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Pictures by John Yoo.
To the trainers who made the most impact in my career: Steve Kalakoda, Henk Pelser and Ivan Hippolyte.
Targeting is the ability to select a target and to hit it with accuracy – no matter how it is moving.
Targeting is just a matter of getting your eye in. It’s all about hand-eye coordination and timing.
The most obvious method is to practice hitting a moving target.
Speedball
Most of us know the speedball. However, I don’t see them in gyms any more – except for older boxing gyms.
It is a pity, for I can’t see any evidence that people’s targeting ability have improved in fights lately – compared to years ago.
Take the speedball and punch it.
I was very impressed one day, when Mike Bernardo was in his heyday, with the way he worked the speedball.
He punched that speedball with power and in quick succession, mixing uppercuts, and hooks into his combinations.
He would punch that ball so hard that it would stretch the elastics to their maximum – making the ball recoil at speed. He just kept on smacking punches into it – not missing one for a whole two rounds!
I just knew that, if he wanted to punch your head, you could move it around any way you like – he’s going to be able to punch it at will.
There is really great value in the good old speedball.
Tennis ball
This is another improvisation I made for myself when I was having trouble with kicking accurately – especially high kicks.
Tie a piece of string to a tennis ball and suspend it from the roof at head height.
The idea is to kick this target and to keep kicking it as it moves around, using all your different kind of kicks.
It is quite difficult to do. So, start with one type of kick until you feel comfortable with it.
Then progress to other kicks one by one until you can hit the target at will with any kick you like.
This trains your timing, the speed of your kicks and targeting and as an added bonus, you also work on your flexibility.
One-second target
The principle is to have a target presented to you at intervals at different places for only one second at a time.
For this I use the normal target mitts that I use for boxing training. Present them to the fighter for different punches, i.e. straight punches, uppercuts, hooks, etc.
Hold them at various places, i.e. low, high up, far away from your body, etc.
But, present it for just one second. If the fighter misses, he misses. He should rather try to hit the next one. As the fighter progress, shorten the one-second frame to a fracture, to make it more difficult.
This usually starts out as speed play, but later on develops to the point where the fighter hits it with speed, power and accuracy.
If you feel comfortable and you have solid pads, you may even incorporate kicks in it. I would recommend it only for smaller fighters as bigger fighters may injure you wrists and arms.
The electronic dummy
I’ve seen some Tae Kwon Do schools with a padded dummy that has lights on the target areas of the body.
Every time a light switches on, the student kicks or punches the dummy on the light (which is embedded in polyurethane).
The instructor sets the light sequence on a control panel and the students strike the dummy on the places where the lights switch on for a set time. It is like fighting a round against a non-moving person. The trick is that you don’t know which light will switch on, so you don’t have time to set up for a specific strike.
This really works well in getting you to focus on the whole body and attack something that don’t allow wild swinging strikes – like the tennis ball would.
