Wednesday, August 1, 2012

My pinkie hurts. A better punch will end the pain

I haven't gone to a doctor, so there's no official diagnosis, but I definitely screwed up my little finger on my right hand. It's not broken 'cause there's no serious swelling and it's not black and blue, but heavy punching is definitely off the table for a while. What I have is a lite version of a boxer's break. A boxer's break is damage to the 4th and 5th metacarpals, or the ring finger and pinkie finger.

What happened is that over the course of a few weeks I was consistently landing my right crosses on my pinkie finger. After these repeated strikes it just gave out, got sprained, cracked or something. So no punching for a while ... sort of. What I need to do is improve my strikes so that I'm landing on the larger knuckles. I'm spending time on the double-end bag throwing soft punches to try and improve my form. I'm only wearing wraps - no boxing gloves - when I do this so I can see where on my hand I'm impacting the bag.

A guy in the gym suggested using a Muay Thai punch to eliminate the possibility of landing the punch on the small knuckles. This punching style requires rotation of the arm so that on impact with the target your thumb is facing the ground. Make a fist and hold your arm so that your thumb is facing the ground and you'll see that this position forces the two larger knuckles to be in front of the smaller knucles.

No comments:

Post a Comment