When your feet are on the floor, you can transmit force. When they’re off the ground, you can’t.
The Principles of Striking 4: Knees and Elbows Draw the Arc of Your Strikes
What’s the essential difference between a jab, a hook and an uppercut? It’s the same difference between a push kick and a round kick, believe it or not.
The Principles of Striking 3: Your Hands Travel To and From Your Face
There are a few reasons for this.
- Your hands are part of your guard. If your hands aren’t in contact with your opponent’s body, causing pain or manipulating their guard and expectations, they should be on your face. You can’t get hit if your gloves are in the way. Simple.
- You’re far more accurate if your punches issue from your chin. Some people prefer to guard higher, keeping the hands near the top of the head for better coverage and effective use of the forearms for blocking. When you punch, however, lower the hands to your chin. Wild punches coming from your chest are going to be all over the show, as futile as trying to hit a pigeon with a roman candle.
- Lastly, yet of equal importance to the first two points is that if your hands do nothing other than travel to the target and then back to guard, there is little for your opponent to see and little indication that it’s coming.
The Principles of Striking 2: Rotation
Question: Why are fighting sports split into weight classes?
Answer: Because your weight is the engine of your power.
To put it simply, a one hundred kilogram person hits you with one hundred kilos, provided that it’s properly recruited.
The Principles of Striking 1: Breathing
Striking is the art of generating as much power as is humanly possible to incapacitate an opponent. This is defined by the equation, ‘mass times speed over distance’.
Simply put, the variables involved are related as follows: how much the weapon weighs, how fast it travels and finally, how far it travels.
The greatest fighters are masters of this equation and are constantly mitigating and modifying it to get the knockout. After all, there’s no room for discussion when your opponent is laid out on his back.
Catching Cannonballs: Aussie Jumps into Dutch Training Cauldron
International Kickboxer Magazine, Volume 16, Number 2
Melbourne Heavyweight Jarrod Boyle jumped on a plane at the end of February and headed to Breda, Holland for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – to train at the Golden Glory Gym of K1 stars Semmy Schilt, Stefan Leko and Chalid ‘Die Faust’ Arrab under the auspices of legendary trainers Cor Hemmers and Ramon Dekkers. Here he talks to MICHAEL SCHIAVELLO about life in the cauldron of one of the world’s most successful and toughest gyms.
Inside Golden Glory, the World’s Number One Dutch Kickboxing Gym
International Kickboxer Magazine, Volume 16, Number 3
Australian Heavyweight Jarrod Boyle lives in Breda, Holland, where he trains out of the world-renowned Golden Glory Gym, home to such champions as Semmy Schilt, Errol Zimmerman, Gokhan Saki and Stefan Leko. In the following story, Jarrod takes us inside a typical Dutch ‘A Class’ training session.