While walking to the gym today, I bumped into that guy that I mentioned who hits with a lot of power. We said hi and had a chat, and I mentioned how I was impressed with his power and asked him for some tips. He gave me the following:

1. Shifting your weight is important depending on which punch you want to throw.
2. When taking a step, don't make it a gentle step but plant the foot into the ground. So it's kinda like pushing off the back foot and landing on the lead foot with a bit of force, which can then get transferred through to the punch.
3. Turn the hips half a second before turning the shoulders. This gives your momentum a bit more of a 'snap'.

Afterwards I hurried to the gym and got my skipping done, wrapped up and headed to the bags. I tried out all the stuff that he told me, and it really helped! Tip #3 helped the most, and now my punches are starting to sound a lot better. They make that popping noise now when I hit the bag.

A few things I noticed that I need to improve on:

1. Sometimes I forget to turn my fist in. When I do, the punch is sharper and when I don't I sometimes hurt my wrist.
2. If I step forward with my punch and I don't bring my back foot up like you told me to - I lose balance.

I feel like tonight I made some real improvements, so I'm going to keep working on it to ingrain it into muscle memory...and then work on it some more Skipping has also improved a lot, when I started I could barely finish a round but now I can do 3. My goal is to get 5 rounds comfortably, and then after that I'll start mixing in sprints into my skipping rounds.

~Remy