Stryke wrote:
ya know what happens to those that sit on the fence dont ya
Don't worry, mate, I'm off the fence with one food firmly planted in a cow pie...
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Van wrote:
Truth is that the majority of Uechi practitioners don’t know how to do side thrust kicks, the way they should be done properly such as in styles like TKD or TSD. Uechi does not teach this _ no such thing in our forms.
In the old days of the Mattson academy, our fighting team needed to go outside Uechi, to learn those and other ‘prevalent’ tournament kicking techniques on our own to get the job done, and that we did extremely well.
Amen to that.
I was fortunate in that I started outside Uechi Ryu where Hiroshi Hamada taught me how to do a proper Japanes
yoko geri. From there I bumped into Ray Berry in Charlottesville (ask Ted Dinwiddie) who had a side thrust kick that had to be seen to be believed. This dedicated Shotokan practitioner and student of Oshima Sensei worked that technique and a lunge punch the way Uechika work their sanchin thrust, wauke, and front snap kick. I stole lots of good training ideas from them, and incorporated these and other TKD drills into my own routines. (The choreography I developed was given to GEM, and became part of my renshi thesis.) Over the past few years I got kind of lax teaching this stuff in class, because I wanted to focus more on Uechi concepts. Sadly in the last test, I noted how everyone's kicks in exercises uniformly sucked. So....
If you want the goods, you have to do the work.
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Good post on the jab, Mike. I agree 100%. That person knows his stuff.
Muhammed Ali and Larry Holmes had the best jab in the business.
* As was mentioned in the article, their primary use was to keep the opponent at bay. Ali was vulnerable to left hooks, so used the jab every time he saw someone about to move in, or planting the front foot.
* Ali also admittedly did not have a "knockout punch", so relied on combinations to bring his opponents down. The jab set things up. (The sequential striking Jim is talking about).
* And finally... Ali perfected the pronation of the jab on contact (see Mike's post above) to an astonishingly high level. What many don't realize is that he spent time with Jhoon Rhee working on this. In his early years, his opponents' faces at the end of matches often looked like hamburger meat.
And that brings me back to the topic at hand.
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Understand that moving people via throwing or breaking of the center is a key fighting ability. We are just focusing on the percussive vs. pushing technique, and how to do the former vs. the latter.
Much has been made of velocity in the ability to do damage vs. move someone. To some extent this is true when you consider the physics on a simple level. Van also talked about the proportion of muscle fibers being fast twitch as a key ingredient. Again, this is true to some extent on a simple level. That gets into the difference between strength and power.
Here's a good example from Wilmore et al.
In the following set of tests, three things were measured.
*
Strength was determined by the one-repetition maximum (1-RM)
*
Power was determined by perfomring the 1-RM test as explosively as possible. Power was caluclated as the product of force (weight lifted) times distance lifted divided by the time needed to complete the 1-RM.
* Muscular
Endurance was determined by the greatest nunber of repetitions that could be performed using 75% of the 1-RM.
Athlete A - Bob
Strength -
200 lb
Power - 200 lifted 2 feet in 1/2 second, or
800 ft-lb/sec
Endurance -
10 repetitions with 150 lb
Athlete B - Ben
Strength -
400 lb
Power - 400 lifted 2 feet in 2 second, or
400 ft-lb/sec
Endurance -
10 repetitions with 300 lb
Athlete C - Bill
Strength -
400 lb
Power - 400 lifted 2 feet in 1 second, or
800 ft-lb/sec
Endurance -
5 repetitions with 300 lb
So in this simple test, Ben is twice as strong as Bob, but half as powerful and with equal endurance. Bill matches Bob's power and Ben's strength, but has half as much endurance as those other two men.
Ponder that test example above. It clears up a lot of misconceptions about fundamental athletic skills.
So why try to do a better bench if someone half as strong can be just as powerful? Look at the math above. It's easier to get stronger (make thicker muscle fibers) than it is to get faster on a fundamental muscular level (make the fibers contract faster). This is assuming, of course, that the athlete works on flexibility and movement so that the antagonistic muscles are not interfering with velocity.
That's the fundamental principles.
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But wait, it's more complex than that!!!
How can a former long distance runners and average strength guy such as myself been so good at throwing a fastball and doing wicked roundhouse kicks? Ahh... Now we get to the good stuff!
