Playing with angles

Punches are wondrous and many-faceted things. They can be thrown a number of ways to a number of places and have a number of effects. Anyone who thinks that just working fundamental boxing techniques makes for a limited game hasn’t spent enough time playing with the variations that can be developed from simple punches delivered well.

Forget your Karate striking points poster with it’s ‘ox’s elbow’ strike and ‘hummingbird beak’—not actual strikes but you get the idea—and concentrate on learning to hit on the straight, hooked and uppercut lines.

Effective standup isn’t just about adding techniques to your game, it’s about adding game to your techniques.

There are a number of variables, timing, combination, target, rhythm… and many more. The one I want to look at specifically is angle.

If you just hit down the same lines all the time then within the first minute of a round your opponent will have learned to read everything you throw. Once this happens then it is only a matter of time before they begin to ‘time’ your game and counter everything you do. You need to learn to play angles, the angles you throw your punches at and the angle of incidence between your centreline and their centreline. I don’t spend so much time working circling for nothing.

I try and work off the idea of two clock faces, one laid on the floor around my opponent (the white clock) and one that centres on their head (the grey one).

The circle on the floor is the face I try to circle around, changing the angle of incidence between me and them, if I can get round to three or nine on the clock I am ‘t-boning’ them and able to strike with power safely while breaking their balance and staying safe.

The clock face that centres on their head shows the angles I can hit along. Use this to change your punches up slightly. Instead of always throwing a hook along the horizontal what happens if you tip up or down to the next marker on the clock? It will become an overhanded hook or an uppercutted hook, but it is still fundamentally a hook. You keep the mechanics the same but change the angle to sneak it in to it’s target.

Same with jabs and crosses, slightly hook the jab, turn it in from underneath, overhand it then do the same with crosses. Even if you just look at the hour markers I have made on the clock you triple your options for each punch. But there are degress within those markers that allow for an infinite amount of variation of just four basic punching mechanics.

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