The No Inch Punch

I’m writing about this because of all the arguments you read about ‘magic chi’ on the Tai Chi and Kung Fu pages.

It started as a joke in the 80’s with the Bruce Lee ‘one inch punch’. I joked that I had a ‘no inch punch’ and demonstrated it to show how the ‘internal mechanism’ of power worked. By placing my fist on a student and applying pressure from the feet to the floor, turning the waist against the hips to release power and vibrating the hips to send power to the wrist, hammering and screwing the fist into the solar plexus of the student it would make them fold at the core and send them often flying backwards.

It was a simple trick, the skills came from Tai Chi and/or the internal mechanism of Sanchin, the fajin of Naihanchi and knowing the nerve plexus’s on the body. I could teach it to someone with basic skills in a few minutes.

Anyone who was around me at the time will remember numerous examples of this being applied in classes and on seminars with hilarious results.

I didn’t think it would take off in the way it did. People would randomly turn up at the dojo and on seminars asking to experience the ‘no inch punch’ so I’d do it on them.

Normal fighting people would fold a bit and move a bit and say wow… that’s good, but it wasn’t that impressive. But to people not expecting the ‘dig’ it was a shock and they would react in a dramatic way.

One guy sh*t himself, one flew back about 15 feet and disappeared into a cupboard, with all the mops and buckets falling on him. When recruiting for my security company I used to visit the home of potential employees and one karateka was telling me that Bruce Lee’s punch was impossible and I said “actually…..” and he asked me to prove it. He went over his sofa and ended up in his bay window. He didn’t get the job.

A famous London ‘gangster’ asked me about it and I explained that if you can imagine a stone flying off a spinning wheel, in percussive martial arts, the wheel is the body and the fist is the stone, but in Tai Chi the entire body is the wheel and the stone is the opponent.

We were in my office and he insisted that I demonstrate it on him, he went over the massage couch and I could only see his feet sticking up in the air, I thought I’d killed him! That was filmed by his girlfriend at the time.

There were so many, I can’t remember most of them, but others on my FB account will. The point is that if you pick the right people, it can look far more powerful than it is, it needs to be shown and demonstrated on a variety of people and not just the sensitive ones or students that ‘act’ for you, or the ones that you can subliminally effect to be realistic.

The photo was taken in the 90’s in the Czech Republic with me demonstrating it on one of the president’s bodyguards, the late Josef Zferina with the police self defence instructor at the time, Ondra Musil, both founders of Karate in Czech and Shi Kon members.