Answering whether it’s possible to stop punches with your hands

Although various types of martial arts have been around for years – there’s still a large amount of debate going on as to whether certain moves are effective or not. One of these questions is whether it’s possible to stop punches with your hands. Some martial arts such as Wing Chun and Aikido teach these methods, whereas many others don’t.

Here, we shall be looking at this debate with a neutral stance and will see if it’s possible. Further, we’ll also look at similar ways to stop and block punches if it’s not possible to do so with your hands.

Drilling is different from reality

One criticism aimed toward Aikido is that what it teaches isn’t practical in reality. For instance, if you start to wrist lock someone then they may fall or roll to relieve the pain. This is very much real and the ukes aren’t acting in this instance. However, actually getting into these scenarios in the first place is pretty unrealistic during a real fight.

For instance, if you look at most of the punches thrown in an Aikido demonstration, they are usually hooks that come from the outside. Not only this but they’re also thrown at a slower pace. This technique means that the teacher can quite easily stop the punch with their hands and block or divert the punch. As a result, this looks nice and effective but in reality, it isn’t very useful.

The reason for this can be found in science. Basically, a punch can be thrown at a certain speed that is too fast to precisely catch with your hand. An extreme example of this would be trying to catch a bullet with chopsticks. The bullet is simply too quick for someone to react in time. Obviously, punches aren’t as quick as bullets – but they’re still quick enough to avoid being stopped with hands.

You can block punches with your forearms, but you can’t stop them with your hands

One of the oldest methods of blocking from Karate is using your forearms. Unlike stopping punches with fists, this can be done – but is obviously a very different technique. Put another way, blocking a punch is much easier than stopping a punch. The reason for this is that when you block a punch, you’re effectively soaking up the pressure.

In this example, you would do so by using your forearm. Specifically, you could do this by aiming to hit the opponent’s forearm with the blade of your own which can be very painful. However, this works by accepting the punch, as opposed to trying to completely stop it altogether. In MMA, you will sometimes see similar blocks where fighters raise their arms to their heads. Again, this is effective but is also drastically different from stopping it outright.

Can you re-direct punches?

So far, we’ve established that catching punches is near impossible. However, what about re-directing punches? This technique is taught in Wing Chun and is a key part of its curriculum. Basically, this involves trapping the punching arm and fist with your arms. From there, you aim to move the arm out the way and reply with a counter strike of your own. The issue with this is that once again, it relies on slow striking. Unlike the previous example though, Wing Chun mostly focuses on punches down the center such as jabs, rather than hooks from the outside.

The problem here is that once again, it doesn’t really account for speed which means the techniques are tough to replicate in a real scenario. However, unlike Aikido – Wing Chun is more realistic and is structurally better. The reason for this may be to do with using both your hands and arms to block strikes rather than just using your fist. This means you’ve got more power and strength to intercept, as well as using two limbs as opposed to one.

This technique is still very hard to do but is at least possible in some scenarios. Once again though, there’s a reason why this isn’t really seen in MMA (much) – which is because it’s very hard to do in reality.

Conclusion

If you go into a fight expecting to stop punches like Batman or Superman with your bare hands, then sadly you’ll be rudely mistaken. This technique isn’t realistic as it requires beating the speed of the punch which is near impossible. However, as we’ve seen there are ways around this. In short, it’s best to learn how to dodge punches by either moving out of their way (with headwork and footwork) or by learning how to block.

Whilst these methods may not feel as fancy as catching a punch with hands, they’re certainly more realistic and will fair better whilst in combat. This may not be what certain martial artists would like to hear but sadly fighting is not a movie and can have terrible consequences if things go badly wrong.