Hey guys
I spend a lot of time working with new people coming in to deal with this problem. I think an important way to look at it is making your hands difficult to drop - rather than fighting to keep them up, which to me implies that they should be down and you have to remember to keep them raised.
Jaxx mentioned the thread with a
discussion on the CM structure and that's worth checking out. The biggest thing for me that comes out of the CM structure in relation to hand position is lifting your traps up to 'scrunch' the back of your neck. Imagine some one tickling the back of your neck and you shrug your shoulders to stop them. That's the motion you want.
Give this a experiment quick try now, while you're sat at your keyboard.
1. Keep your shoulders down, your head upright and lift up a guard.
2. Lift your hands up to your eye level
3. Have a look at how much of a gap there is between your elbows and your body.
I'm 5'9" and if I do this (while I'm typing), I end up with a 6" gap between my elbows and ribs - this means my elbows are projecting in front of my body and I can feel the work in the anterior deltoid straight away. If I lift my shoulders up (trying to touch my shoulders to my ears) this doesn't change much. Plus if I lift my shoulders up at the sides, I can still nod my head backwards and forwards - which shows my neck isn't locking my head still if I take a hit.
Now lift up your traps and try and get rid of your neck and repeat the exercise.
Lifting your traps up makes you hunch slightly, bringing your chin down under the cover of your shoulders and supporting your head. If you try nodding your head backwards and forwards now there should be very little backwards movement.
Bringing things swiftly back to the original topic, the other key benefit of lifting your traps is that if you raise your hands to your head now and look down at the gap between your body and elbows it should be a lot smaller, if not gone completely. If I hunch my traps I can put my hands on my forehead and still have my elbows touching my ribcage, whereas before I had to reach my hands up, with the scrunch of my traps they reach to my head with no problems at all.
The beauty of this from a postural mechanics standpoint is that the top half of my arm is hanging from my shoulders now, rather than being held in front and counterbalanced by work in my deltoids. So all I need to do work-wise is keep my hands held up...
not my whole arms. If I can keep my hands on my head, which is locked solid, I can take shots with structure not strength.
By working the hunchback stance that raising my traps gives me it is much harder for me to drop my hands, so I don't really need to think about keeping them up: They want to stay up.
Hope that helps.
Phil