A dramatic encounter.
I heard this story second-hand but I trust the source and I knew the person involved.
It all focussed on an altercation in a nightclub; not drunken guys, but drunken girls.
A young woman, early 20’s, a very able Wado karate Dan grade, was out on the town with some friends. They were in a club and another group of girls who had been clearly drinking heavily and were being rowdy, crossed their path.
Something happened, a misunderstanding, harsh words might have been said, and one of the drunken girls decided to get physical on a stairway leading up to the street. She directed her violence towards the Dan grade, who acted swiftly and reflexively to protect herself. A short sharp retaliatory strike to the side of the other girl’s jaw, nothing heavy, just direct and instant.
Unfortunately, the strike had more than the desired effect. To the Dan grade it was no more than a tag, but it must have caught her where the skin was weak and opened up a four-inch gash along the jawline.
Any cut to the face is going to bleed a lot and this added hugely to the drama. The bouncers got involved and at one point they were convinced that to cause that much damage she must have hit her with a bottle or a glass.
As I understand it, after the mayhem had quietened down, the truth of the matter was uncovered and amazingly things didn’t get ‘legal’ (how that happened is beyond me).
Naturally, this frightened the Dan grade; she realised her own potential for violence and the full extent of her trained ability, and witnessed first-hand what can happen; it was a shock to her (never mind the girl she hit). I have no idea how it affected her attitude towards continuing her training, but I can recall another case where a teammate and fellow competitor damaged his opponent with a head kick and as a result gave up training altogether.
This stuff can be a lot more devastating than we would give it credit for.
Anecdotes don’t make evidence but all kinds of outcomes can come from unexpected actions; and this is the thrust of my take on striking.
Hitting/striking in karate.
I know I have written before on the crude concept of approaching your strike training like your opponent is a bag of sand. This mentality ignores all the possibilities that are available to you. It’s a very limited physical model.
I remember I used to get frustrated by karate people expressing the view that their objective with developing their striking power is to consider themselves the human equivalent of a ballistic missile – to my mind, this is so mono-dimensional.
Also, if people think that the vehicles of their delivery are just their fists and feet, they have missed out on a whole arsenal of possibilities.
Let me be clear, from the examples given above, it really doesn’t take much to deliver a whole world of pain and damage – it’s all relative, and the more skill you have the more options are open to you.
And then there’s positioning; angles of delivery relative to the weaknesses you want to exploit. It’s all there in the nuts and bolts of the training, and it starts really early on.
An example from a paired kata for 7th kyu in our own syllabus (Shikukai Wado karate); an angle is opened up to deliver a ball of the foot roundhouse kick that cuts right to the heart of the opponent’s vulnerability, physical weak point and worst structural angle (for them); once you know that line, that access point, it becomes another tool in your toolkit.
There is also the possibility of creating a situation where the opponent supplies most of the energy of a collision that finishes him off; he literally runs into your fist; no need to be the ‘ballistic missile’, just be the wall that he runs into, or the rake that he stands on.
Vulnerabilities.
What of the vulnerable areas, the sensitive bits?
We give these away all the time when we feel we’re under severe threat by how we choose to protect them.
The most extreme and drastic example is to curl up in a ball on the floor; knees come up, elbows tucked into ribs, head pulled in, chin down, like an armadillo. All our exterior (tough) lines are presented for our adversary to pound into if it comes to that, but our interior (weak/vulnerable) lines are closed off, this is real ‘emergency’ stuff. Interestingly, there is also a very basic corelation between these ‘interior/exterior’ lines in acupuncture and TCM, but I am no expert in that field.
Taking advantage.
When it comes to fighting, we instinctively know where these lines are and, if we are smart, we can literally get our opponent to open up and create enough of a window to make the damaging shot available to us.
We don’t need to blindly blast away at him to wear him down, or send out a blizzard of strikes with the hope that one will get lucky (that also wears us out) – I refer to that like picking up a handful of stones and throwing them at someone.
To be on the receiving end of strikes to the vulnerable areas are often painful and debilitating, sometimes in surprising ways; as an example, a swift kick to the shin can cause a sudden flash of pain which acts as a distraction to set up the real shot.
Another strike can cause an opponent to sway or rock away, putting him precisely in the position we want him for the real hit (or throw).
Often you have a primary and a secondary target. The primary is the one you planned for; the ‘real’ target, while a secondary target can be a follow-on if the assault on the primary attack fails. I know this is a contradiction but often the ‘secondary’ technique comes first, as a softener or a distraction to set up the real objective, the primary target. This is not necessarily a feint, because a feint is usually a fake, no, if this gets through, because your opponent is being sloppy, it solves the problem in one.
Your own tools.
And what of the parts you can use to strike or apply pressure with?
They can be almost anywhere, from the top of your head to the end of your big toe. Some can be used for impact, others for leverage or pressure. As an example; the edge of your forearm can be set up as a fulcrum to apply pressure on an elbow joint.
When I first started training, I thought some strikes looked puny or ineffective, or just a pure fantasy; but when I experienced them in action I changed my mind. I once received a middle-knuckle strike on the inside of my knee when I came in for a kick. It was deliberate and it wasn’t particularly hard, but when my foot found the floor, the whole leg collapsed under me. I was on the ground looking up at my opponent, totally done for.
Vital point striking.
A final word on Kyusho (for the sake of this I will draw a line between Kyusho and Atemi waza) 1. Kyusho is the so-called vital point striking, something that seems to have developed a life of its own. I know that this has spawned a whole industry of grifters who want you to believe how clever it is, well it is not as ‘clever’ as they would like us to believe. Their deliberate obfuscation belies the fact that in fighting, simplicity is always the best course of action. If it has to be complicated to work then you are just factoring in all kinds of unnecessary junctures where things can go wrong – why would you do that, particularly when the stakes are so high?
My advice; don’t buy into the fantasy, stay practical, pragmatic and grounded, put trust in your tried and trusted techniques and remain economical.
Advance notice: Coming up on 5th May another in depth study, this time tackling aspects of the Shinken Shira Ha Dori (Sword defence) of Wado karate.
A taster will be sent to all my free subscribers, but paid subscribers get the complete article. Become a paid subscriber and you get access to all the past (longer) articles behind the paywall. As the body of work increases I think you’ll find that there’s something there for everyone.
Photo by Anton Steenbergen on Unsplash
For the sake of keeping things simple, Kyusho is often connected to the idea of strikes to the meridian lines, while Atemi refers to directed strikes to anatomically vulnerable areas. Sometimes these same vulnerable areas coincide with points on the meridian pathways. Also, some martial artists confuse the two. It’s also a language thing, I have no desire to go down that rabbit hole. Interestingly, the second grandmaster of Wado Ryu was asked about this and he said it was nothing special, in fact many of these weaknesses are extremely well known – no big deal.