Power Tae Kwon Do Kicks in Five Logical Steps

 Martial Arts  1 Response »
Feb 012010
 

It makes no sense to let an attacker get close enough to use his hands. If he’s got a knife or club, or just a fist that is fast, the best strategy is to kick low and keep him at a distance. The problem is that many Martial Arts schools do not teach the right way to use the legs.

A couple of things to remember before we get into making your kicks into powerful tools of destruction. Practice kicking high so you have strength and flexibility, but keep your kicks low in a real fight so you don’t get a leg grabbed and tossed. And, the best strategy is to avoid the fight altogether.

Practice kicking over a chair or object of similar height. This will train you to raise your knee high for the proper execution of the kick. When your knee is high your foot can go straight in and deliver the goods, and rise in an arc up the side of the body.

Turn your hips into the action of the kick. Always turn, or tilt, your hips so that the weight of the hips is driven into the action. This will also give you a little more reach, and it will help commit the whole weight of the body into the action.

Always try to kick with the ball of the foot. I know many people like to kick with the instep, but if they miss they end up spinning around out of control. Kicking with the ball of the foot forces the artist to be an artist, and it concentrates more weight into the smaller area of the ball of the foot.

Bring the foot all the way back. Snap that foot back so that an opponent can’t grab it. This also tends to leave more power in the target.

Practice planting your foot on the target, then pushing. This usually means you will alter the kick, for this exercise, so that you can place the heel on the body of your partner, then push. This trains the exact muscles needed at impact.

Kicks are your first line of defense, and this makes them extremely important, so don’t just practice your kicks ten or twenty times and forget about them, practice them hundreds of times a day for each kick. Whether you are training in Karate, or Tae Kwon Do, or Kung Fu, or whatever other art, a well placed kick cancan make the difference between winning and dying. So practice, and look at your kicks, study the physics of a kick so that your kicks are effective and end the fight before the opponent even gets close.

Al Case has analyzed martial arts for over 4O++ years. A writer for the magazines, he had his own column in Inside Karate for many years. You can find out how to have the most powerful punch on the planet, or how to have the strongest kicks on the planet, by picking up his free ebook at Monster Martial Arts.

How to Strike Harder than Mike Tyson!

 Karate  No Responses »
Jan 132010
 

Wham bam! Iron Mike Tyson, back in the day, was knocking them down faster than they could stand up. Twelve of his first nineteen fights ended in the first round, and always with the opposing fighter laying face down like a drunk that had been massaged by a tractor!

No other fighter was knocking people out like Iron Mike, also known as Kid Dynamite, and there were a lot of strong fighters out there. So there had to be something that Mike was doing that nobody else was doing. There simply had to be a secret behind his incredible, dynamite filled, slobber knocking punches!

The secret actually comes in two parts. The first part of the secret is that he was shorter than everybody, therefore he was automatically ducking under the incoming fist, and rising up with his own. This meant that he had to use his legs, he was perfectly situated, so the push of his legs was part of his punch.

Because he was coming up from under, he learned how to push with his legs and use his hips so they assisted the angle of his punch. He just happened to be the proper size that enabled him to arc his punch at exactly the right angle, to pop that chin at exactly the right spot. Every opponent fought him in similar fashion, he defended the same way, and he didn’t start losing until opposing fighters analyzed him correctly and actually boxed!

The other part of the secret has to do with the way he was living his life. He was winning fights as long as Cus DAmato was training him, because Cus DAmato was keeping him in hand, caring about him as an individual, working with him as a person. When Cus died, however, everything changed for Iron Mike Tyson.

After Cus died Tyson came under the influence of nefarious individuals such as Don King. His marriage went sour, and he eventually began taking prescribed psychiatric medications. The mental edge that had carried him so far went away, and other fighters were no longer coming in in exactly the right manner to be taken apart by him.

So the secret of Mike Tysons unbelievable knock out punch had to do with taking advantage of his height to use his legs and come up under his opponent. It also hinged upon the discipline in his lifestyle which was enforced through the friendship of a man who cared about him as a person. And everything changed when fighters figured him out and he no longer had a trainer who could help him solve the issue.

