Tag Archives: hitting harder

Making the Body Hard Enough to take a Punch in the Martial Arts

Newsletter 857

Armor in the Martial Arts (part two)

It’s Saturday!
Time to work out ALL-L-L-L day long!

Hey, look at the title,
Armor in the martial arts…part two?
I thought I’d written everything I wanted to,
then thought about it,
and realized I was only half done.
You can check out part one on MonsterMartialArts.com (the blog)
But let me finish the article right here.

I told you the secret of taking punches
was easily learned by just doing the forms,
doing techniques out of the forms,
and practicing breathing.
Let me splain.

When you breath,
you breath out when the body expands,
and in when the body contracts.

Or,
you breath out when you strike somebody,
or when you are getting struck.

This is simply aligning the
in and out’ of breathing
with the expansion or contraction,
so to speak,
of the body.

But it is a major alignment.

Just remember that you must breath as if to the tan tien.
The tan tien is the energy center an inch or two below the navel.

Now,
oxygen will not reach the tan tien,
it will go to the bottom of the lungs and stop at the diaphragm.
But…this starts a sensation of energy
that continues downward from the diaphragm
and condenses into the tan tien.

When you breath like this,
hold out your arms in a relaxed manner,
and you will feel a tingle in your finger tips.
This is an indication that
as you focus on the tan tien
it creates energy,
and this energy can be cycled through your body.

Now,
we come to the interesting part.
You can,
by just being aware of a body part,
direct energy to a body part.
Become aware of your right index finger,
and you will feel a sensation in your right index finger.
If you don’t,
you just need to practice directing your awareness
until you do feel the sensation.
I spend a lot of time,
quite serious here,
just thinking about my right index finger,
then my left,
then my right,
and so on.
Just feel the awareness wake up the finger,
making it tingle,
and begin to glow with energy.

When you practice forms,
by breathing like this,
you are putting energy into the body part
used in the form.
The fist,
the foot,
the block,
etc.

When you do the forms
you learn how to breath.
when you do the techniques,
and somebody strikes you,
you become aware of the place being struck.
Again and again and again.

First you tighten the muscles,
but,
because of proper breathing,
you are directing energy into the site.

Eventually the energy you are pushing through the body
goes there automatically.
First into the fist,
or foot or whatever,
then into the body part being struck.

Somebody hits you,
and the energy just slides through the body.
Sometimes you can feel it moving.
Sometimes it just sort of erupts into a shield,
a deep sort of shield,
that stops the strike.

It usually takes a while to get this ability,
but it won’t take long if you know what I am saying here.
When I learned
nobody told me,
took me years.
But by the time I made black belt
(about 3 1/2 years)
the energy was moving,
going to where I was going to get struck.
And the pain of getting struck totally stopped.
People would hit me
and there was literally no effect.
Other guys in the school just accepted this.
They were going through it, too.
People on the street were sort of amazed.

It is not the same as taking a punch in boxing.
In that discipline you tighten the muscles.
In the martial arts,
probably because of the kind of strikes we were taking,
the muscles would tighten,
but the important thing was
the energy moving under the surface.

Okay,
that is the other half of the article,
what I should have told you yesterday.
Better late than never, eh?

So,
if you have a copy of the book I wrote,
the ‘Kang Duk Won,’
(amazon or, possibly, the Monster website on one of the courses)
then you can pick it up,
do the forms,
do the techniques,
and you’ll get there.
You’ll have to practice,
ignore fellows who say,
‘You won’t see that on the street!’
Because you are going deeper,
looking for other abilities.
And,
to be honest,
you can make that art work on the street,
but you have to commit yourself to the art,
you have to work to make it work.

But the Temple Karate course is better.
I give you more forms,
forms aimed at that building this sort of ability,
plus a few other abilities.
The forms are slightly tweaked to be more efficient,
and I show you how to make it work.
You see me do it on video.

But,
up to you,
either way is excellent.

And,
if you think you have enough data,
you could just try to apply stuff I’ve said,
including today’s blog,
to other arts.
Karate works best,
but there is usually too much degradation of form.
The Kang Duk Won,
as I studied it,
bypassed the Japanese influence,
stayed with some of the chinese internal practices,
and is about efficient as it gets.
Kung fu,
I don’t know.
That is really going to depend on a lot of factors.
But there you go.
That’s the way,
all you have to do is dig in and commit yourself.

Have fun,
Have a great work out,
and I’ll talk to you next.

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/temple-karate/

Al

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/temple-karate/

http://www.amazon.com/Binary-Matrixing-Martial-Arts-Case/dp/1515149501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437625109&sr=8-1&keywords=binary+matrixing

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Making the Promise of a Fight in Karate

Newsletter 805
The Promise of a Fight

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Gorgeous day.
Absolutely gorgeous.
And that means it is an absolutely gorgeous day for a work out.
So get going!

Was teaching this morning.
We were doing Promised Fights,
and my partner was grimacing,
and finally backed off.
“Ow,” he said.
And we got into a long discussion.
Heck,
he was hurting,
I had to let him recover,
give him some data,
and then hurt him some more.
Right?

