Stu

One of the most basic summations of physical self-defence is simply: hit the other person really hard. That’s it. For all the useful tricks and tips that are out there, a good sixty or seventy percent of the time, it involves nothing more than getting a good, hard shot in early. It’s a game that is primarily about power, although there are certainly other factors at play.

Now, that might be a comforting thought for some people, but I’m guessing that, for the majority, it’s a little worrying. After all, not all of us are massive, muscular types able to bench press small mountains. I’m certainly not. But hitting hard isn’t just a question of being big and strong. Those things are a massive advantage, but even a much smaller person can dramatically increase their power by understanding a few basic ideas.

First, where does our power come from? Well, unless you’re about to start trusting your life to the notion of chi or ki, which even as an occasional internal arts practitioner I think is nonsense, there aren’t that many sources for it. Your muscles can generate force in a strike, and the weight of your body behind it can add to it. That is, for the most part, it. It’s just a question of how you use those factors.

So how do you use them? Well, the most important principle here is to make sure that as much of yourself as possible is going into the strike. If you think for a moment about another endeavour where power is needed, hitting a cricket shot, you’ll probably know that batters like to have their weight moving forward into the ball as they hit it in order to generate maximum power. The same thing applies here. If you just move your arm or upper body, you won’t hit as hard as if your whole body weight moves into the target.

One easy way to get the feeling of that is to step into a few strikes. Step forward as you hit the pads, just to get a feel for moving your whole body. Remember though, that is just to understand the idea, because usually when defending yourself, you won’t have the kind of distance needed for that approach.

What you should still have, though, is the feeling of your body moving as a connected, coherent whole. If you’re throwing a punch, it should begin with you pushing off from your feet, generating power through your legs and hips, turning your shoulders, and only then putting it out through your arm. That is a point stressed by people as far apart as boxers and tai chi practitioners. Indeed, one of my old tai chi teachers used to say that it shouldn’t feel like you have any arms when you’re hitting someone, because they aren’t doing the work.

One thing that occasionally isn’t stressed enough, however, is that these things don’t happen at quite the same time. I know that some people (and yes, the internal arts do this a lot) stress that every part of your body should move together, but that really doesn’t make much sense in terms of generating maximum force. Instead, while your body needs to be used in a connected way, the individual parts need to fire in sequence, so that each adds to the power of the last.

Let’s go back to that cricket shot we were talking about earlier. For a perfect shot, the batsman will move his feet, turn his waist, rotate his shoulders, and only then bring his arms through. Trying to move the arms at the same time as the feet will result in a shot where there is less power. The same thing applies when you are trying to punch, kick or elbow someone.

What you are actually looking for, therefore, is a kind of whipping action, where the motion you have built up through the body comes out of the striking surface only once every body part has contributed. Generating force becomes a question of timing then, rather than pure strength.

Practise on the pads to get a feel for it. Start with a very large motion, and gradually make it smaller. You should quickly be able to feel the difference. More than that, you should quickly begin to generate the kind of force that ends fights.