Speed up reaction time and improve punching speed/power?

Question

Hi, does anyone know if you can buy a machine or piece of equipment which has punch pads which pop up randomly so you can hit them and speed up reaction time for martial arts? If not, one with lights which randomly come on to tell you which order to hit (punching and maybe kicking). Failing the existance of any of these things, how would I go about making one? lol.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Cheapest thing is to have had pads and a good training partner. It is probably the most effective as well as the partner can move all around. We do drills like the in class from time to time to get students reaction time up as early in training as possible. Nothing beats a good training partner.

Answer 2

According to legends Bruce Lee had a light-up punching device made by an engineer.  It measured reaction time and power, but I haven't seen any commercially available ones.

Besides, any machine wouldn't have the capacity to move around with you.   If you want to punch someone, hopefully they will be moving, so what's the point of training if you aren't training while you're moving around, right?

So find a training partner and have them pad up.  They should give you targets to punch and kick as they move around, but move the target quickly out of range, just as an opponent would.  They can call punches or combos, and they can help you work on defending against strikes and following with strikes from a defensive posture.  You can find detailed drills in a million books/videos/websites, so search around.

They should also be watching your footwork, and helping you correct that.  A good training partner is better by a million times than any "punch-bot" that you could create.

Hope that helps.