mano a mano combat

One of my favorite ways to cause damage involves the art of striking. My hobbies include walking into bars and punching every person I see and knocking them out. Okay, okay just kidding. As any mixed martial artist knows striking plays a very important role in causing damage. What options do you have when you step in the cage? Strike or Submit, right? I prefer the former.

Striking Variations
There are many ways you can hit people: open palm strikes, punches, knees, elbows, and kicks. I’m going to cover two styles of striking which involves Western Boxing (Traditional Boxing) with a mixture of Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) because those are the two styles I’m familiar with.

Muay Thai: The brutal art of Thai boxing is the favored striking style taught in most mixed martial arts schools. Muay Thai adds various dimensions to boxing due to the ability to use elbows, knees, and legs. With the wide range of attacks you can throw a wide array of combos. My favorite element of Muay Thai is the leg kicks. Throwing a powerful roundhouse to your opponent’s leg can wear them down really quick. Another devastating attack in Muay Thai is the clinch, where you clinch the opponent by the neck and deliver knees to the head or body.

Boxing: Some may think that boxing is just Muay Thai minus the knees, elbows and kicks, but there’s more than that to it. From personal experience, I learned how to bob and weave, slip punches and cut angles. I feel that the focus on muay thai is less on the actual hands, so adding boxing to your arsenal really sharpens up your stand up.

Now there are many other types of striking, such as the fancy strikes done by Karate variations, but I don’t know them, so I won’t discuss them. I encourage mixed martial artists to study many forms of martial arts and striking beyond the typical Muay Thai and BJJ couplet. Evolve yourself unless you want to be like everyone else.

About The Author
Jimmy Vo is an amateur mixed martial artist based out of South Jersey. He also runs a blog called MMA Training Stuff. Manoamanocombat.com is honored to have Jimmy Vo as a new part of our writing staff. Be sure to tweet this article of his and show him some love!