Okinawan Karate Club of Madison

07/24/2022

This is an interesting video demonstrating how to increase your strength and power by properly engaging your triceps to connect your upper body to your midsection and lower body: https://youtu.be/KLm8vBRUUYQ. We see this practiced explicitly in kata like Seisan, Seiunchin, and Sanchin. While it is pretty obvious how this technique and improve your grappling strength, it is also a key component for increasing striking strength. It is something you really have to feel to get, and the best way to practice is with a makiwara or heavy bag. Focus on you lats as you strike and using them to drive in just as the strike makes contact. When you get it right you should feel a real difference in the power of your strike.

Next Episode: https://youtu.be/37Fcisca1A8Higa Sensei's Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosMbDkM4v5aGAxPNT8AqwQ🥋FREE TRIAL｜Online Group Lesson🥋htt...

01/16/2022

Just got these bad boys. The tonfa are made to order by Torii Wood Weapons (http://www.toriiusa.com/index.html) so the dimensions are perfect for me. They have many wood choices and these are made of hickory which is harder than oak making them very sturdy. The workmanship is top notch and the only negative is that as a custom made thing you can’t get the in 2 days with prime delivery. I’m really looking forward to learning to handle these effectively.

03/09/2021

An interesting video on the value of training slower. It is sometimes said that it isn't practice that makes perfect, but perfect that makes perfect. When in the mindset of learning something for self protection, one feels a certain amount of pressure because you are imagining a situation when things are going to be happening fast and furious. It is natural to want apply your defense quickly and now. But fast and sloppy is surefire way to not learn a technique properly. Slow and deliberate leads to fast and effective.

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03/03/2021

Here's a short video on the effects of a strike on the Vagus nerve (the side of the neck). A knife hand version of this strike appears in many of the Shorin-ryu kata and in fact is one of the most common techniques to be found in them. Clearly the Okinawan masters knew how effective this strike could be which makes it surprising that it is not better known. Probably this is due to the sporting influences on karate and the subsequent loss of knowledge of kata bunkai. All the more reason to look back at the kata to find the gems like the Vagus nerve strike for practical self protection.

Hey Everybody! Tim Larkin here with another self-protection video. Today we talk about an area of the body that can give huge results. The neck and the Phren...

02/14/2021

So now that I have discussed the theory of punching power, it is time to discuss the practice. I shot the slow motion video below to show the details of a classic Karate reverse punch, the most powerful strike in the art. If you look closely you should notice that the hips shoulders and arm move not simultaneously but engage in a sequence starting from the ground up. First the legs drive the hips torquing them into rotating. The shoulders only start moving after the hips and the arm only shoots out after the shoulders are moving. It is basically a wave that starts at the ground and moves through the body into the fist. Interestingly by the time my fist is about to hit the target, my shoulders and hips have actually stopped moving.

There are a couple of reasons why a wave motion optimizes speed and therefore power. Firstly there is the matter of Newton's second law. Remember that it says force is equal to the product of mass and acceleration, or to rearrange things a little, the acceleration is equal to the force divided by the mass. Apply the same force to a smaller mass and you get more acceleration and more speed. If you make your whole upper body rigid then the force applied by your legs has to turn its entire mass. When you only move the hips to start you are applying the same force of your legs but only to your hips, so they will start turning faster. You then engage your shoulders to catch up to your hips so they turn faster and then finally you shoot out your fist after the speed of your shoulders has peaked. The second advantage to the wave is that it allows you to stretch out all of your muscles so they have the maximal distance to contract. As you start turning your hips you stretch out your abdominal muscles so that when they contract to pull your shoulders they can pull over a longer distance adding more energy. By leaving your arm behind you stretch out your pectoral muscle so that it can pull over a longer distance maximizing the energy it puts into the punch. Finally you engage the arm muscles for the final boost to the target. By getting the most pull out of each of your muscle groups you maximize the speed of your arm toward the target giving you the strongest possible punch. Again if you kept your upper body rigid only your leg muscles would be contracting and contributing to the acceleration of the punch instead of all the other muscle groups when you punch in a wave.

