Make Training a Part of Your Everyday Life

Ever since my daughter was born its been harder and harder to set aside a few hours of the day to practice. I now have minutes of practice scattered randomly throughout the day. It's one of the best things about single kata practice that I can take a minute and run through my form. One or two reps here and there, or practicing a section while cooking. This has led me to do all sorts of things to try and keep my physical fitness and karate level up.

Keep weights around the house.

I'll keep a pair of weights or kettle bells at different stations in the house and every time I walk by I make myself do a set. You could do the same thing with calisthenics.

Elastic bands

If you get bored of the weights I sometimes keep a bicycle inner tube slung across me and use it periodically as a resistance band. They take up very little space in a pocket as well.

Make everything harder!

If you do chores around your house or some other banal activity, make it more difficult. Practice stances while you clean. Practice the footwork of kata while moving around the house. Lately I've been sliding a five pound plate onto my brooms, mops and scrub brushes to make cleaning the floor a resistance exercises.

The basic idea is to Mr. Miyagi-hack your day to day. Turn everything into an exercise. It also makes doing the boring housework that comes with life a little more interesting.

Exercise and Efficiency

I was thinking the other day about how exercise can teach us some bad lessons about efficient movement. Not all exercise, because obviously some weight lifting movements are based on how to efficiently get as much weight up as possible by using your whole body. I'm talking more about body specific exercises, or what might be called aesthetic exercises. These exercises make us strong, but they don't teach us how to use our strength.

Using structure and body weight to power technique is about using gravity and the natural sweet spots of your bones and muscles to perform work, while using the least amount of chemical energy possible, fuel. It's about using the least amount of muscle necessary. It's harder to fight if your tired and generally dropping your whole weight on someone will get more done than punching with just your arm. Many exercises on the other had excel at being exercises because they are inefficient. To maximize the benefit of many exercises, you move in a way that stresses the muscles the most. It is literally the point of exercise to stress the muscles to stimulate their growth. In a real way, these movements strengthen the muscles, while showing us the exact opposite way to use them.

Is this an argument against these types of exercises? No, but it could be. It's only to bring up the point that we need to be aware that what goes into training something and what goes into using something can be different things. We have a tendency to confuse effort with effectiveness. We feel strong when we use muscle, because the only other time we might feel strong is when we're in the gym. Weights make us strong right? In reality, a movement is usually very strong if we feel nothing at all, because it's efficient.

More principle articles are on the way. They just take longer to put together. Cheers.

Busting Logs

I've been spending a few hours each day splitting rounds of maple. They're from a tree we brought down in my front yard, and it's been a mission of mine to get it from fallen trunk to cords of wood for the last few months. All the rounds are finally sequestered in my driveway, so they're not an eye sore for the neighbors. I'm sure they're liking that. This activity has been my chief source of strength training for the last week, making it a point to spend a few hours on it each day. It was a thirty foot maple, so it's taking some time.

I'm using a sledgehammer, wedges and an axe to split the wood, though I have a chainsaw in my basement. I could get it done much more quickly with the gas-powered tool, but that's not the point. It's a challenge and a monster. Blisters, splinters, some blood and muscles so sore that sometimes it's hard to practice have been my rewards so far, plus dropping ten pounds. What I'll get in the end is more knowledge, more resilience, more strength and a ton of free fire wood. It's worth it to me for just the challenge and the accomplishment.

It seems simple enough on the face of it. Hammer wedge into stump, hit wedge with hammer and split wood. The logs don't know this though. Usually it's hammer, hammer, hammer, ping, and the wedge pops out like it was pushing against a spring. Probably user error along with lack of knowledge, but this is the kind of thing you have to figure out on your own. These are skill based tools. You don't just follow the instructions. These things build mental fortitude as well as physical. You need to work past the frustration, the pain and work toward progress. Swinging the hammer is the easy part. I know that sooner or later it will be routine. Once I've learned the weaknesses of the wood. It will take mindfulness and concentration.

I'm looking forward to what I'll learn.

