There are many ways to teach yourself how to keep your eyes open in a fight. They all work, but some of them are only practical in certain situations and serve no purpose in a real fight. Watch the video below and learn how to train and reverse your natural reaction. Being able to keep your eyes open and alert will greatly improve your effectiveness in a fight.
Video Transcription
In this video, we’re going to teach you how to keep your eyes open and your head up when the punches are coming in a fight. Alright guys, we got a lot of suggestions about videos and topics that I should be covering, which is great. Keep sending them in. Someone asked me about blinking and closing the eyes while the punches are coming in. So, I’m going to be showing you a few ways how you can overcome that, keep your eyes on an opponent, and be most effective in a fight. The importance of keeping your eyes on your opponent is obvious. You get to see when the punches are coming and from where they are coming from. You can block, and you can counter. Counter punching is probably going to be my next video. For now, we got to make sure you’re keeping your eyes open.
It’s a natural reaction to close your eyes when something is coming at you. If you think about it, when you raise your hand to a dog like you’re going to hit it, it automatically will start to turn away, and it’s eyes will flicker. The reason for this is because your eyelids are your last line of defense. If you have your hands up and a punch comes through, you know you’re not going to block it in time, or it slips pass your block, it’s going to be your first reaction to blink. This is good because you don’t want knuckle going directly into your cornea or pupil. Even though, it’s just a thin layer of skin, it’s still better than nothing. It’ll prevent scratching. This is instinct, and your body knows to do this on cue. You don’t have to train this.
In fact, we’re going to try to reverse the habit and keep your eyes open as long as possible. My Muay Thai trainers in the past said “if you close your eyes, the monsters don’t go away.” This is a good concept, and it’s pretty self explanatory. If you close your eyes, it doesn’t mean the punches are going to stop coming. Your best bet is to keep your eyes open and see where they are coming from; slip, block and counter.
There’s a lot of unique ways that people try to get over their habit of closing their eyes and flinching. Sometimes they will have partners throw tennis balls at them, and they will slip it. I’ve heard people will slap water, and when the water splashed on them they will try to keep their eyes open. The sound of the water tends to make people flinch and blink. These might all be effective ways, but I’m very sports specific with my training. People aren’t going to be throwing tennis balls at you in a fight. Punches are going to be coming at you, and that’s the way I want you to train.
For this, you’re going to need 2 pairs of 16 oz gloves, headgear and mouth-guards. We don’t have the head gears and mouth-guards because we’re not really going to be sparring. But, I want you guys to develop a 75% power and speed. What I want you guys to do is set the clock for about 3 minutes, and you’re going to do just sparring. I have a video on sparring for beginners if you’ve never done it before. It’s pretty much everything you would in a real fight but toned down just for training. It’s a way of learning and teaching your partner, so, use it as a learning lesson, not to take each others heads off.
After the 3 minute runs out, take a minute rest, and after that minute, we’re going to do a drill similar to what you just did with the sparring, except one person is going to be the offender and the other is going to defend. We’re going to split this up into 30 seconds because you don’t want one person on the offense the entire time. Once you switch it, they’re going to be so used to hitting a heavy bag, when the punches come back, they’re going to be flinching.
For 30 seconds, 1 person is going to be throwing attacks, the other person defending. After that 30 second is up, you switch places. Do that continually until the 3 minutes is up so you should be doing 3 each. One thing you might be seeing there is that I was always in constant movement, constant motion. You never want to just stand there and be a punching bag. Even if you feel like you’re blocking the hits, and you have good form, and the helmet guard, you still want to be in movement. This is because if a punch hits you as you’re move away from it, roll with it, slip it or have your hand up and block it partially, it takes a lot away from the punch, and it won’t hurt you as much.
When I say keep you head up, that doesn’t mean your chin. Your chin always stays tucked, your hands always stay up, elbows in, and your eyes on your opponent. You don’t have to look them in the eyes. I like to look at my opponents at their chest level so I can see their arms, their hips before anything comes, and I can see their feet in case they were to throw knees or kicks.
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