[Tease T Tickle]

Originally Posted by Tease T Tickle

Unfortunately, it also has the tendency to expose more of your face, so you might eat a straight or hook, but if you're quick and tough you can capitalize on that, too. This is aggressively setting up the counter-punch, which is a rather esoteric notion, and requires much more extrapolation than I'm prepared to give here right now.

So, here's my extrapolation. I know this thread is a Q&A and I shouldn't be replying to myself, but I doubt any of you will mind.

Aggressively Setting Up the Counter-Punch

In most contemporary competition formats, being conservative can lead to problems. If you spend most of your time looking for the opening, not throwing punches, you lose points on the scorecard. While it is generally a bad idea to let the fight go into the judges' hands, to be a real competitor you have to understand that it will happen and playing to the scorecard can and will get you wins. So, being conservative seems a bad idea and you want to be aggressive. But, you hate the idea of throwing ineffective strikes and wasting energy. So, you stategize.

While ring control and positional dominance are just as important if not more so, you can shrink the idea of positions and angling to just the opponent's body (and conversely your own) to make sure that you can land at least one clean, powerful strike. To do this, and still staying out of grappling situations (this is the Striking Q&A, after all), you will be using feints, aimed misses and pushing strikes to alter your opponent's body in such a way that an opening appears for just long enough for you to put a strike through it. Note: this is the exact opposite of the Walnut Approach to Striking, but more on that notion later.

First an example, and to keep things simple let's use an orthodox boxing stance versus another orthodox boxing stance and only strikes using the fist. Since your opponent's left hand is slightly closer than his right hand, and since your power punches are probably coming from your right hand, you need to move that left hand to get a clean punch from your right. Taiji, Wing Tsun, et Al. like to use various techniques to just this end, but we will not be using those specific methods despite the similarity of principles.

Your fastest and most effective punch in a stand-off is your jab or lead hand strike. Throwing this strike directly to the face will tend to bring the opponent's hands closer together to help cover the middle more effectively. That will not work for our purposes here. We want to slam the middle of his guard with our right, so we need to move that left hand wide from the other hand or down from the face. Throwing the jab across the vertical axis of our opponent's body leaves the left side of our face open to overhands and hooks, so we cannot jab wide to our opponent's left to bring that hand out. If we jab at the body to bring that hand down, we're just as likely to bring the right and not the left down. So, we need to open the opponent's left with our right for long enough for our right to strike again.

We start with an overhand right aimed directly at the bridge of the nose. This will bring his hands in. We follow immediately with a left hook, bringing his right hand out, but leave our right hand low. He tries to come over the top of our right hand with a left hook or a jab, and we have a signed invitation to throw that right uppercut directly underneath his chin. We might eat his left hand, but we still got the better of the exchange. We opened his guard, baited the left hand and aggressively set up our counter punch. We made him react to us, took control of the pace of the fight and we landed a punch likely to score a knock out and definitely likely to rock him while he might only land a hasty and poorly executed punch without any knock out potential.