Monday, October 19, 2015

Power comes from your feet

In close range combat you don't have the time to speed things up to put more power into your strikes. You might just have a foot or even a few inches. Luckily boxing someone's ears is devastating and you don't need that much power. I digress. The point is that close range power has more to do with your lower body than your upper body. It's somewhat amusing when people thing that slighting changing the motion of their arms means that they are somehow not using arm strength for their techniques. Why are my arms so tired? It's because you're not using your mass and you get your mass moving by moving your lower body.

Gravity is your friend and hopefully soon I'll have some videos showing you how much of a friend it is. Basically by dropping weights on stuff and showing how devastating a little  bit of weight moving a short distance can be.

Have you ever noticed that there's lots of kata where you drop into a stance. Literally drop like a bag of rocks down from a higher stance to a lower stance, it's because gravity is your friend. Ever had a little cousin, niece or nephew who only weighs 60lbs or even smaller suddenly decide they want to be picked up so they jump on you and nearly knock you off your feet? This is what I'm talking about. Do you try and push a car by planting your feet and pushing just with your arms? No, you take a low stance, hmm I wonder if that's relevant, and you lean into it to put all of your mass behind it. It's the very same concept. You just use the structural support of your skeleton to keep yourself from collapsing, move just a tiny bit faster and presto, you can blast through someone twice your weight if you remain efficient in your movements.