Why Hojo Undo Equipment is Cool and Stupid

Doing supplementary training exercises in the old fashioned way is pretty cool as a cultural study. I've used these old tools and it's pretty neat to discover exactly which muscles these old karate tools are used to develop. These are usually the deltoids, trapizious, the lats and the forearms. The exercises are performed for endurance because power endurance exercises are the kind of movements you want for physical conflict, but besides cultural study these tools are not necessary.

"If you don't use kigu, you're not practicing karate."

Read this recently and it made me roll my eyes. Almost all of these tools were some form of heavy household object. They ground rice were locks for doors or were just heavy stones. They were whatever you could find that was heavy. A modern equivalent would be lifting milk jugs or bags of kitty litter. In a hundred years it would look pretty silly to come across someone lifting their ancient traditional milk jugs because that's the true way that poor old great grandpa used to do. Besides the fact that the kigu came from Hawaii in the 1920s. The author of the above quote knows this, but I think some people are confusing form for function.

These grand old karateka were looking for results. Remember that there were no organizations, no belts, no ranks (as we know them) and no syllabus. You practiced however you felt made you stronger and you learned from others. You used what came to hand. Skill was what was important and not the kind you showed off to your friends, but the type that got you home at night. I'm fairly positive that if you could drop an Olympic weight set off at Matsumora's house and showed him how to use it, he'd be all over it. It's a lot more versatile than a rock.

If something is not about what you do, but how you do it than that's called aesthetics. Function has it's own kind of beauty, but form by itself is empty. It's an illusion. What counts are results.

There are plenty of free exercises that can work these same muscles. They're called calisthenics. You can look them up online and they only need a body. Your body. But then you'd just need to work hard, instead of playing with cool toys. Granted many of these tools can be made very inexpensively, but five dollars in my pocket is better than some more crap filling up my house.

The practice of one kata is the same. If I can learn karate from one kata than why should I pay someone for 20 if one will serve? Should I buy 20 different cars just in case, or twenty different corkscrews, 20 different kinds of axes? People love collecting this junk, but skill and creativity counts for more than possessions.

Kata in the Cold

It's been snowing for the last two days and it's below freezing outside, but I went outside to practice anyway. I practiced the kata for about twenty minutes stamping down the snow and adjusting to the difference. Then I spent a few minutes striking the pounding post.

It's always good to practice in varying weather conditions and terrain. It's easy to say you have a stance locked in when your bare toes are gripping the dojo floor, but it's harder to say when your leg muscles have to lock in a stance while sliding on snow and ice to keep yourself from falling, while wearing boots. It's a different feeling. Different terrain calls for different stance depths and there needs to be a certain amount of adaptability when dealing with uneven footing. These are things most don't talk about in the rigid uniformity of the dojo.

It's also good to be uncomfortable. Can you practice with the wind throwing snow in your face? Can you stick it out until your body heat compensates for your thin clothing? Can you keep going after your shoes are soaked and your fingers are numb? Questions that need answering.

Makiage Kigu

The makiage kigu is a wrist roller. I know my high school weight room had one of these, so it's not exactly an original Okinawan invention, but it's super easy to make.

You basically need a stick, an old broom handle or a dowel. I used part of an old wooden closet rod. You cut it so it's the same length as your shoulder width for the most part. Drill a hole in the center and tie a rope through the hole and tie the other end to a weight. I used an old five pound plate weight that I had.

I won't explain how the exercise is done, because you can just YouTube it. You basically just hold it out in front of you and wind the cord up by rotating the handle like you were rolling up a newspaper.

I have to tell you that I thought 5 pounds was going to be too light. I was wrong. It's not too heavy, but my forearms are screaming by the time I've brought the weight up and all the way back down again. It's definitely going to be great for grip strength.

Grip strength definitely makes things a lot easier. Karate wise a good grip is essential for hikite, grappling, gouging and possibly finger strikes like the nukite. It makes a lot of none karate stuff easier too. I spent a significant amount of time moving furniture for relatives over the weekend, and it was pleasant having the hand strength to grip at all those weird points you end up grabbing when you move shelves, couches, nightstands and tables.

I recommend anyone add this to their training regimen mostly because it's cheap and easy to make, takes up little space and improves strength and health.

