Location, Location, Location

Any one who has ever purchased real estate knows the mantra of every real estate agent in the world: location, location, location. The idea is that nothing is more important to the value of a property than its location. A similar claim can be made about the value of a martial artist’s strike. If it lands in a bad location, it won’t have much value. What’s nice about your strikes, though, is that you can change the location if you practice!

What’s your location? If you’re doing a mid-section punch with your opponent facing you, you should locate your punch to strike the solar plexus. Why the solar plexus? Because striking the solar plexus will have the highest “pain ratio” in your favor. I define “pain ratio” as the pain inflicted on your opponent divided by the effort expended by you. This is an important concept! When I was training in Muay Thai, the pain ratio of those leg blocks was barely over 1.0. My instructor told me “It hurts more to kick a block than to block a kick” but in my experience, not much more.

I often see beginners either punching straight out from the shoulder or seeming to target the sternum. Why? The sternum is solid bone and anyone who reads Patricia Cromwell or Tess Garritsen novels will tell you it take a buzz saw to get through someone’s sternum during a post-mortem. When your opponent’s sternum and your meta-carpals collide, don’t expect to come out ahead! Some of you may be thinking, “No problem, I can break bricks with my hands!” Ignoring the fact that bone is a LOT stronger than your garden-variety capstone brick ($0.79 from Home Depot), why choose a target that has such a low pain ratio? That same punch to the solar plexus would be devastating! Lower your punch by four inches and increase your pain ratio ten-fold.

Now comes the hard part: practice. A good rule of thumb is to practice as if you’re striking someone your own height. If you’re really short (or just happen to be female), it might make sense to raise them a bit if you feel it’s unlikely you’ll be attacked by someone of similar stature. Martial arts techniques tend to describe the location of strikes in relative terms, meaning that a technique might be a “punch to the face” or a “kick to the ribs.” This is as opposed to absolute terms, which would be describing a kick as “five feet above the ground.” The key to good forms practice, then, is to create a mental image of your “opponent” (or opponents) and locate your strikes appropriately and consistently with respect to that imaginary opponent’s height. The idea is to train yourself to think about this sort of thing, not necessarily hard-wire a permanent location into your brain. You should be willing (and able) to vary the height of your imaginary opponent, and observers of your practice should notice the difference. Keep in mind that if you imagine yourself fighting Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (as Bruce Lee did in "Game of Death"), then it may be unrealistic to think you execute an effective kick to the head.

In my opinion, instructors should be less of a stickler about the height of a punch, but instead focus on consistency. If a student consistently punches above his/her own solar plexus, ask about the height of his/her imaginary opponent. If you get a reply of “huh?” then take the time to explain the “imaginary opponent” and “pain ratio” concepts. When students get in the habit of locating their strikes to high pain ratio targets on imaginary opponents during practice, their training will be more valuable in a self-defense situation.