikes with spin are more difficult to deflect properly, and can help with distancing, flow,
and preventing self-injury. Incorporate spin where appropriate.

Short duration of impulse is just as important as the magnitude of the peak force for
causing soft tissue damage (shorter wavelength of induced pressure waves increases
inelastic dissipation). Accelerate near and through the point of contact rather than just
building up momentum over a long path (although this must be balanced with the need to
avoid the "springy-ness" that comes with sub-optimal extension); this also makes your
strikes harder to read and react to. Some of you may be familiar with this concept
as FaJing (the term is very vague, however).

Dislocating jaws or cracking ribs requires a certain amount of "penetration" (more

accurately: translation or material deflection, respectively). Learn to gauge the amount of
"penetration" necessary to cause the desired injury while balancing the need to minimize
the "springy-ness" that occurs at sub-optimal extension. This concept is different
from FaJing since it doesn't matter how the work is done, only that the "penetration" is
sufficient to cause some form of mechanical failure (though in practice they tend to go
hand in hand).

To prevent injury to your hands when fighting bare-knuckle, attack soft with hard and
hard with soft. Use palm/wrist/blade strikes on "hard" areas and fist/knuckle/finger
strikes on "soft" areas.