Boxing, or more generally fighting with your fists, is perhaps the most well known aspect of combat. I spent the first weekend of February 2018 with Gurdev Nidar Singh at our regular Birmingham Seminar covering the Shastar Vidiya form of fighting with fists.
Known as Musht Yudh (battling with fists) the weekend started with a specific way of forming a fist which was evidently alien to most attendees at the seminar. A method which essentially gets you to tighten your bottom two fingers and then press down with the top two using the thumb to solidify and close the system. There are a number of ways this enhances a strike. The one I’d highlight as being most important is that it allows you to integrate your strikes with your footwork. The more generic method of clenching a fist structures the arm’s tendons and muscles in a way which restricts overall body movement. Whereas this method allows for greater dexterity of movement. Hopefully these points are demonstrated effectively in the proceeding video:
Thanks to Danny for being a willing training partner and of course Gopal Dhillon our resident budding and aspiring actor/director check him out: https://www.instagram.com/gopal_dhillon/
By movement I don’t just mean that of the fist or the arm, or even torso. By movement I also refer more so to locomotion. This method allows for an unimpeded footwork which is itself agile and so this method also requires no grounding whatsoever. This then means this method requires no turning of hips. Overall it reduces the body's inertia to an absolute minimum so that one is optimally agile.
This increased dexterity also doesn’t come at the cost of reduced power in strikes. Though to achieve this one must also understand the principles found in SV about structure and energy/power generation through mass and hitting within movements.
These key points were worked on diligently over the weekend culminating in the traditional form of fist fighting in Shastar Vidiya - Loh Mushti (Iron fist fighting). As always with SV the end game was battlefield combat and high stakes combat as seen in the video below.
This video is courtesy of the always excellent Asante
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