First,
I started out with the old
‘Do it a form a thousand times and you know it.
Do it ten thousand times and you’ve mastered it.’
My student did exactly the right thing,
he said,
‘So if I do it 20 times a day,
then in fifty days…’
“Yep,” I said.
“You could know it.
You could be expert in 2 months.
But you have to do it right.
You have to understand the alignment,
how the feet work and why,
and you have to know the Promised Fights…
otherwise you could do it forever and not know it.”

Second,
we went into proper body alignment,
which is covered on the Master Instructor Course,
and how the feet must align properly,
and how the particular form we were doing had to be done
to make this all work.
I ended up saying,
“align your body,
make it a single unit,
then he won’t hit your body parts,
he will hit a single, integrated unit,
and it won’t hurt you.
Energy flows through a body that is a single unit,
it doesn’t flow through body parts used in individual fashion.
This is especially important in a Promised Fight.”

And,
came the look I had been waiting for.
I had been using the term Promised Fight,
and I knew he would eventually ask about it.

“What is a Promised Fight?”

A Promised Fight,
or a Promise Fight,
is a piece of the form applied.
A form Application.
It is a self defense movement.
It is bunkai.
It is the working part of the form.
But,
it is more.
In fact,
if a person doesn’t understand what I am about to tell you,
he/she is not doing karate.
They are just fighting themselves.

I asked my instructor what a Promised Fight was,
and he said,
‘The Promise of a Fight.’
And,
while the study of PFs gave great abilities,
and the answer he gave me was correct,
it was terribly incomplete.

To understand what a Promised Fight is
I need you to look up the word ‘Postulate.’

Look it up for yourself,
get all the nuances,
where it came from,
and all that,
but for this newsletter,
the short and inadequate version is this:

suggest or assume the existence, fact, or truth of (something) as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or belief

Assume existence,
put forth the truth,
as a basis for belief.

If you understand the hint here,
you should be diving for a big old Oxford Dictionary,
wanting to know why a simple karate move
becomes the basis for truth in this universe.

So let me break it down a bit,
from the viewpoint of 50 years of training.

A postulate is a thought,
which if worked on,
becomes true.

Worked on,
as continually done in a work out.

As in a piece of the form,
practiced again and again and again.

Now,
let me back up a bit,
a form is a circuit,
a pattern of moves that you practice and practice
until you just do it without thinking about it.
You strengthen the body,
you remember the applications,
you get light and quick,
and all those sorts of things.

When you do a piece of the form,
over and over and over,
you condense the circuit,
and you get rid of thought,
and suddenly there is nothing but the move.
Somebody punches,
and you don’t exist,
you just track the incoming,
and the Promise Fight,
the postulate of moves,
pops out of you.
And it works.
You punch him,
and he falls down.
And he doesn’t understand what hit him.
But here is the truth of it all…
a thought hit him.
A Postulate of thought hit him.
A Promise Fight,
clean and simple,
without distractive thoughts,
hit him.
And there is nothing purer in this universe.

Now,
I am always so busy trying to get people to understand,
offering all sorts of methods,
that i sometimes forget to go into this factor.
BUT,
in Matrix Karate there is the Matrix of blocks.
These are like mini-Promise Fights.
Very important to get these,
to understand them,
it is important to learn the small PFs
before you get to the big ones.
The big ones are on Temple Karate.
There isn’t talk of a matrix there,
because it is assumed you have done the groundwork of Matrixing first.
And the form applications are VERY pure Promised Fights.
They REALLY result in a zen frame of mind,
and the ability to hit somebody with a thought.

If you get Temple Karate
and you haven’t done Matrix Karate,
then you are taking the long route.
It will take you years,
and as distractions mount,
you can be knocked off the path
and never get there.

So you should do Matrix Karate,
work on the Matrix of Blocks,
make inroads and discover what a PF is.
And,
you can always take the pieces of the form,
they are pretty obvious,
and work on them to make real Promised Fights.

Then you do Temple Karate,
get into the classical forms,
and really go to town on the Promised Fights.

Matrix Karate is pretty simple,
it presents the movements that are pure karate,
no distractions from other arts.
It aligns you,
and sets you up for the broader moves of Temple Karate.
It is a real Closed Combat System.
You can do it by itself,
or you can do it,
then move into the classical,
and see what kinds of things
the old guys who came before us were into.
Temple Karate is a larger assortment of tricks,
it broadens the education,
and digs you to new depths.

Anyway,
that is the story on Promised Fights.
Dig ‘em…they are the real zen of Martial Arts.

Here’s the link for Temple,
if you have already done Matrix Karate.
You can just go to MonsterMartialArts and find Matrix Karate,
it is one of the first arts presented on the home page.

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/temple-karate/

Now,
have a great work out,
and schedule yourself for twenty times a day,
and send me your wins in two months.

Have a great work out!

Al

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/temple-karate/

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http://www.amazon.com/Matrixing-Tong-Bei-Internal-Gung/dp/1507869290/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1423678613&sr=8-1&keywords=tong+bei