How to Knock Someone Out

Plus some people are just a lot tougher than others…

Boxing Knockout Tips

‘Knockout’ is the word on everyone’s lips when it comes to a boxing match. And rightly so, it puts boxers in the spotlight and gives them a notable reputation:

Measured by percentage, here are some stats from the top knockout boxers in history.

• Edwin Valero: 24 fights – 24 KOs = 100% Knockout rate
• Marcos Maidana: 26 – 24 = 92% Knockout rate
• Vitali Klitschko: 38 – 35 = 92% Knockout rate
• Juan Manuel Lopez: 24 – 22 = 92% Knockout rate
• Roman Gonzalez: 22 – 20 91% Knockout rate

Read on for some boxing knockout tips and gather insight on how to train and improve your chances of knocking your opponent to the floor.

What is considered a KO in boxing?

5 Knockout Tips

1. Be Quick and Speedy

2. Utilise your Body Weight

3. Leverage the Shoulder Snap

4. Set up the Knockout

5. Be Confident

What is considered a KO in boxing?

A KO (knockout) is normally given by the referee when a boxer is straight knocked down and out.

Boxers get a knockout out usually due to jaw impact because a hard punch to the jaw causes your head to suddenly spin. Trauma is then caused to the brain due to this quick movement and leaves you unconscious.

A TKO (technical knockout) is applied when the referee declares a fighter unable to carry on due to injuries or not being able to continue fighting.

Ways to knockout an opponent.

There are various ways to throw a hard punch and make your opponent fall down. How this happens depends on the following:

Precision: how to punch ‘hard’ correctly.

Landing a Punch: how to develop a powerful punch to cause the maximum amount of damage

Right Moment: learning the right time to land the punch

Understanding how to place your knockout punch properly is vital because a hard punch of this calibre may end up breaking your own wrist and thumb. Moreover, making sure a follow up deadly counter punch from your opponent doesn’t catch you out if the timing is poor.

Tips for throwing Knockout Punch

So what does it take for real knockout puncher to get the job done?

Before we start telling you knockout tips for boxing, remember…

Size doesn’t matter. Having a massive build doesn’t matter.

It has no significance in knocking someone out in the ring.

Here are the complete boxing knockout tips to knock your opponent out by throwing an accurate and powerful punch:

1. Quickness in the punch

One of the most important knockout tips is being quick when fighting in the ring. Your blow could be wasted by sluggish punches. A slow approach will mean your opponent have time to react and defend. So your punch must have quickness and speed. You must have to utilise the speed in your knockout punch.

Quickness in a punch comes from training.

So here’s how you can increase punching speed and agility in boxing.

Muscle Strength: First of all, you need to make your muscles stronger. It can be done by some simple exercises like jumping, sit-ups, push-ups and squatting. Another technique is to punch water in a pool or boxing sandbags repetitively.

Speed in the Punches: Once your muscles strengthen, you need exercises like shadow punching which is to punch in the air around yourself as fast as possible. Your punching speed would be improved as much as you practice it.

Try Some Tools: You can increase your punch speed with boxing equipment like weighted gloves, wrist weights, resistance bands and double end bags.

2. Utilisation of Bodyweight

The second most important boxing knockout tip is to utilise the weight of your whole body. Like any punch, you cannot knock your opponent out just using your arm.

A knockout artist is the one who utilises his entire body weight to blow his opponent anywhere they want… to the floor of the ring.

Learn to transfer power through your body.

Start from your legs with every punch or any jab you hit, cross or uppercut. The force generated will be much more powerful than using your arm strength alone.

Power is actually developed in the base of the body.

You can transfer this power from your legs through your entire body to your fist using weight transfer. Practice the transference of power to develop a powerful punch.

A tip would be sitting down slightly before punching your opponent. This might help the power transfers from your entire body to the fist with maximum velocity.

Another tip for transferring power is to point your foot towards your opponent when punching with the same hand as the upper body turns inward.

3. Leverage in the shoulder snap

Leverage in the shoulder is an important knockout tip. Punching your opponent with the leverage you have in the shoulder snap means you can hit your opponent really hard.

Snapping in boxing is a punching technique that uses the elastic energy of muscles and tendons when you are punching. You deliver the punch by using primarily a spring effect. It’s a punching technique with stages:

Relax – when stiff, your punches will more likely be thudding punches. You need to your shoulders for snapping.

Shoulder pop – this is the ‘snap’ and is what gives you extra power and a speed boost.

Freeze – It is not enough just to create tension. Studies support that it is the effective freezing of the chain links of your body that makes the effective release of the tension build-up.

Release – The trick here is not to tighten up muscles in the shoulder, otherwise your punch will push, not snap. The reason is because at the end of the punch you have to explode (tighten your fist and, correspondingly, other joints.) Therefore, the key is not do it too early. This comes with the practice only.

The application of the snapping principle to basic boxing punches comes down to a question how to create the tension properly.

It is just another method to shift your body power to your fist to throw a powerful punch.

4. Set up the Knockout

Basically, in boxing, you are not throwing just one punch to knock your opponent out. You have a strategy that sets up the knockout throughout your fight with an opponent.

Below are some boxing knockout tips for setting this knockout:

Fight by jabbing, using your footwork training, moving around the ring and throwing feints (movement with deceptive intention).

Counterpunch with the right hand and target the chin or temple. These are the right soft spots to knock someone out.

If your opponent misses the punch, you can counter with a left hand to punch to the liver and then to the chin consecutively.

Look for the opportunity to punch your opponent when he is not looking. Also, accurately hitting combination punches to your opponent may knock him out.

