Increasing Hand Speed (Punching Speed)

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Unless I'm mistaken, fighters who are born with the gift of incredible hand speed owe that speed to being born with extremely fast, efficient central nervous systems. Their brains send messages to their central nervous systems to throw punches as fast as possible and then their central nervous systems send these electrical impulses to the muscles responsible for throwing punches faster than the vast majority of people's CNS systems are capable of doing.

My question is: Are there exercises that increase the efficiency (speed) at which the brain sends messages to the central nervous system as well as increasing the speed at which the central nervous system is capable of sending impulses to the muscles responsible for throwing punches? If so, what are these exercises?

If there are no exercises to accomplish this, does that mean that the efficiency (speed) of one's central nervous system is determined at birth and nothing can be done to improve upon that speed or efficiency?
 
I had a college class called "Speed Improvement" which was interesting, it studied speed generation and achievement. It focused mainly on running/sprinting speed, but I'm sure the principles apply to hand speed in a meaningful way as well.

In a nutshell, the things that can be changed to improve speed are strength, flexibility, and form. Stronger is faster, more flexibility helps, and training form to correct and make the movement technique efficient is important as well. In fact, with diligent training, an athlete could improve their speed by 5 to 10%.

So yeah, the vast majority of your ability is the gift you're born with, or without. But, for sure in hand speed as relates to combat sports, there are things to remember:

-- Power generation is a factor as well. Many successful boxers have tremendous power and only decent speed and do very well.

-- Technique is even more important in a skill-based pursuit like boxing. A person without top-notch speed may slip punches in just due to their excellent technique and skill in anticipation and movement.

-- It's still worth it to train the factors which will improve your speed even if it only gives you 1%. That 1% may be the advantage you have over your opponent, why leave it on the table.

As with anything in training and athletics, your mileage may vary. A couch potato who has never thrown a punch before will get more out of training percentage-wise than an already-trained athlete.
 
As far as boxing, the bulk or your "hand speed" can be improved by two things:
1. Practicing the movements until they become reflexes more than decisions. If you have to think to throw your punch a certain way, it will be much slower than instinctively doing it. Constant drilling of bag work, mitts, shadow boxing, and sparring will all eventually increase hand speed.
2. increased precision will be interpreted as an increase in hand speed. Most of the guys who people think have fast hands, really are just more accurate strikers and therefore "feel" like their hands are faster. Again, you work on this basically the same way as above, lots and lots of sports specific movement practice, especially mitt work and light sparring.
 
Couple of things to practice:
1. Balance/footwork. If you have no stable base to throw from, a lot of time will be wasted just to get your body in proper position to throw. Same thing with footwork, timing your weight transfer will greatly increase your powerpunch speed.
2. Learning how to relax antagonist muscles. The goal is to only use muscles you need for the movement and stabilization. I guess this could be considered "efficient CNS"
 
It all starts with the feet. Quick on your feet equals quick hands.

Strong core helps too. Your limbs will only move as fast as your core can support.
 
Imo it's largely a mental aspect. Being relaxed so the antagonists aren't slowing you down. Most importantly obscuring the beginning of the motion makes it seem faster.
 
The consensus seems to be that power exercises with weight transfer from lower to upper body like snatches, push press.. Improve the power outcome, hence the speed increases.

Stimulants like caffeine /ephedrine, clenbuterol excitate the cns so I think the signals will be faster.

Maximal strength training with classical compound exercises is debatable, since it tax too much the body making the fighter incapable of working conditioning and sport specific tasks all around, that's the understanding I have about your question.
 
The_observer86 said:
Couple of things to practice:
1. Balance/footwork. If you have no stable base to throw from, a lot of time will be wasted just to get your body in proper position to throw. Same thing with footwork, timing your weight transfer will greatly increase your powerpunch speed.
2. Learning how to relax antagonist muscles. The goal is to only use muscles you need for the movement and stabilization. I guess this could be considered "efficient CNS"
Click to expand...

Number two is probably the widely taught way to move fast. Relaxation and not tensing up through out a movement is key.
 
