It’s close to the end of the year again. I am off target from my goal of attaining “6000 Punches, 6000 Kicks”, by a margin of 2000 thereabouts at worse, or 1000 at best. It also comes down to the actual definition - when I mean “Punch/Kick”, I meant a dedicated style of punch or kick.

If counting my combination of elbow attacks and varying punches, I should have exceeded the 6000 mark. For kicks, it would likely be at around the 4000 mark - it’s harder to perform kicks compared to punches, due to the flexibility needed to perform kicks upwards of the waist (I’m kicking into a sandbag). Certainly more exhausting too.

At least I’ve managed to get to the midway mark of my grand target of 10000.

In terms of feedback, the difference in the fluidity of movement can definitely be felt. What used to feel like something that requires active thought is more or less a reflex action now. The only thing that still requires attention is the awareness of the movement of the bag, so as to land the strike as accurately as possible - I’m not sure if that is possible to reflex away that too, but we’ll see.

Where it used to bleed with striking bare knuckles, they are callused enough now where strikes doesn’t cause any raw-ness anymore. And silly self-injuries from bad positioning of the wrist while striking have reduced by a good margin. I’ve realised from punching bags that it actually isn’t reasonable to angle the wrists while driving the knuckles into your intended target, as some martial arts would advocate in order to cause ‘more hurt’ to your opponent.

Personally, from experience, it’s counterproductive to make any movement from your wrist while striking at high power/speed. As this is likely to cause injury to yourself, or inflict less damage to your opponent. I’ll be quite happy if my opponent takes a blunt, full-force impact from the flat of my fists, rather than a watered-down punch from a couple of my knuckles, and risk breaking them from bone-to-bone impact.

That’s the summary of what I’ve learnt the past year. I’ll leave the remainder of my other observations in a future post.