pull your punches

Example: “The coach didn't pull any punches when she reviewed our performance.”

Origin: A pulled punch is one deliberately checked before it lands with full force — the arm slowed or withdrawn at the last moment so the blow connects without the power behind it. The phrase is early twentieth-century boxing usage, later than often assumed, and it arrived with a specifically dishonest association attached: a fighter pulling his punches was widely suspected of throwing the bout, taking money to lose while appearing to compete. That is why the figurative sense is not neutral restraint but withheld effort, usually with a suggestion that the person could have hit harder and chose not to. Figurative use spread through the 1930s and 1940s, and the expression is now far more common outside the ring than in it.