Right, I'm finally home with some time to myself to post a more detailed reply.
First off, about the arm-swinging drill...it has a number of goals, one being training the blood flow, as I already mentioned. This is done by forcing blood through the arteries to the peripheral circulation in and around your hand via centripetal force. Squeezing a fist to force the blood back up through the veins to the heart via the pumping action of the muscles develops that aspect of the circulatory system. Furthermore, by getting familiar with the feeling of blood rushing to and filling the hands, one can eventually initiate the process simply through visualisation and willpower - studies have shown that bodyparts perfectly at rest will display vascular changes identical to those seen during intense exercise when subject to vivid and prolonged mental imagery of intense exercise focused on that bodypart. By filling the hands with blood at will, you give them extra weight and, if you're inclined to believe in that sort of thing,
qi/
ki/life force/bio-energy/what-you-will, which, in any paradigm you care to mention, runs to wherever it's directed by blood, breath and will.
Also, the drill will teach you to relax your shoulder and arm joints while moving ballistically at high speeds. This is essential because a major power sink in striking is in wasted internal work - that is, resisting the action of inefficiently activated muscles. This aspect of the drill should teach you how to turn on only exactly the muscles that are needed to strike and only for as long as they need to be. From my own experience, with enough of this drill, the force of a strike should feel as though it's cascading down your arm like water through a pipe and then gushing out at the striking point, never to return. The action of the muscles is also more or less the same as they activate at increasingly distal points throughout the kinetic chain, aligning the limb and transferring momentum through momentary changes in density.
The end result of all this, of course, should be a punch/slap/forearm bash that hits like a big nasty bag of wet sand
zefff: That drill has actually been making the rounds in the boxing world, I hear, and I suspect it started with Chris Crudelli of Mind, Body and Kickass Moves fame, who picked it up from a Chinese martial artist and tipped off a London boxing coach about it, who gave it a try and liked it a lot. Funny old world, isn't it?
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