01/31/2021

In the last post we discussed the importance of speed in punching power and came to the unsurprising conclusion that more is better. Now we want to look at increasing power at the point of impact, what I have referred to as force applied at impact. In karate there the concept of kime which translates in this context to focus and refers to the momentary tensing that occurs when finishing a punch. The funny thing is that it isn't too difficult to learn to use kime to increase your punching power, but understanding why it works is quite complicated. The tension used has to increase the force applied to the target, which at first blush may seem contradictory. Let me explain.

First let me show by example what is not power enhancing kime. Considerer a classic karate straight punch thrown into the air so there is no target to impact. At the termination of the punch the muscles of your arm lock usually as you complete the twist of the fist. This is not done to increase the power of your punch. In fact it can't. Your muscles are actually locking because of a reflex action that your body has preprogrammed to protect your elbow joint. You may notice that you don't really have to think about stopping the punch; it just snaps to a stop. Your body is preventing you from hyper-extending your elbow joint. But, this reflex stops your punch from moving. Locking your arm removes speed from your punch diminishing or even eliminating its power (slower speed means less force). This is why you are instructed to 'punch through' your target so that your fist hits a full speed before your reflexes stop it.

So what is the source of effective kime? It is actually in your abdominal muscles. As part of kime you exhale hard just as you hit the target. The contraction of your abs pulls your torso (rib cage and shoulders) toward your pelvis driving your arm into the target. Try this. take a stance facing a wall and extend your arm all the way out so that it almost touches the wall like you are completing a punch. Leave a gap of say a quarter of an inch between your fist and the wall. Now keeping everything else still give a sharp exhale like you do when finishing a punch (but not too hard or spackle is in your future). You should notice your fist bumping the wall. So we see that this abdominal contraction, the momentary tension of kime, can help drive your fist into the target. It provides additional force behind the punch at the point of impact. Note that you really can't move your fist very far by contraction your abs, maybe an inch or less. This means that the tensing must come right at impact when the forces are peaking to add to the force of the strike. Hence kime as an instantaneous focus.

In future posts we'll look at how you can properly train kime to maximize its effect. We'll also look at some particular kata that I believe either in part or are mostly designed to train kime and why they do so. And since you have read this far, if you could like and share this post it will help more people to see this content which I hope you find interesting. Also, leave a comment if you have your own thoughts on the subject.

01/27/2021

This is the second post in my series on understanding punching power. In the introductory post I mentioned the two key components of hard hitting speed and force applied at contact. In this post I want to tackle the importance in particular of speed. To do that we need to take a closer look at what happens when fist meets target. The details of impact can be incredibly complicated and would require very powerful computer simulations and lots of math to really simulate. Don't worry, there won't be any math in this post because luckily we only need to have a qualitative understanding of impacts to learn what we need to understand how to hit hard. Let me start out by stating something that might be kind of obvious but nevertheless are key to cracking the problem.

Firstly, no matter how solid the object (or not) anything your punch is likely to come into contact with has give. Under force it will compress. If the target is soft like a pillow it will give a lot meaning that compressing a pillow significantly won't change the force of resistance very much. Conversely a very hard target like a concrete wall has almost imperceptible give. You can apply a great deal of compression force to concrete and it only compress very slightly. On a human target the give varies between say bone which is pretty hard and skin and muscle which is more compressible. That doesn't mater too much for the rest of our discussion.

So now let's simplify the problem a bit by replacing a punch with a hard thrown baseball (so we can ignore the applied forces from the body at contact) and consider what happens when ball hits target. We'll assume the ball is moving at the target is stationary. When the ball makes contact a combination of two things has to happen: the ball needs to slow down and the target needs to get out of the way. The system needs to at least reach a point where the relative motion of the ball and target is zero so the ball stops trying to pe*****te the target. At that point it may bounce off again or not depending on how elastic the ball and target are, but we don't really care at that point because we're past the peak of the impact. Now recall Newton's first law says that an object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an external force (and one at rest will stay at rest until acted upon). Also remember Newton's third law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So when the ball hits the target the ball and target are going to start compressing (because the have to get out of the way) which will generate equal forces on the ball and target. The force on the ball will tend to slow it down and the forces on the target will tend to accelerate it away from the ball. The give in both the ball and target will keep increasing so long as the ball is moving faster than the target causing the forces on both the ball and target to increase. Eventually the speed of the target equals that of the ball and the forces peak.

