Hitting stuff.
By ‘hitting stuff’ I mean, the logic and practicalities of working with bags, pads and other devices in martial arts.
Opening statement number 1; not ‘hitting stuff’ can be detrimental to serious training in karate.
Statement number 2; ‘hitting stuff’ can be detrimental to serious training in karate.
To my mind both of the above statements are true.
I am going to base this on personal experience. I have had some knowledge of ‘hitting stuff’.
Why it must be done.
Now I am not talking about hitting any old thing, because clearly different equipment gives you different results. A big part of it is body feedback. It is important that you train to meet resistance of varying degrees; so much can be gained by just knowing what it feels like and observing the effects your strikes or kicks have on an object and, probably more importantly, on you. You need to be able to appreciate your own successes, as well as your own weaknesses.
Isn’t it weird that impact work is generally considered a solo activity (unless you are working with pads)? When, the truth is that you probably need tighter supervision in this activity than you do when you are just striking air. With someone casting a critical eye on you you can gain so much; without that, something important is liable to be lost.
Positive learning experiences.
One very important lesson to experience is that annoying and embarrassing moment when you mistime it and the resistance you were expecting to meet suddenly disappears – you were sure you knew which way the bag was swinging, gave it your all and ended up jarring your elbow or spinning clumsily into space. Or, you hit the target as hard as you can and find that your wrist is slightly misaligned and suffer pain or injury – a lesson hard learned.
Padwork can give you multiple bonusses; you have the impact element and, if it is done creatively, the challenge of having to constantly keep adjusting to find your range.
I suppose there are also psychological extras; you get a real buzz from the actual physical experience but also, somehow the activity itself is iconic and archetypical, after all, isn’t this what you are supposed to be doing as a ‘fighter’? You also convince yourself that your strike or kick has the potential to do some damage; that in itself promotes a feel-good factor, surely?
A couple of pieces of kit I found useful.
I want to share with you some of the stuff I have found really beneficial:
· Top and bottom ball (floor to ceiling). An inflated ball with elasticated bungee-style fastenings, one attaching it to the ceiling the other to the floor. This is a great piece of kit. At one time I had two of them set to different tensions. The tighter tension was very fast, while the loose one, set at chudan height, swung wildly over a bigger range (this one I used to sharpen chudan gyakuzuki). This equipment has to be handled intelligently. You can get a major buzz from coordinating ‘punch and return’ but your footwork will go to crap and your punching will fail to have your body behind it – unless you consciously remedy it, or get a friend or coach to be a harsh critic.
· A small piece of paper on a light string, set at jodan height. It is great for higher level kick sharpening. Okay, it gives you no resistance, but as it wafts around in semi-predictable ways it is still a moving target.
· Last of all; a good punchbag, of the right consistency and rigidity. But the rigidity has the potential to cause you damage. I do recommend good quality bag gloves AND hand wraps, but learn to put the wraps on properly (I am not a fan of those quick wraps). But again, don’t get seduced by just leathering the bag with all your might, just because it feels good.
Pitfalls.
The most significant pitfall is that you can seriously muck up your technique. Everything you work so hard to achieve in your core training can get totally hijacked and overwritten by lousy impact work. I have seen it in my own Dojo. When we decided to bring the focus mitts into play… ‘why is Sensei banging his head against the wall in frustration?’ Because, you’ve just thrown everything you’ve been working on for months out of the window! Seriously, in the eagerness to really give it some wallop students throw everything into it in a way they would never do while training in combinations, or even sparring (which is really ironic).
The above-mentioned top and bottom ball can prompt another mistake that again undoes everything you are working towards. To get the ball to bounce back into your space to set-up the next hit, the direction of strike is crucial. You can always hit it straight on your opening strike (because it is perfectly still) but if it curves back at you in a slightly different trajectory the easy/lazy way of getting the next strike in is to move your elbow to align behind your fist; note, ‘move your elbow’ NOT your body. To get your body behind it you have to have some really slick footwork, which is ideal training in itself, but laziness kicks in ‘because it feels good to just hit it’!
The Makiwara.
I have previously made my case about how the makiwara mucked up my own punching at a technical level. But I want to look at it from the biological/physical side.
Someone I knew had taken up Wing-Chun Kung Fu and had thrown himself into training with great enthusiasm, particularly with WC’s famous Wooden Man hardwood conditioning device. So much so that he managed to damage his hand to such a degree that he had to visit his doctor. Naturally, his doctor asked him how he’d done it? He told the doctor about the Wooden Man. The doctor then asked him a strange question, “Do you have a laptop”? He replied proudly that he had a MacBook Pro, the doc then said, “Have you ever considered hitting it with a hammer”? “Of course not!” What he was explaining was that the hand and wrist are made up of lots of very fine delicate bones and guiders that can do the most amazing things, (like a MacBook Pro) why on earth would you consider brutalising them in such a way?
