Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

covid

The Missing Year

Tidying up my website at the start of this week I suddenly realised that a whole calendar year had gone by without my writing a single blog post. How could this happen?

Possibly to the chagrin of some I wasn’t abducted by Aliens. Possibly to my own disappointment I haven’t spent a few years in the Tardis and been accidentally returned to my own timeline a tad too late. So where has the year gone?

My foot’s nemesis. Knocked backwards by my dog onto my foot in the garage at the end of a zoom class.

I cannot blame injuries. 2020 saw a major abdominal surgery in the Spring, a broken foot in the Summer and a thumb injury (damn speedball) in the Autumn, but I was able to keep writing.

Admittedly individual surgery on both eyes at the start of 2021 did make me minimise how much time I spent doing any reading or writing over three months until both eyes were at the same prescription, but that still leaves a lot of months unaccounted for.

The root answer has been Covid. Returning to online training again in September 2020 through to April 2021 took up a vast amount of my time and energy. My regular students are always my top priority and so because I have a lot of written material easily accessible via my books as well as short video clips highlighting both training methodologies and technical application of karate, I chose to focus on their development rather than writing new articles.

Analysing skill retention patterns post lockdown has been interesting.

Lockdown and the return from lockdown did present opportunities for introspection on teaching methods and syllabus structure. Watching students return to ‘hands on’ training in Summer 2020 and again in Spring 2021 after either no training or purely online individual ‘thin air’ training presented a unique opportunity for syllabus analysis. What had stayed with the students? What had they lost? What came back quickly? What attributes took time to resurrect? Were they what the instructor team expected? Were they what we wanted and if not, how could we change that?

 

Online Training has been surprisingly successful, but those with household training partners gained the most benefit.

Syllabus analysis is not new, it is always an ongoing process, but two such ‘lockdown recovery’ periods in Summer 2020 and Spring 2021 have perhaps provided more material than normal. As an instructor teaching regular classes I naturally want students to stay training and progress across multiple levels, but at the same time I want anyone that trains with me for a short while and then leaves (whether because they move away or because they choose to pursue other interests in their free time) to get the maximum benefit from their classes, thus ‘lockdown training break recovery periods’ have been educational opportunities.

I have had other projects on the boil beyond my personal training and my classes. The writing project that perhaps ‘broke’ the blogging routine was contributing to Les Bubka’s Rules for Success in Karate in November last year. I’ve also taken time to revisit the 2016 Karate & Self Defence: Selected Articles and publish a second edition of the same book under a new title, updating the HAOV pictures. The title has been re-released this month as Karate & Self Defence: Volume One – Thoughts on Training. Alongside this release I undertook the long process of sifting through a large number of articles that used to be on my website, choosing to present those I felt the most important in a second book in the series, now released as Karate & Self Defence: Volume Two – The Reality of Karate & Close Quarter Combat. I’m very grateful to Peter Consterdine for not only agreeing to write a companion foreword for this second volume, but also for suggesting the subtitle for the work. Both books are available worldwide on Amazon in paperback and ebook formats.

It’s been good to resume scenario training.

As we begin the last two months of 2021 I’m still incredibly busy. Like many instructors I’ve had a surge in new students after a recruitment freeze over the previous year and that naturally results in more work, especially as we approach the end of year gradings. I am however committed to writing more regular blog posts and articles this year and continuing that habit in 2022, but I will also be working to publish at long last the Self Protection book that I have been writing for the last twenty years. This year I have resumed teaching seminars but because of my suppressed immune system I have decided to limit my public teaching in 2022 to my scenario training days and a group seminar project I committed myself to prior to the initial spread of Covid 19 in 2020. I intend to supplement this with more video instruction for those who do not have the opportunity to train with me on a regular basis.

2023? Wait and see.

Keep training and stay healthy!

 

Hikite for Power? Pull the other one!

Discussions on hikite are like discredited political philosophies. You think that empirical evidence has consigned them to history and then they flare up again, fuelled by the ‘true believers’ devotion to outdated treatises or the misguided analyses of the long-dead.

2020 saw another such flare up with many prominent and respectable individuals in the practical karate spectrum voicing opinions. I chose to steer clear, not seeing the need to express an opinion on what I felt was obvious. I suspected that ‘Covid Boredom’ and mischief rather than ignorance may have been responsible for the topic crawling from the grave once more. At the request of Les Bubka (author of the thought provoking Anxious Black Belt) I’ve finally been coaxed into stating my views in time for Halloween.

Retracting one arm does not increase the speed and therefore the power of extending the other arm. Whether the (non-striking) arm is pulled back or already held at the hip or in front of the chest / face makes no difference to the velocity of the other hand. It may feel more powerful, but any empirical test with hundreds of experienced subjects from multiple disciplines striking impact measuring equipment will demonstrate that this is not the case.

BUT

Leaving one arm fully extended while striking with the other may limit hip, torso, chest  and shoulder movement and thus striking arm extension, resulting in reduced speed and therefore reduced power. As a result, if you have an arm already extended you should bring it back to enable full body movement to generate a powerful strike with the other hand. It is not the retraction that makes the extension more powerful, it is not having the ‘non-functional’ arm extended that enables better muscle recruitment for power generation in the striking arm. The simplification of this to ‘pull the arm back for more power’ may have been lost in translation.

Pulling a target onto a strike will increase its speed at the point of impact (and therefore the energy transferred) as the speed in the force calculation is the sum of both the striking object and the target moving towards it. HOWEVER, the distances involved are so small that very little target speed is generated and the shortened distance made by the striking limb results in it achieving a lower speed and thus the overall effect (in terms of power) is negligible and may actually be less powerful. Far more significant is the effect of any pulling on the state of the target, since third party induced movement may result in loss of muscle tension resulting in the strike having a greater effect; furthermore seizing a target increases the chances of the strike hitting the target and may enable greater accuracy.

I hope that is simple enough to understand.

Sometimes I think my martial arts friends are pulling my leg.