Now we can see why speed is key. The faster the ball moves the faster it tries push through the target. The forces between the ball and target build up more quickly and peak at a higher value in order to stop the faster moving ball. This makes intuitive sense if consider the difference between getting hit by a freight train moving at one mile per hour to being hit by a bullet. The energy and momentum of the train is astronomically greater than that of a bullet but the train is moving so slowly that it only has to accelerate you to a speed a third of a walking pace. It is hardly a bump. A bullet on the other hand is minuscule by comparison, but it is moving so fast that your body can't get out of the way fast enough and it tears up flesh and breaks bones. That's another thing to note about speed. At a high enough speed the peak force generated between target and the impacting object is greater than the strength of the target (or the impactor if you are foolish enough to punch a boulder). In that case the target tears or fractures allowing the impactor to pass through. This is the essence of many board breaking and other similar demonstrations. The practitioner hits with enough speed that the instantaneous force breaks the target. So, speed is essential; it is as simple as that.

01/24/2021

Any decent instructor of a striking martial art can teach you how to hit hard. And while the mechanics may differ a bit depending on the particular art say between boxers and karate practitioners (because the use of gloves in the former requires adjustments for maximal effectiveness), I have never found an adequate explanation of why we hit the way we do. Sometimes a discussion will include an equation for momentum or energy or a discussion of mass and 'getting your body weight behind the punch' but none I have seen satisfactorily the complexities of all the dynamics of a fist hitting a target. Now maybe it is just because I studied physics in my wasteful youth, but I don't like inadequate explanations. But actually, having a real understanding of why a punch is hard hitting can help you improve your strikes and also avoid serious mistakes from misunderstandings. A failure of some karate practitioners to grasp 'hip vibration' can lead to some sadly comical results.

Unfortunately a subject as complicated as punching power can't be covered completely in one or even a few short blog posts. However, I think I can give enough of the flavor in this forum to enhance your understanding and give you some tools to analyze and improve your own striking. So this post doesn't become just an advertisement, let me tease some things we'll discuss more thoroughly in future posts. Fundamentally hard hitting depends on two things: speed and the force applied at contact. You want to accelerate your fist (foot, elbow, whatever) to the highest speed possible before making contact and then as you are making contact you want to apply as much additional force as possible. Put together you will apply the maximal peak force onto the target which should be the most damaging. Stay tuned for the next post where we will discuss what actually happens when you hit something.

01/10/2021

In the video below, the gentlemen at the Fight SCIENCE YouTube demonstrate what they call hand fighting which is their term for controlling an attacker's limbs when things get up close and personal. In my own classes I categorize this range of fighting as grasping range because you are close enough to grab and control but not quite chest to chest where grabbing looses its effectiveness. It interesting to me to see some of the same basic principles shown here as contained in Naihanchi kata (one translation of 'naihanchi' is roughly 'close fighting'). We also see similar defensive work in some of the 12 karate kumite created by Choki Motobu who was famous for his interpretation of Naihanchi (and for being one of the best karate fighters of his time).

Here’s why you have to fight to control arms in a self defence encounter. Danger is in the hands of the threat. Think about it, if someone wants to use a wea...

01/03/2021

First class of the year will be this Wednesday (1/6)! Our regular schedule is Wednesday at 8 PM and Saturday at 2 PM. We still have openings for new students, so send us a message if you are interested joining us.

12/29/2020

Classes are currently scheduled to resume in January. If you are interested in learning classical Okinawan karate send us a message or email us at [email protected] to try two weeks of classes on us.