Searching for Karate

I spent a little time reading over some of my first posts and decided that I should give a better explanation to the purpose of this blog. While it's a place for me to record my training and a place for my ideas to coalesce, it's also about self discovery and hopefully offering a little bit of motivation. Let me start by trying to explain the name of this blog, In Search of Karate.

You might be asking yourself "why not do a quick google search?" or if you're really old school "why don't you flip through the phone book?" If you're too young, they're those yellow things that mysteriously appear on your doorstep, which seem to be forgotten there and then turn into mush. There are plenty of people out there teaching karate, claiming they teach karate and are all too happy to tell you what karate is in exchange for money. There's Wikipedia and other sources that will explain exactly what karate is supposed to be and plenty of people writing blogs like this telling everyone what they believe true karate to be. No matter what the setting each person needs to decide what karate is for themselves, what karate means to them. It can be fighting, self defense, fitness, spiritual development or any combination of all of these. It can even mean hanging out with friends and meeting new people. Just going to a school is the easiest. There have definitely been times where I've wanted to throw up my hands and say "screw this, I'll just find a school and get some colored belts and have fun playing at martial artist." I've done it in the past. It's what brought me to Seidokan when I was in the service. Going alone is hard. Even when one has a teacher, some things are impossible to teach. A lot of karate is about feeling. Until you feel your body moving in unison, all of it moving towards a single point with all your weight behind the technique than every time someone says that "power comes from the hara" than you won't know, won't listen, won't understand until that first time when recognition hits and you'll know what your sensei was talking about. Until then you just think you're doing it right, you won't know. No matter how many times you hear that kata is everything, you won't understand that it is the tool, the textbook and the teacher. Karate is a search and a journey.

This blog is also about motivation, encouragement and giving people permission. Paying for a class and standing in front of a sensei is not the only way to practice karate. You don't need uniforms or belts or someone telling you what to do. As far as I'm concerned all you need to practice karate is a kata, patience and discipline. Anyone who practices a karate kata practices karate. It takes patience to learn the lessons and discipline to keep at it, but this is all you need. Too many believe that karate is only practiced at a school that if you're not paying a class fee than you're not practicing karate. Karate is not a credit card or your electricity. It doesn't require a monthly payment to practice. It just takes practice and your only payment is sweat. I want people to know that when there's a will there is a way especially when karate is concerned. I want people to know that they have permission to practice karate however they want.

This is what this blog is about. It's about discovery, practice and most of all asking why.

Karate Resolutions

First post of 2016, so I should obviously write about New Year resolutions. Resolutions for me obviously.

First on my list is making some hojo undo equipment and dedicating some time in my fitness routine to them. Mostly the chishi, body conditioning (because fighting hurts), the nigiri game and makiage kigu (wrist roller). I already have the ishi sashi. I like building stuff, and I'm a big advocate of DIY.

I'm also planning on making a makiwara and striking post for testing structure. I've had makiwara in the past, but they keep breaking. The last one lasted about a second before it snapped. It was old wood.

Me and J are also planning at some point to make videos, and we're planning on participating in some local martial arts tournaments.

The tournaments might be surprising to some, but it's just another way to test our karate. It should be fun, give us a little bit of stress and give us a little bit of a challenge. After all the essence of self defense is not being touched and playing a game of tag is a pretty good way of testing that. It's also a chance to meet people.

Other than that the plan is to keep training and keep learning.

A Small Karate Physics Lesson

Physics is very counter intuitive. The fact that us and everything around us is actually accelerating toward the earth all the time under the force of gravity is weird and strange. The only thing keeping us from falling through the earth is that the ground can absorb the combined force of our mass and acceleration. This is more commonly called weight. The moment that what we are standing on can't absorb this force we fall, like falling through ice, rotten wood or just anything.

