Writing About Fighting: Hand to Hand Combat Part One. 


1. Fighting is tiring. You fade quickly and even the most experienced fighters, even MMA champions tire, and sometimes rather quickly. If you want to write a convincing fistfight, keep it short and sweet, or show the exhaustion of your characters from how they exert themselves.

2. Your hands are going to get injured. If you punch someone, especially if you aren’t an experienced fighter, you’re going to bust your hands up and more than likely leave the encounter with bloody hands, and maybe even fractured knuckles. Oddly enough, this is more true for traditional boxers/kickboxers/MMA fighters. They’re taught to fight with gloves, so when they don’t, they hit harder because they’re used to gloves, so they are more prone to hand injuries if fighting bare knuckled.

3. Most people tend to target the head, but a knockout blow isn’t an easy thing to achieve, and often it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with force, rather it is more so the angle of the attack and where it hits that causes the KO. A knockout occurs when the brain is rattled in around in the skull. The sides and tip of the chin, along with the temples, the top of the head (with kicks) and behind the ear are all spots that are easier to obtain a KO. Be that as it may, it’s still not an easy feat. You aren’t going to knock someone out on your first attempt if you aren’t warrior or pro fighter.

4. Well placed Body Shots hurt. They hurt A LOT. Taking a shot to the Kidney is devastating and can cause nausea and pain for days. It’s not an easy target to hit though and is located about between your sides and back just below your lowest ribs. Speaking of body blows, the Liver Shot is also horridly painful and a well placed blow to the Liver is almost always a KO blow. It overwhelms your pain receptors and there can be a small delay up to a few seconds, but after that you will fall to the ground and be gasping for breath because your body will give out and everything will go blank for a second or two, pretty much without fail. Also, hitting the ‘Floating Rib’ which is the last and lowest of the ribs also has a similar effect to the Liver Shot.

5. When facing inexperienced strikers, closer is almost always safer because you’re essentially taking the momentum out of their blows, most of which are large looping shots that require distance. So if you want to be safer against someone who’s not a martial artist or professional fighter, get close. You need to be careful about wrestling though as it’s the most common martial art in the world and in any culture. Still though, closer is safer for most strikes.




There’s more to be said about distance management and slipping strikes, but you’ll have to tune in for the next update that’s soon to come. So, if you are thinking about writing or filming convincing fight scenes, keep watch on this blog series as I’ll update it soon with another list of five.

-M. Anthony Harris