Punching the air

Hi Nick: I´ve got a question for you. Quite often in the RBSD world, people refer to their previous training in traditional arts as "walking up and down and punching air."

On the old site, you´ve always defended good, hard, old-fashioned traditional training. I was wondering if you see a role for striking the air.

For what it´s worth, I think it´s useful for learning the core mechanics of a strike and cranking out high reps, but it´s a bit silly unless you also progress to hitting a wallbag / heavy bag / pad / partner / whatever.

All the best,
RGC

Socrates,

Good question mate. Let me tackle the two parts one at a time.

Yes, I see value in it. If you teach the technique to someone, standing in place and not hitting anything allows them to perfect it. I've always found that letting someone hit either the bag or makiwara too early causes their technique to immediately degenerate largely because they're trying to get that object to move. (so their punch/kick becomes more of a push than a strike)

Having said that, once they've reached about green belt level then they do bagwork, pad work and makiwara in all the traditional systems I've studied. Also remember our free sparring was pretty heavy contact. At white belt you weren't supposed to make contact at all. As your control developed you were supposed to touch the gi at blue belt, about half an inch (to the body) at green, an inch at brown, and good solid contact to the body at black belt and above. Touch contact was allowed to the face at brown belt level and above (this was bareknuckles of course, and you'd often see split lips, nosebleeds and black eyes after sparring sessions)

Nick

PS: Boxers also shadow box which is done for more or less the reasons I stated above as well as allowing you to train when you don't have a bag or a training partner.

Thanks for the reply Nick. I wonder if anyone disagrees with this? We haven´t had any good arguments on the new site yet...

If I can just state for the record that everything Nick Hughes says is rubbish, and that he wouldn't know what a fight was if it turned up and combed his long blonde hair!

I've never trained in TMA, but I can see the value in 'punching air'.
As Nick says, it helps you build good form and it's never hurt boxers!

Also, once you can generate a load of power, you can't really go round smacking things/people full-on because you'd do too much damage either to them or your own limbs!

As I develop stuff for myself I can see it's a really valuable thing to have 'forms' where you can practice movements and techniques slow and precise to build "muscle/subconscious memory" and then separate sessions where you can smack the living shit out of someone/thing to get a feel for doing it for real.

Currently I'm trying to devise some combatives 'forms' to enable me to practice my own little syllabus when I'm out and about and just want to go through moves and do what is effectively shadow boxing.

The main key that is an absolute requisite in "punching air" is visualization. Without that it's just dancing.

A study was done a long time ago with 3 teams trained differently. One group did physical drills only, the 2nd did visualization drills only and the 3rd worked a 50/50 split on both. The 3rd group cleaned house apparently.

Here's something else people forget about kata work. How often do you get to "kill" someone when you work out for real against a living opponent? I can set up a scenario in my kata where I'm a fight for my life against eight to twelve people and "kill" every one of them. A lot of people who go shooting over here do that when they use their gat but they neglect that aspect of empty hand training. While I honestly hope it never gets to that stage it's something we all have to think about,...and you'd better have thought about it long before you end up in a situation where you may have to.

Nick