5. Be Confident

The golden rule.

You have to believe in yourself.

Mentally visualising your opponent knocked out in the ring is key to any knockout ability.

“From the neck up is where you win or lose the battle. It’s the art of war. You have to lock yourself in and strategise your mindset.” – Anthony Joshua

“ I’m not the greatest, I’m the double greatest. Not only do I knock ’em out, I pick the round.” Ali

It’s not an easy feat to accomplish but keep practising and you will hit hard and your opponent will hit the floor of the ring.

All the big names are engraved in boxing history, standing over their victims. Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Marciano, Sugar Ray, Jack Dempsey, these champions and legends of boxing all knew how to hit someone hard.

Have you ever knocked someone out in the ring? Let us hear that story. Add your own knockout tips in the comments below.

How to Knock Someone Out

Knocking someone out is an art, not a science. You have to get just the right combination of strike, angle, target and timing for it to work.

Plus some people are just a lot tougher than others…

You might clip one person with a glancing blow and have them go down instantaneously, lights out.

But then, another time, you might hit someone else square on the jaw with your very best Sunday punch and he’ll just stand there and smile at you (uh-oh, better start running)!

But it’s not all luck. The more you understand about the anatomy of human body then the more often you’ll get the fight-ending big KO!

Today we’re going to look at the 3 best targets on the human body to knock somebody out.

The video below breaks it down for you with lots of examples of actual knockouts from the boxing, MMA and Muay Thai ring.

Please note that we’re not including targets on the body below the neck in today’s article. Although shots to the body can also end a fight (and a good liver shot is so painful that you wish you were unconscious) it’s very rare for someone to get knocked unconscious from a body shot.

Let’s take a quick look at each of three prime knockout targets on the head and neck…

Knockout Target 1: The Jaw

The jaw is the easiest knockout target to access, because it’s the biggest of the 3 targets we’re going after.

Some of the most common strikes to attack the jaw area with sufficient force to cause the knockout include:

• the cross
• the hook
• the uppercut
• the rising knee
• the front kick
• the forward or spinning elbow

Doctors and anatomists debate the exact mechanisms by which a shot to the jaw causes the brain to shut off. It may, for example, have something to do with the jaw acting as a lever and amplifying the force transmitted to the head and the subsequent rotational ‘sloshing’ of the brain.

But regardless of the mechanism we can all agree that shots to the jaw have knocked out countless fighters in the boxing, kickboxing and MMA ring. And if you watch enough streetfights you’ll see that the pattern is no different on the street.

The jaw is a huge target and hitting it hard with a fist, elbow, knee or kick can bring the fight to an abrupt end.

Knockout Target 2: The Temple

The temple area is just behind your eyes and alongside the zygomatic bone on your face.

If you reach up with your hand you’ll be able to feel the indented area corresponding to the red highlights in the image below.

The temple is a smaller target than the jaw, but no less effective.

The most common shots that cause a knockout to the temple include

• the hook (including a wide swing)
• the overhand right
• the round kick
• the heel kick
• the hammer fist (on the ground)

I’ve heard several different explanations for the vulnerability of this area, including from the relative thinness of the bone in the temple, the biomechanical effects of lateral and rotational acceleration of the brain, to b.s. Chinese acupuncture point locations.

For our self defense purposes the exact mechanism is unimportant: the bottom line here is that if you get hit hard here it’s probably lights out!

Knockout Target 3: The Side of the Neck

The third point we’re going to talk about today is the side of the neck.

More specifically it’s about halfway down the neck on (or under) the sternocleidomastoid muscle (the big ‘rope’ that goes from your ear to the front of your neck).

This target is less commonly seen in boxing because the big gloves make it harder to access this point, but you see it fairly frequently in MMA, kickboxing and stick fighting when someone targets the head or the neck.

Typically this target is accessed with the following shots…

• the round kick
• the overhand right or the cross
• the forearm (thrown in a looping motion similar to the overhand right)
• downward angled strikes with a blunt weapon

The side-of-the-neck target also corresponds to the brachial stun location used by a lot of the Dim Mak and pressure point knockout people.

In fact the brachial stun may be the only legitimate thing these charlatans do: hitting 3 different meridian points on the bladder meridian (or whatever the magical sequence of the day is) never seems to work on a resisting opponent, but if you whump somebody hard enough on the side of the neck they’re going to get wobbly and fall down.

Once again there’s a lot of debate about why this point works…

I’ve heard doctors debate whether it’s a vascular (i.e. blood-based) or neurological (nerve based) knockout. The knockout point does correspond well to the location of the Carotid Sinus, which your body uses to keep track of blood pressure, so it may well be that hitting this point tricks your body into thinking that your blood pressure is sky high and shuts your brain off as a protective mechanism.

Once again, it doesn’t really matter why it works. The fact remains that it’s incredibly effective.

One final, very important thing…

The knockout is glorified in combative sport. Every highlight reel for the UFC features fighters being laid low by a photo opportunity shot to the head.

Knocking somebody out in the ring is one thing. Your opponent is landing on a padded surface and they’ve signed disclaimers and liability waivers to get there.

But on the street the first shot that knocks your opponent out could very easily be followed by a skull-crunching impact of head on sidewalk.

This second hit – the head bouncing off the pavement – has tremendous legal and ethical considerations. People have been sent to jail for more than 10 years after a simple sucker punch was followed by such a pavement coup de grace.

To familiarise yourself with this often-overlooked but potentially life-altering danger please check out the ‘Death After The Knockout (Or Beware the Second Hit)’ article on this site.

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