The fist is a noble weapon too; putting up your fists to protect your honor or boxing in a ring, are seen as noble, heroic, and manly by much of western society.
To try to help those who might suffer the same fate as I, and countless other martial artists, here are the fundamental lessons I’ve learned about using the fist during my marital art career: Proper Tension When you strike with a fist what you’re really doing is using your fist as a medium through which to transfer your body weight into your target.
There is a saying that you want your fist to be “Knuckle white” which means that you squeeze it so tight some of the color drains from your fist.
The reason for that is that people generally hit with a “Horizontal fist”, or in other words when they punch they hold their fist so that their palm faces the ground and the back of their hand faces the sky.
The horizontal fist fights the natural structure of the body and therefore I never use it.
In the vertical fist you make your fist the same way as the horizontal fist but you strike with it upright so the pinkie side of your fist is facing the ground and the thumb side of your fist is facing the sky.
The vertical fist does have a drawback; because of the way the fist is designed this fist tends to lead with the knuckles of your ring and pinkie fingers instead of the stronger index and middle fingers.
The diagonal fist has been my fist of choice for well over 15 years and everyone who I know that has tried it has adopted it, save a few very traditional Karate practitioners who understood the logic and liked the fist but at the end of the day they could not accept it as “Karate”.
Have them extend their fist to your solar plexus and you’ll see that the knuckles of their index and middle fingers are right there at the very front of the fist.
The way you remedy that is to firstly don’t punch to the head or neck and secondly, if you do, you should use a “Diagonal upset fist”.
An upset fist means that you turn your fist over so that your palm faces the sky.
If you turn a vertical fist over 45 degrees to the outside you’ll see that the proper knuckles now lead the fist.
Anytime you punch above your own shoulders you really have two choices: 1.) Strike with the joints of the fist instead of your knuckles, or 2.) Use a diagonal upset fist and hit with the proper striking surface.
The Proper Use of the Fist Now that we’ve covered the basic mechanics of hitting with a fist let’s talk about how to properly USE the fist.
Without any padding on the fists, if you got hit by the bare fist just a single blow could end the fight by either seriously hurting you or by breaking the hand of the other guy.
The reason the gloves got bigger is because the crowds wanted more and more action so the fists needed more and more protection.
Just like every other weapon, the fist has a proper use… which is to hit muscle and organs.
The fist is OK for the side of the neck and the back of the neck, but there are other tools that are a lot better for hitting the front of the neck than a fist.
There are a couple of fists that do have some uses against the skull, such as the hammer fist and the four-joint fist.
Training the Fist The last thing I’m going to talk about is training your fist to handle impact.
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