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Whether you are talking about the self defense skills that are required so that you can protect yourself on the street if you are attacked, or the skills needed for sports fighting such as kickboxing or MMA, the most important skill that you need is how to punch.

Now of course there are many many different types of punch that you can learn and use, such as the jab, cross, hook, uppercut and many more, so no individual article would ever be able to go through them all and provide enough information for readers to learn anything really useful and be able to actually apply that to use the techniques in a street fighting situation or organized sports fight.

So what I would like to do in this article, in order to enable me to provide something interesting and useful for you, it to just look simply at cross and jab punches and to explain some of the basic things that will help you to make sure that you know how to punch hard and effectively.

The first thing is the position of the fist when it lands. In some systems like Karate there is a big twisted movement of the arm and fist with each punch, in which case you land the punch with your fingers facing down and the back of your hand facing upwards. But if you are using a regular strike without this twist you get more power if you land it with your hand on a diagonal, so that the back of your hand is facing diagonally up and to the side. This is because it gives optimum position for the muscles.

Also with your feet it is usually advisable to have a stance where the distance front to back and left to right between your feet is the same, because that gives you good stability. But for a hard strike it is good to step forwards with your front foot, whilst keeping your back foot firmly planted and even pushing down and back into the ground with it.

Tense muscles can slow down your movement and reduce the power. Because of this it is best to try to keep your arm and shoulder relaxed and loose throughout the movement until the last moment when you land the strike and tense up your muscles, even though this relaxation can seem counter intuitive.

Also if you are not in the ring or the cage but are using this as a street fighting technique to defend yourself then remember that without gloves the fist is easily hurt, so your strike may do more damage to yourself than them. Using palm strikes instead will not reduce the power that you can generate, and if you hit with the heel at the bottom of your palm it can do as much damage, but you are much less likely to break your own bones and leave yourself injured and less able to fight on.

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Filed under: Mixed Martial Arts