TheeFaulted said:
As far as boxing, the bulk or your "hand speed" can be improved by two things:
1. Practicing the movements until they become reflexes more than decisions. If you have to think to throw your punch a certain way, it will be much slower than instinctively doing it. Constant drilling of bag work, mitts, shadow boxing, and sparring will all eventually increase hand speed.
2. increased precision will be interpreted as an increase in hand speed. Most of the guys who people think have fast hands, really are just more accurate strikers and therefore "feel" like their hands are faster. Again, you work on this basically the same way as above, lots and lots of sports specific movement practice, especially mitt work and light sparring.
Click to expand...
Your #2 is spot on. Since we're in S&C, I'll tie it to power lifting. Specificity is huge. Practicing specific movements (in this case, running specific drills) is so important. I promise that if you run a jab counter drill a thousand times, you'll be quick and accurate, and no matter how tired you get, your body will be trained to do that movement in response to a jab. Put in the work and you'll see the results.
 
I'm mid work, but people are mostly on the ball. For pure speed work, movement proficiency is obviously king, so time spent on skill is going to be the biggest payoff.

That said, there are adaptations in rate coding, PCR stores, etc, and those are trainable.

Some general principles

1) Real speed work doesn't make you tired. You will never have productive pure speed work and muscular endurance work in the same session, and preferably you'd set aside a block for that development

2) Large muscle group work is great for general adaptation, but you need transfer to specific movements. So snatch is great for the beginning of the cycle, but as you move on in the cycle, you want to more closely approximate the joint angles and loads of the sport movement. Medicine ball throws would be a good specific preparatory exercise (and all my boxing coaches have had me use them), and of course bagwork would be present throughout the whole cycle, because it's the sport skill, and the best way to practice at full speed and power.

3) Efforts would probably be 2-10 seconds of maximum speed effort, with complete recovery between bouts
 
When talking about hand speed in fighting, there's always a need to bring up it's other related component.

Power

This is what all of this is ultimately about. You want to increase hand speed so you have a more powerful strike and can land more strikes in a round. A lot of this has to do with mass and strength too. A heavier fighter will have a slower velocity, but his higher mass and strength allows for a more powerful strike than a lighter fighter with a faster velocity and less mass and strength. The two main components to power for striking are strength and velocity. Strength is trained in it's own way, and speed is trained in another.

You want to do speed training on days that you are fully recovered. Essentially all speed training comes down to technique and ingraining that pattern into muscle memory. A lot of this has to do with the specific types of fighting you are doing. Conditioning has a lot to do with the specific type of conditioning you need. If you're doing 5 sets of 3 minute rounds then you need to train for 5 sets of 3 minutes. If you're doing 12 sets of 3 minutes then you need to train for that. You want to train perfect technique and throwing as many full speed strikes as you can. If you get tired before the round is up you need to stop. Shadowboxing and speed bag work is very popular for this type of training.
 
Bruce Lee was always trying to find the speed you have when you twitch unconsciously, like when you are falling asleep.

That's all I got for ya.
 
Plyometrics did wonders for me back in my MT days. Just working on that explosion.
 
I suspect (based on no personal expertise whatsoever) that baseball methods might set the gold standard here, since training for bat and pitching speed is so integral to the sport?

I'm not too familiar with baseball, being British, but as near as I can figure their focus for increasing velocity is mainly the hips.



Medicine ball work also seems to crop up a lot:



And the Olympic lifts are recommended:

 
Also, You have to imagine that some of the hand-eye co-ordination drills demonstrated by Ross Enamait here would improve your fine motor skills and reaction times?

 
YukisHeart said:
I suspect (based on no personal expertise whatsoever) that baseball methods might set the gold standard here, since training for bat and pitching speed is so integral to the sport?

I'm not too familiar with baseball, being British, but as near as I can figure their focus for increasing velocity is mainly the hips.



Medicine ball work also seems to crop up a lot:



And the Olympic lifts are recommended:

Click to expand...



Those are all good, but i'd say that the gold standard is going to be track and field, because baseball coaches are allergic to science generally
 
Correct posture and a solid core is what differs the slow from the fast. Look at Cormier as an example.. very strong posture from which he can throw any strike which means he doesn't need to "prepare" to throw a kick or punch(pull back before pushing it out) but he just explodes.. He developed great striking ability really fast for coming from a wrestler-background and this is solely, imo, due to his posture. Lots of people missing out on this.
 
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