Hitting the Punching Bag

Johnny Nguyen, FIT Exercise Director

Lately some people have asked why I’m hitting the heavy bag so often. Punching the heavy bag melts off the mushy layer of civilized behavior and unravels me to the basic, raw strand of chimpanzee DNA. And it’s a good stress-buster, too.

Throwing punches and hurling kicks at the heavy bag provide a full-body workout that returns many benefits. In addition to the mental benefit of relieving stress, working the heavy bag improves your balance, agility, speed, power, and coordination. It also develops your anaerobic and aerobic capacity while strengthening your joints and connective tissues. It teaches you the discipline to push through extreme fatigue when it’s so easy to simply drop your gloves and stop. And it instills patience because throwing kicks and punches requires a thorough development of skill in order to land a strike without going to the hospital for a torn ligament in the wrist or elbow.

Throughout our teenage years my little brother and I achieved each a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do, and after a string of brotherly bruises and bloody noses mom decided that we would keep to only school sports. So I traded my Tokaido uniform for sprinting shoes. It was then that the skill of throwing punches and kicks was lost. And since then a host of entrepreneurs like Billy Banks, Amy Bento and Cathe Friedrich brought the fighting discipline to the commercial surface as a way for America to get into shape.

According to some great professional boxers and trainers like Freddie Roach, Russ Anber, Mark Messer and Danny Campbell, hitting with your hands, elbows, knees, shins and feet requires an appreciable amount of skill. Although I am currently what some would consider a monkey on crack at the heavy bag, I am slowly learning the intricacies of throwing kicks and punches. I plan to also join a boxing and kickboxing camp called Fairtex in Mountain View (www.fairtex.com), where I’m hoping to learn more basic but valuable techniques. There are many great books and videos available, and I now own over a dozen of them, all over-taking my wife’s unwatched Netflix DVDs from two months ago. But nothing will be as good of a teacher as getting in front of the bag and patiently throwing some strikes.

You have to know the proper stance, which is always changing; but, even with the endless changing, there is always a right “stance” for every defensive and offensive maneuver, otherwise you would look a bit like me and become off balance. Ever watch an inexperience hitter throw strikes at the bag or spar with a coach? The inexperience hitter would typically step off balance, often tipping forward and crowding the bag or the sparring coach. Proper weight distribution and placement of the feet must be employed for every situation – striking, defending, and circling. Spending time with the bag is the best way to develop this balance.

You also have to develop a sense of timing, because the movement of the bag can trick you into throwing a punch that achieves nothing but air displacement and a foolish look. Developing timing means you also sharpen your decision to move and react. Moving too early or too late and you know it when the strike lands (if it lands at all). Moving at just the right instant and the strike feels good and solid. Right now, probably less than 10% of my strikes feel like this, while the rest needs work.

If I ever thought that punching is all about the fist, I now know better. With a simple right-hand cross, the entire body has to develop power and speed. It must move correctly to generate force from the floor, transferring it up the leg, across the hips, through the trunk, out into the hand and finally into the target. It is truly a whole-body chain of events, accomplished in a blink of an eye. The left hook requires the same transfer of power through the kinetic chain. (My obliques were sore for days after the session in which I first learned to throw a proper hook.) Slipping to the side for a defensive maneuver and then throwing a counter punch puts more work into the core then I had imagined. And a simple jab, which most people think is just a quick reach of the lead arm, is actually based on a sharp burst of motion from the hind leg, delivering the fast-twitch pop through the hip and across the torso and into the opposing arm, and finally into the target that would be the fat nose of a bully who stole your lunch money in 3rd grade. With punching, everything is from the ground up. Punching is not about the fist.

And kicking is a whole-nother dimension. The skill of kicking hasn’t returned from my days of Tae Kwon Do, but the kicking on the heavy bag isn’t quite the same as the kicks I learned in karate, when they were more for “art” than for conditioning. Now I just want to kick the living shit out of the bag, but my friend and colleague Karen would always walk up and remind me that, without technique, I look like a monkey on crack. So it is “easy” kicking until my skill improves… then I can unleash like a rhesus monkey