People are always leaving gaps open in their guard presenting opportunities where they can be hit. Uppercuts strike underneath the jaw, an area that is often open but quite difficult to hit as it requires you to get in close. This tutorial explains the technique behind the uppercut as it is a punch that is often performed incorrectly and when performed incorrectly will open you to being hit by removing your defense.
With the uppercuts you need to use the drive of your lower body to generate the force for the strike. Most people make the mistake of using their arm and swinging with it – this is incorrect and doesn’t deliver as much power as what a leg drive could. It also exposes your face.
Keep your hand by your face, dip the knees slightly and drive up and moments before impact you place the arm out to position it to deliver the boxing uppercut punch.
To break it down further you are actually driving with the leg (by extending the hip and knee) as well as twisting with the core to add rotational power.
It is that twisting motion (rotation) coupled with the leg drive (hip and knee extension) that delivers such a tremendous amounts of force. When you rotate with the twist you are transferring your body weight to the other side as with a normal boxing combination. You are transferring force into your opponent on the way.
People forget that uppercuts need to transfer body weight too – like hooks and straights.
This one will take some time to practice.
And now that we understand it is the whole lower body used to generate power we can now keep our hand guarding our face until it is time to release and strike our opponent at the last moment.