I have Googled around looking for objective studies on this and found some references to suggest that makiwara usage has no detrimental effect on the bones and structure of the hand. But I noticed that the wording was very careful and the examples chosen seemed to be selected for their relevance in supporting the author’s pre-existing views, rather than scientific rigour – Mas Oyama Kyokushinkai founder was used as a positive example; one individual!
Scientific studies seemed to be from forty years ago or even more – logic alone leads me to be less than convinced.
I remember examples from decades ago; in the 1970’s a club mate from my original Dojo got into a fight and broke bones in his hand on someone’s skull – the skull is of a pretty solid construction.
Another example; one of the students from my Dojo in Leeds in a ‘friendly’ competition, broke his wrist on someone’s jaw (incidentally, breaking the jaw as well).
From the world of pro boxing - in 1988 Mike Tyson broke his hand in a street fight against boxer Mitch Green.
Of course, these are anecdotes, and anecdotes do not make evidence.
But to add to that; if you go back to the bare-knuckle days of the 1700’s through to 1800’s, it is known that more fighters retired through damage to their hands than to their heads. The list goes on.1
Did the founder of Wado karate Otsuka Hironori use the makiwara?
Certainly, there are films and stills of him using the makiwara at different times in his life:
But, as is typical with Otsuka Sensei, his views and actions are mercurial, take this quote from Donn Draeger from his 1974 book, ‘Martial Arts and Ways of Japan Vol. 3’, in his short section on Otsuka and Wado Ryu, he said, “As regards the popular practice of hardening certain parts of the body by deforming them in order to reduce their sensitivity to pain, Otsuka totally rejects such inane ideas”. It is possible that Draeger was referring to other some other parts of the body, but it is difficult to think what they might have been.
I suspect that master Otsuka might have endorsed the practice to some degree; maybe encouraging university students to line up in front of makiwara and bloody their knuckles, but anecdotal accounts suggest his preferred personal hitting practice involved rapid fire strikes at a hanging towel – so not so different from my hanging piece of paper.
Conclusion.
It can be made to work if it is approached intelligently. The responsibility is with both the coach/Sensei and the individual student.
The coach/Sensei needs to be really strict in outlining what can go wrong, particularly if the student is training unsupervised AND it needs reviewing regularly or bad habits will sneak in.
The individual student should avoid being seduced by the ‘feelgood factor’ alone, or just treat it like a fitness workout or cardio session – just because you got a good sweat doesn’t mean that all that effort is worth anything, (unless you think your body’s cooling system needs to top-up on its efficiency). If you just chase that particular rabbit, you might get a buzz from the endorphins but to what benefit?
Featured image, Daniel Mendoza, Jewish English prizefighter, of Spanish lineage, 1764 – 1836.
A study of bare-knuckle boxing in the US from 1797 to 1897 suggests there were no fatalities recorded, whereas in recent years, with padded boxing gloves, there are three or four fatalities a year, with 15% of professional boxers suffering from some kind of brain damage at some point in their lives. With boxing gloves, a punch to the head is equivalent to being hit with a 12lbs wooden mallet travelling at 20mph.
Yep Tim, the good ol' makiwara. Our long-departed Wado sensei, who arrived in Europe in the early 1970s, was a great advocate of it. So I installed one in my garden too. Sensei had told us that one should only use the makiwara as resistance to initiate a strike mainly from the hip and the 'tanden' region; thus I had tailor-made the resistance of my makiwara for my personal body strength. With each strike, I kept the backwards sprung makiwara at its furthest position for about a second. I thus trained on it for many hours until one day it broke due to rot in the ground and from then on I went over to the heavy training bag. I don't really know if I got major benefits from it but the makiwara was still advantageous in my view for training the elementary junzuki and gyaku azuki. Then again, the bag was more advantageous for more dynamic punches with displacement to the side. Anyway, and without ever practising with handguards, to this day I have not suffered any ill effects for it in the joints and tendons of hands and joints...although it must be said that I did not develop any deformities (osteophytes) at the knuckles as some of my sempai did....
Thank you Jan,
Another senior Wado Sensei I know is also a teacher of classical Spanish guitar, he refused to do even knuckle press ups, because of the risk of damage to his tendons. But ironically, an acupuncturist I worked with had to give up learning the guitar because it reduced the sensitivity of his finger tips which he needed to feel pulses!
It is indeed a strange world.