The lesson here is that when you train in the martial arts, be it boxing or whatever, you must assess your body truthfully, and learn how to avoid its weaknesses and exploit its strengths, not an easy thing to do, but rather requiring an honest and truthful approach to oneself. The second thing you must do is live your life the right way, staying away from people who say they love you, but who act otherwise, this is seen easily if you look at how they treat people in their past. Anybody who utilizes these two principles, being accurate in your assessment of your body and living a good lifestyle, has a chance to develop the hardest punch in the world.

Al Case has researched martial arts, and the science of striking, for over 40+ years. A writer for the magazines, he is offering a free ebook on the martial arts. You can also visit Punch Em Out if you want a 100 page book which has the secrets of the hardest punch in the world!

How to Get the Gunfighter Mentality in Martial Arts!

 Karate  No Responses »
Jan 122010
 

One of the most important things you can have, if you want to be a good fighter, inside the ring or out, is the gunfighter mentality. The best fighters, like Chuck Lidells and Anderson Silva, have this intuitively in their personality. The losers don’t.

Interestingly enough, the Gunfighter Mentality used to be part and parcel of the classical martial arts. I remember training back in the sixties, and everything we did was geared towards this ability. While there were many factors involved in the death of this principle, Bruce Lee was probably the nail in the coffin.

Bruce Lee added circling and bouncing to the martial arts. The Gunfighter Mentality depends on stillness, being coiled like a snake, and here was this fellow acting like Mohammad Ali, circling and jabbing and destroying the mindset of the Gunfighter. Now Bruce Lee would have won most any fight anyway, but a generation copied him, and they gave up the deadly zen stillness of the Gunfighter.

Now stillness is the heart of true fighting, when it comes to the martial arts, and there are several good reasons or this. There was much interchange between karate and zen principles in Japan, and people who sat in the zen position for long hours began to see the benefits of sitting, waiting, and cultivating silence. In the silence one could better perceive, could empty themselves enough that their intuitive nature would take over.

When one is silent, just sitting, when one does nothing, the senses begin to work better. Try it, just sit in a chair comfortably and do nothing for a while. The world will start to intrude on you, tell you things, become brighter, louder, more obvious.

Once the student begins to appreciate that his perceptions will work better, the true martial arts can be developed. In the silence we learned how to set our stances, to sink them into the ground, and search for the angle set of the leg, the best position to spring from. In the silence we would examine the position of the foot and the turn of the hips, trying to make every single part of our bodies into responsive and explosive machines.

Freestyle matches, instead of moving all around and wasting energy, would be subtle shifts of the body and edgings toward the opponent. Instead of throwing a hundred punches, most of which missed the target, we would set up to throw one punch, but every ounce of our might would be instilled in that one punch. Most important, we left the training hall as different people, aware people, patient people.

The Gunfighter Mentality in the martial arts is pretty much unknown now, and it is too bad. I believe that if the fighters of today began building the characteristics of a good Gunfighter the Martial Arts would take a turn for the better. This might not be good for mixed martial artists in such places as the UFC, however, as the techniques might become too dangerous to be used.

Al Case has analyzed martial arts for forty++ years. A writer for the magazines, he is the originator of Matrixing Technology. You can get his free ebook at Monster Martial Arts.

Tai Chi Chuan Instructor has Not had a Lesson in Tai Chi!

 Tai Chi  No Responses »
Dec 202009
 

This is going to be the weirdest tai chi lesson you have ever had. I’ve never had a lesson in tai chi, you see, but my tai chi chuan is the best. I don’t mean to be self serving, but let us see what you think after you have read how I came up with my tai chi.

I began learning tai chi with a book, Modified Tai Chi for Health by Lee Ying Arng. Every night I spent hours memorizing the form, trying to figure out the applications, trying to figure out the meaning. And, tell the truth, it didn’t mean much.

So I went through books by Chen Man Ching, and I read Chen and Yang and Wu and Sun, but they all spoke this gobbledegook that didn’t make sense. So I began doing my Karate, I had near ten years experience in Kang Duk Won karate, and the thing started to resolve. I was using good, old karate power to juice up the form, and it worked, and then I was able to make what was happening into Tai Chi power.

