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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 381498" data-attributes="member: 5171">Hm.  I disagree. For a beginner, yes, of course there's a difference, just like when a baseball player gets trained by a batting coach, and has to change his swing -- there's always that point where he can swing harder "the old way" than he could in the new way he's learning.  But once you reach a certain point, doing the punch cleanly and doing it hard are one and the same.The path for me, at least, was as follows:White Belt: You want me to what?  I can hit harder if I just throw the punch out there instead of doing this step and pivot and turn the waist and punch deal.Blue Belt: Ah, now I'm getting power out of the waist movements.  I can punch a whole lot harder if I do it from the right stance.Brown Belt: Okay, now I can learn how to generate the same waist motion without doing the big steps, so I can do a powerful punch without having to be in the same stance all the time.That's all a gross oversimplification, but for me, that's roughly how it went.  At this point in my training, there's no reason for me to do a sloppy punch.  I don't get anything out of a sloppy punch, and I wouldn't use one on the street.What I WOULD do on the street, punchwise:Back-knuckleJab Straight punchInverted punchHook(off top of head -- and those are pure punches, knuckles-hitting-bad-guy strikes, without the palm strikes and rakes and such)With those strikes, there are also a variety of movements.  I can do a back-knuckle while retreating, I can do a hook while moving in, I can do a lunging straight punch, etc.  Some work better than others, but any combination of movement and punching type could potentially have a use.So I would never practice a wild lunge, but I might practice a lunging straight punch.  And I would make it as clean as a standing straight punch.  It would probably generate more power because of the forward motion.But if the teacher said, "practice your punches, step and punch to the wall and back," I wouldn't default to lunging punches, since she did say stepping, yes?  That she said "stepping" would imply that what she was trying to get people to practice was getting power from the waist with the step.So right now, based on what I know, your argument wasn't actually style versus effectiveness.  Your argument was stepping versus lunging, or straight punches versus hooking punches.  If I were teaching a class and someone insisted that a lunging punch were inherently more effective than a stepping punch, and that a stepping punch was therefore just an example of niceties of the form as opposed to what one would really use, I would politely disagree.But basically I wasn't there, I don't know you, and I don't know the teacher.  As a teacher, I've had a lot of beginning students inform me that their way of punching is better than my way of punching.  They have, to a man, been wrong.  So that was my default opinion.Now that I think about it, I suppose that there CAN be a difference between style and effectiveness -- in that sometimes you want to practice one more than the other. I will sometimes slow down my katas to check and see if they're still clean at lower speeds.  And I will sometimes go faster than I normally, putting more energy into the moves.  But that's just what you're focusing on during practice.  And the fast, high-energy one isn't inherently more effective than the slower, style-focused one.On the street, a fast wild swing is little better than a slow controlled punch.  What you want is a fast, controlled punch.  You want style AND effectiveness.  That style might not be as much fun, but it's there to keep you from overextending your arm, hyperextending your arm, pulling muscles or hurting tendons in your arm, telegraphing your attack to your opponent, or leaving yourself unguarded while attacking.I'm really glad it hasn't devolved into which style is better.  I hate that.-TackyPS: Please allow me to reiterate the I-wasn't-there-ness.  So I got nothing against you.  I'm just debating "punching with attention to form is inherently less effective and not what you'd do on the street."</blockquote>

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