You have learned to touch from a walkup, thus establishing your initial sense of range.

You have learned to develop power in your jab by pushing off with your rear foot and applying the strength of your lower leg to the blow.

You have developed the first and last portion of the chain of mechanical events that is the perfect power jab.

Now we work on the middle portion, the meat of the beast.

First, recall that you are jabbing from the floor, stepping to the floor using gravity, and pushing off the floor using your lower leg and foot. You are hitting him with the floor.

Forget that at your peril.

The key to the power jab lies in between these two points.

You touch him.

You jar him.

You destabilize him.

The foot push at the end, which you just practiced in the last section, is what Big George Foreman used to beat people up with, because his calf was like a normal leg. The push off at the end of the jab is supposed to put your man on his heels, or hopefully cause him to lock up his hips for a fraction of a second, or better, a whole damned second. This is the destabilizing element.

So now, you can tell just walking up, when you can touch that wall. Once you can touch it you can rock your weight forward and drive some low leg strength off the rear foot into the target.

Let’s put it together.

Touch the wall.

Rock your palm into the wall.

You have now integrated to touch and rock.

Now you want to fill in the middle, the heart of the punch.

Back up a half-step which is no more than the length of your lead foot.

Your hands are up in guard.

Take a half-step forward and shoot out the slapping palm.

Back up to a half-step out again, and hit the wall with the palm slowly, making certain that you step out with your lead foot like you are walking, with your heel touching down first. This is about weight and does not have to look obvious, and can be done with your lead toes parallel to the floor. You don’t need to do a Bozo the clown slap step.

The power transfer rule is stated in three parts:

1. If your jab lands before your heel hits the ground, your potential power loses its potentiality as you get hung up on the high line. You have shit the jabbing bed.

2. If your jab lands after your heel hits the floor then your potential power wastes its potentiality on reconnecting with Planet Earth, a moody cosmically inclined bitch on the rag, who could care less about your combat aspirations. Congratulations, you have taken a step—kindergarten awaits!

3. If your jab hits the target at the same instant that your heel hits the floor, then you have transferred a portion of your weight [if it was all your weight you’d hit the floor with your lead knee every time you missed] into the target. You have hit with meaning. Do it again.

Continue to play with step length, angles, and how much weight—which is a matter of balance and should be between 60% and 40% optimally, 80% and 20% marginally, and will either be too risky if you are pushing more than 80% of your weight into the jab or too light to discourage a hard man if you are holding more than 80% back.

From these figures you can see how important the jab is to the bigger man. The bigger man must jab. The bigger man can win—can wreck fighters—with the jab.

Do not, as of yet, try flexing your rear foot into the blow. This will mess you up, and is the mistake made in Jeet Kune Do circles. Do not go for all of the elements up front but develop them in isolation. We will put them together later.

Now, having palm jabbed the wall, get on your line on the floor and start working the jab forward. When you get to the end of the line, turn, and work it the other way. When you get tired, switch to left hand lead and work that. Don’t jab going back, to the side, while standing on your pumpkin head, or doing any of the fancy shit you want to do. Just do this, and do it well, with a sizzling will. People who see you jabbing the air should think you possessed or insane.

Develop three step lengths, half-foot, quarter-foot and three-quarter-foot, and do them all with the jab. If you want to mix anything up, mix up these step lengths. Try quarter-step, three-quarter-step, and then half-step. Get creative and mix things up, keeping those shoulder relaxed, looking through your hands—not over them, hotshot—and moving with an easy, relaxed, step and drag. You are going to scrape the sole off of the front portion of your rear shoe by the time you get good at this.

So, practice for this week, is to jab, jab with the other hand, jab some more, jab until you start to hallucinate, and then jab at that imaginary foe again.

Do this, and you will never have to make a target access calculation. You will simply know when you can hit the target—provided it stays still, and when it doesn’t stay still, that game is called boxing.

Jab.