Marcus touched on the subject a bit with his comment about lateral techniques. I'm curious about how Marcus is built. Personally I fit the profile of a "crane."
"Big Unit" throws some wicked fast pitches even in his forties, partly because of his build. While he may have average strength, the distance from those pectoralis and deltoid muscles and the ball is incredibly large. So this means the velocity on the end of that long arm is much higher than for the guy with the shorter arm. And that's just one part of his massive frame. A full windup pitch (done with the bases clear) is a whole body motion with a whole lot of leg and hip movement leading into the shoulder, arm, wrist, and finally finger movement. With him, we see two things. First, we see the advantage that the longer-armed guy can bring onto the field. (It's always those short-armed guys doing the massive bench presses, no??) With certain movements done in certain ways, the veolocity really can get pretty impressive.
But it's more than the geometry (moment arms) involved. Now we go from muscular to
neuromuscular power.
When you watch Dana do her Nakamatsu-inspired sanchin thrusts, you see someone who has captured the concept. In essense what she does is make energy go from one part of her body to the next. It starts from the legs/hips, and goes through the spine to the shoulders, arms, and finally hands. As the energy wave goes up the body, she pre-stretches those muscles VERY QUICKLY. The dynamic stretch reflex is proportional to the speed of lengthening of the muscles. So as the wave goes up the body, each muscle group does a stronger contraction than it normally would because of the rapid pre-stretching of the muscles. A person properly trained knows how to go with the dynamic stretch reflexes at each point in the body and add in intentional contraction. The result is like a boulder that gains speed as it goes down a very steep hill.
But this goes beyond a single technique. Athletes who learn flow can cause prestretching in various parts of the body that they can take advantage of. Good kata (like the Uechi big three) have excellent concepts of movement build right in. If you know how to flow, you will realize the grammer in the forms, and realize that sometimes it has little to do with the target and more to do with generating that energy wave.
This is why Muhammed Ali did not have a "knockout punch" and yet was able to knock out so many of his opponents. He understood combinations. He understood how to flow. He could get the wave going in his body, and release the energy on the right place at the right time.
Easier said than done...
We modern fighters can learn all this via good kata training, plyometrics, good prearranged partner training, etc., etc. It's all in the basics. You just need to know it is there, know how to exploit it, and then just do it.
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And finally...
I have often told my students that strikes and thrusts are a 2-phase affair. Phase one is the speed you develop going from point A to target. Phase two is what you do once the weapon hits the target.
If you look for it... Our kata have things that we do - or SHOULD be doing - at the moment of contact. Sadly we train that out of ourselves in sport sparring. But you can still work on elements of it in competitive sports such as boxing where hitting is allowed.
Take a simple punch. Karate/boxing have one way to add in an extra "oomph" at the point of contact. It is in the pronation of the forearm that happens as the person continues to penetrate the target. WCK has the radial deviation of the wrist. Six of one and half dozen of the other. Each is a way to add in an extra energy component. The pronation introduces shear forces. The radial deviation just introduces more linear penetration.
Makiwara training also is there to teach folks about this second phase of a technique. After contact, the person is supposed to add in an extra contraction component. You don't bounce off the target like a good tournament fighter. You go from high velocity, low resistance to low velocity, high resistance movement. And you CONTRACT against that resistance with your whole body. That happens for about the amount of time that you are focusing your sanchin thrust at the end of extension.
Snapping techniques accomplish that extra energy transfer in a slightly different way. The pronation of the boxers jab is a good example. It's less about continued penetration, and more about speed and surface damage.
The biggest problem we dojo people have IMO is we don't hit things enough. Furthermore, we should be trying to hit different types of things. Makiwara teaches one kind of damage power. But hanging things that can move if you don't hit them fast enough teaches you more about the hooking and whipping techniques. One really great tool I picked up from Dave Machin is used X-Ray paper. Unfortunately HIPAA makes it more difficult to get used stuff (privacy concerns with the names on the X-Rays). But you can still order the stuff new for a price. X-Ray paper gives a fantastic "report" when you do things like a good backfist, a roundhouse kick, a hook, a spinning hook kick, etc.
Focus mits help as well.
One thing Hiroshi Hamada used to frustrate us with in teaching whipping techniques is a simple candle. The idea was to blow the candle out with the speed of your technique, without touching the flame. Give it a try; it'll humble you until you get it down.
I supposed that's enough bandwidth for now.
- Bill
