Upper Body Striking Only Beginner Sparring Drills is a great way to just focus on your boxing skills and boxing sparring as well as focusing on adding elbows and palm strikes to your beginner sparring drills. You can work on offensive and defensive punches, palm strikes, and elbow strikes for mma, kickboxing, and self defense. Most beginners will feel more comfortable with hand strikes or upper body sparring as it will feel more natural as we were taught to use our hands more than our feet. Focusing on getting good with boxing skills will help you defend your head as well as learning to set up your kicks and knee strikes to the groin and legs of your opponent or assailant.

Sparring in itself is unpredictable as most self defense situations are. Martial Arts styles such as taekwondo, where you do a lot of sparring, are more practical for self defense because you aren’t just drilling with theory. You actually learn what sparring skills and self defense skills work for you. This is a key point we teach in our self defense for women workshops.

Master Jonathan Field