More important, I was neglecting all the bushwah philosophy and mysticism in the books and using physics. The martial arts, you see, are taught through the memorization of random strings of data. In physics you look for a reason, and a logic, and you define a concept.

Now, ancient stories claim tai chi was created in a dream by san feng after he watched a bird and a snake fight. Or, it was started by a general in a village, who was retired from war and wanted to make up games for the children. Neither of these concepts have much verifiable validity, but we can’t just discount them out of hand.

Maybe the general was old, couldn’t do the martial arts proper, and so he moved slowly, so as not to hurt himself, and actually came up with something. And the vision of the snake and the crane, though I like physics I would not dare to disclaim the value of visions, which are dreams and inspiration, and at the heart of mankind. Still, whether rehabilitation of the infirm, or big dreams, tai chi does not make sense without physics.

So this is what I want you to do, I want you to get a book on physics. Make it a simple kids book, simple pictures for illustrations, that sort of thing. It would really help if it was aimed at describing a motor.

Now, go over that book, and make lists of the terms are the same as in tai chi chuan. Rooting is grounding, what are these things called leads, where is the generator, and so on. Do that, and when the deep innards of your tai chi chuan start to reposition, do not come complaining to me.

Al Case has studied martial arts 4O years. He began Tai Chi Chuan in 1974, became a writer for the mags in 1981, and originated Matrixing Technolgy, which is the study of physics in the martial arts. You can get a free ebook on Matrixing at Monster Martial Arts.

The Secret of Knock Outs in the Martial Arts!

 Karate  No Responses »
Dec 132009
 

Mixed Martial Arts gladiators circling the eight-sided ring, searching for the chance, and, WHAM, somebody is punched out. The roaring crowd, the price of the ticket, they are worth it if you can see a good knock out. What most people don’t realize is that a good knock out, with the help of a little practice, can be done easily.

Forty years ago, in Kang Duk Won Karate my instructor told me that A tight fist is a heavy fist. Man, what good advice. Just make the fingers into steel bands, tie it together with a thumb, and, zingo bingo, you have yourself a brick busting fist.

The trick, of course, is to be totally empty before, and to be totally empty after. This is the idea of focus, and it is vital to knocking an opponent all the way out. Hard to do it the way they wrap hands before a fight, but there it is.

Think about it like this, a radar station is looking for planes, it is looking, and what would happen if the skies all filled up with static? The radar operator would be blind, he wouldn’t be able to see the planes for the static. So when you relax, and make your fist loose, you are trying to get rid of the static, make it so you can perceive what is going on around you.

Then, without the tension of your muscles holding you back, you can better see the path of an incoming fist, the angry emotion, the guiding intention of the attacker, your fist will move faster because it is empty, and it will hit harder when it becomes tight. Muscular tension will slow down your motion and your fist, and that fist will fly fast and true, and your radar will better help it find the target. The moment of fistal collision and your hand gets tight, and that increases the weight of it, making it hard enough to knock somebody into dreamland.

So there are two things a fighter in the UFC ring, or just a guy out on the mean streets must do if he is going to have real knock out power. The first thing to be done is to be loosey goosey empty, not trapped because of his own muscular tension. This frees the inner radar to find those incoming targets, and enables the MMA fighter to move faster because he does not think of himself as heavy.

The second thing is to make the fist tight when it hits, and loosen it immediately afterwards. This is real nanosecond stuff here, but it really works. The energy comes to bear, the power focuses, and that which was empty and quick suddenly becomes full and heavy.

If you are an Mixed Martial Arts fighter in the UFC or strikeforce, or even just a guy who likes watching it on the tube, think about the physics I have described here, and figure out how to use them. Empty/full is actually a well worn concept from traditional Karate, and it is used extensively in the ancient Shaolin types of kung fu like or Choy Lee Fut or Hung Gar. Emptiness and focus, these are the keys that will lay them out and close their eyes!

Al Case has dissected Kung Fu for 4O++ years. He has written hundreds of articles for the magazines, and had his own column in Inside Karate. You can pick up a free ebook at Monster Martial Arts, or get the straight skinny on hitting harder at Punch ‘Em Out

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