This is the last involution in the striking series for this month. In the video below you can see Athanor Robert experimenting with a Rough 'n' Tumble, Hatmaker-styled pulling towel for street-ready fighting combos.
Obviously this approach assumes clothing, which means that it wouldn't work in a shirtless MMA environment. But in the real world there's almost always a shirt of some kind, and this time of year there's often a coat -- even better.
By all means at least try putting a towel on your heavy bag.
Pull and Hit: Martial Arts Training Involution #194
Warm-up thoroughly for at at least 8 minutes. I like to do 2 minutes each of jump rope, light calisthenics, shadowboxing, and dynamic stretching -- or I just do 8 minutes of MBF.
3 x 3:00/1:00 on the heavy bag with the towel. Experiment with both one and two-handed pulls. Which do you like best? Make sure when you give the bag a yank that you pull down as much as you do inward. You want your opponent to get off balance and, if possible, for his head to come down so you can clobber him with a rabbit punch to the back of the head.
3 x 3:00/1:00 sparring with the pulling technique. Obviously you never want to strike your training partners with a rabbit punch! But what you can do is put shirts you don't care about and practice your quick grabs and yanks. If you do get your partner's head down, substitute a hammer strike to the bicep or lats. Really get after it -- this is the great thing about grappling and wrestling: you can go really hard without too much risk of injury. It's the striking, and risks of concussion, that present the highest risks. Play safe, modify, adapt, and overcome.
10 minutes of meditation on why you're doing martial arts. Set a timer for 10 minutes, have a seat in your meditative posture of choice, and regulate your breathing. Spend the time meditating on your reason for practicing martial arts. Do not think in words. Step back. Imagine that you are watching your martial arts highlight reel playing on television, It plays backwards from the moment you shut your eyes all the way back to the moment you first started your martial journey. Experience the mental images without linguistic thinking until the timer beeps. Pick up your training journal, write down what you saw and learned, and then begin to explore in words why you're doing martial arts. The answer may be different than you think!