Quote from: practicaldreamer on March 24, 2016, 06:53:16 PM

Good for you man, for keeping in shape. But at 5'7" you have only succeeded in knocking out a dwarf in your workout. If you are just looking at a cardio vascular workout then thats fine - but if its any kind of training for your own physical self defence, then you need to be raising the bag and punching higher - you'll get more power punching uphill, cos then you are getting power all the way from your knees and above, potentially - try to punch with your body and not your arms. Tyson was a master at it - a natural.

Thanks for the tip. I noticed that too when watching the video again this time. Also instructor at my gym had mentioned not punching only with my arms.

Several times I have begged them to raise the bag higher at my gym. They have it so low because the steel cage holding it is low, their chain is not well designed for the application, and because many of the filipinos are shorter than me. Even in the house I am renting, the damn mirror in the restroom displays my neck (concrete walls and I don't own a drill).

I am punching it low because if I punch it higher there is not much filler in the bag up there, so it isn't solid and I don't get the thud feedback from the bag. I did try punch it higher and it felt like I was punching the top of a bowling pin where all the weight was below where I was punching so it just gave way.

Also you are viewing me sick where I was only working out perhaps once every 2 weeks or so. (And that was February 2015 and I got acutely more ill and lost all my muscle later in 2015)

If I get healthy, I won't look like that. That is no where near my athleticism potential when healthy. Even as a freshman in high school, my neck was good 1 inch thicker in circumference. I don't have any pics of myself from when I played American football, but here is one from my high school graduation wherein I had stopped playing American football for 3 years and was doing XCountry and middle and long distance for Track&Field and you can see here my neck even without weight training and being thin:

(Ah I would much prefer to be doing it than talking about it and showing pics of myself like a narcissistic pussy)

Put it this way, at 5'5" and maybe 135 lbs as a freshman in high school, I played the offensive guard and defensive end positions, which looked ridiculous since that is incredibly undersized for those positions. My natural positions were cornerback and wide receiver, but due to politics, coaching perceptions, lack of an opportunity to demonstrate my capabilities at my natural positions, and also due to myself being a team player and not caring where I played as long as I could play the entire game, I took the assignments that were less in demand. I had so much energy I did not want to rest even for one play. When the game was over, I wanted to continue playing. I wasn't tired. Ditto partying in college in California (after I left L.S.U.) where I didn't want to sleep even a 4am after drinking til you drop style. I wanted to eat and head to beach and drink some more. Play some volleyball at the beach, and then party again that evening. In 8th grade, I played flag football every afternoon at PE with the guys who ended up being our cornerbacks and wide receivers, and I was regularly the top player on the flag football field (even against African Americans) but I guess the coaches were just letting us play out there and not even paying attention. But I was accustomed to being the (especially laterally) quickest (not fastest) guy on the field in the USA (and that even the case later in 2002 in Texas in some pickup football games), but I had my ass handed to me by the filipinos. My ex's brother (a skinny 5'3" dancer) could run rings around me and I couldn't even lay a finger on him. Well that was when he was 17 and I was 29. Later when I was in my 40s and he was late 20s, he was considerably slower perhaps being out-of-shape, but that was just tossing the ball to each other. I didn't actually try to tackle him that day. I'd be very curious to experience Pacquiao's speed. The owner of a buffet near my house says he can introduce me to Manny after his next fight. I'm hoping i have time for that, am healthy enough to go down to GenSan and work out in his gym. Just dreaming. Note when I worked out on a junior college team one summer in California, I was shamed by negro wide receivers there. But I had degraded my quick twitch muscle fiber by doing so much long distance training the prior years. So I really don't know. I have always had too many interests to juggle, didn't focus enough on just one. Maybe many of you can relate to that dilemma. Oh another data point is I played pickup football in late 1980s with the incoming freshman recruits for the Cal Lutheran college in Thousand Oaks. I forget how many solo touchdowns I scored, but I was pretty dominant. I broke my nose on a big guy's knee that day but played on because I was enjoying it too much. Btw, I squatted with the lineman at that Junior college and after only a month of training, I was squatting 400+ lbs to parallel in a strict way.

I am punching with my arms partially to protect my rotator cuff. I can overpower the load that my joints can handle at this age, and especially being sick and not able to train consistently. As it was even with wraps and the gloves, I was messing my hands up (partially because I have a broken right hand (which makes my ring finger knuckle protrude when in a fist) due to punching a concrete wall when I was drunk in the 1990s). I really need to tape my hands, but I was just doing this for messing around. I wasn't yet taking it seriously because I can't even train seriously due to the illness I have. Due to inability to train, I had very minimal aerobic capacity as I was huffing and puffing after each ~40 seconds round. Lately I have been doing more running albeit quite limited by the illness (can't run more than 1.5 miles without abdominal pain stopping me), so I am still waiting for my cure to materialize so I can go balls out training. My resting pulse is still 40 given the enlarged heart from all my endurance training in high school.

Believe me, I am eagerly anticipating being cured and royally fucking up a heavy bag the way Tyson does. After 3 years of debilitating hell (and 6 years of declining health before that), I have some progress on a potential cure just in the past weeks.

What you probably don't realize is that for several days after doing that boxing in the video, I was probably laid up in the bed with horrible Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which is why I couldn't train. That evening, I was probably not feeling well after that day in the gym. Recently I am seeing some improvement on this, but I am still not 100% in the clear. Still having some issues.