1 How to do a Karate Punch

The Karate Punch:Your First Karate Weapon

Most people don’t really understand how to do a karate punch, which is to say that they don’t understand some of the reasons behind it. This page will describe the karate punch, and tell you the real reasons.

Stand naturally, with the feet shoulder pointed forward and shoulder width apart.

natural karate stance

Feet straight and shoulder width apart


Place the hands at the waist. They should be closed but loose with the palms up. This is the ‘chambered’ position.

WARNING: do not overextend the fist in this move…at full extension of the punch it should have a very slight bend of the elbow…there should be a slight wedge of space in the elbow between the bones. If you let the bones hit from overextension you could get a bone bruise inside the joint.

Extend the right fist to the front, at the end of extension turn the fist over and close it.

karate punching

Tighten the fist as you turn it over.

karate punch

Extend hand, wait to turn it over

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.Now, here are the points that you need to understand if you are going to truly understand this basic karate punch.

Turning the fist over at the end teaches one how to focus. It is adding the snap of extra muscles at the end of the punch.

When using the karate punch for real you probably won’t want to turn the fist all the way, maybe just partially, but with all the snap. There is a certain potential for instabllity when you deliver weight while corkscrewing the fist.

When you retract the right hand, extend the left hand in a punch. There is a certain balance that is achieved by the body when you do this. The movement and weight shift of one side of the body balances the move and weight shift on the other side.

You must learn how to do this in all stances, in all directions, at various heights and targets (groin, head, or…?) and so on.

As you progress you will learn two types of punches, the thrust punch, and the snap punch.

The thrust punch pushes through a target, putting all your force into the opponent. The snap punch puts only a portion of your force into your opponent, but it is sudden, and none of the force travels back down the punching arm, as it would in a thrusting punch.

Now, there is a lot more here, but that is reserved for later pages when we define karate blocks and kicks and so on. The main thing is to practice this basic until you can do it intuitively, without thinking, and then to put it together with other moves.

This has been a page about How to do a Karate Punch, and once you  have done it you should go to the page on how to do a Karate Low Block.

 

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