Muay Thai Kickboxing - How to Throw a Uppercut

Matt Hostetler: This is Matt Hostetler with Capital Jiu-Jitsu. Now, we are going to move on to Uppercuts. One of the most important things when you are doing Uppercuts again, is how your holder is holding the focus mitts. Now, you saw for hooks, it was perpendicular to the holders body, for uppercuts, he is going to keep the focus mitts right at chin level and straight down. Thats going to enable Stuart to have a proper angle of attack. So, leading off with the front uppercut, again, the punch is going to start from the feet and its going to carry up into the focus mitt. He is going to slightly pivot his front leg forward and as he does that, he drops his base a little bit, you dont necessarily have to drop your base, but it will give you more power if you put a little bit more of your core into the strike and because the path of the uppercut is straight up, thats another reason why dropping your base will allow you to transfer some more power into the strike.

So, a couple of strikes for the front uppercut Stuart, now, as you saw, the strike is going straight up, its not coming at any angles. You are aiming to go underneath your opponents guard and travel up and hopefully hit him right in the chin or the jaw. The leg movement is what is going to enable you to have good power. Now, moving on to the rear uppercuts, you guys want to switch up. Again, everything is pretty much just the mirror image. He is going to pivot slightly off of his back leg, dropping base, dropping in base as he does that and then he is going to deliver the strike. Now, one important point to make is not to exaggerate the strike. You dont want to travel it all the way up to the top, you bring yourself out of position. Thats not necessary. The critical part of the motion pretty much ends right as you pass his head level and it enables you to recover your guard very quickly as well. So, with that, you can see that it can be a knockout; it can be a very effective strike to travel inside your opponents guard. Its a close range strike, you can catch him. Its hard to see this coming if its executed properly.