Objects also have a limit to the amount of force they can take. There is an absolute threshold to the amount of force any specific object can absorb. After this threshold it either breaks, is crushed or is pushed. Basically it will deform. This force works both ways. If I punch a wall and the force is more than the wall can withstand it will deform in some way. If I punch a wall and the force is more than my fist can withstand it will deform in some way. They bend, break, buckle, shatter or if they can withstand the force nothing will happen. If my fist can withstand the force, but the wall can't I'll either push the entire wall backwards or my fist will go through it. I also can't impart more force to the wall than it can take before breaking. If it takes 10 newtons to break the wall than 10 newtons is the maximum amount of force it will encounter. Even if my punch had the power to put a hole in a wall that could withstand 20 newtons, if the wall I'm currently punching can only take 10 then it receives 10 newtons and my hand goes through it.

What this basically means is that no matter how big, strong, fast or proficient my striking is there is an absolute upper limit that I cannot cross without damaging myself. I could produce a lot of force jumping off the Empire State Building, but I'll splatter on the pavement. You can't out exercise physics. The strongest toughest man in the world still splatters on the pavement after jumping off the Empire State Building. Because there is this upper limit, one needs to be more concerned more with not losing energy rather than gaining energy. If I can only hit with 10 newtons of energy than I want to make sure that all those 10 newtons are getting transferred into my target. One way that you lose energy is through bad structural alignment.

Because the force of a strike works both ways, my own body can act as a shock absorber for the other person. If my arm is bent the wrong way, or if my legs aren't in the right position my joints will bend with the force of the impact and some of the force will be absorbed by my flexing joints. It's the same as jumping from a high place and bending your knees on impact instead of locking them out. Locking them out is more jarring, because you receive the full brunt of the impact. The same goes for striking.

Now if I strike someone and it sends them flying backwards, I've also wasted energy. Instead of the person absorbing all of the energy of my strike, some of the energy is just used to push the person backwards. I want the person to absorb all of my energy. This is where the hikite comes in. If I pull them into my strike, they can't bleed off the force by moving backwards their body has to absorb the impact or break. It becomes similar to stomping someone on the ground, because the ground won't flex with the impact, all the energy is either absorbed by the person or they break. It's why being stomped is dangerous and a killing blow in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. A hikite doesn't make you punch harder, it just means you don't waste the energy you were already using.

This is why structure, good structure, is what I think about the most. I want to hit with good structure, so that I don't waste any of the finite amount of energy that I can produce. I want to hit like a hammer, not a pool noodle. It's also why you strike anatomically weak parts of the body. The frontal bone of a person's skull can absorb more force than your fist, therefore you will shatter your fist if you punch it. A person's neck however cannot withstand as much force as a fist, so their neck gets crushed when you punch it.

At it's very heart, striking is about whacking people with geometry and physics.

Karate Programming: the hardware

I've spent a little bit of time writing about this in other posts, but I figured I dedicate a couple completely to this idea. The idea is that you can program yourself. Your body and your brain are adaptable. It's how we learn, it's how we get stronger and it's pretty easy to do if you know how to do it.

Training your body is very easy especially when it comes to physical attributes. We may not all have the genetics to look like Arnold in his hay day, but we can definitely make ourselves better. The answer is steady increase in intensity at planned intervals. It doesn't need to be much of an increase. We're not Olympic athletes for the most part. We can throw out much of what professional athletes do, because we're not training for a big game. We're training for an unforeseeable event that we hope will never happen.

All you need to know is how your body adapts to exercise. When you workout your body adapts by overcompensating the recovery of your muscles for future stress. This over compensation period occurs one to three days after you workout. It's important that you increase the intensity of your workout within this time frame, so that the pattern repeats itself. If you workout after this super recovery period your muscles will have reverted back to their previous state because you didn't stress them again during the appropriate time.

This is all you need to know about exercise. Pick some exercises you enjoy doing and go for it, and you can forget everything you ever read in the muscle rags.

It's important to recognize that professional athletes have huge amounts of resources behind them including constantly evolving manufactured performance enhancing drugs, which change the way you train. Steroids for example almost completely change the way you lift. When you take steroids, which I don't and never have, all you need to do is get your reps in. You've taken out your body's natural cycle of recovery, adaptation and hormone secretion. Basically the more you lift, the bigger you get.

The mental aspects of karate training is where careful planning and knowledge of how we build neural pathways for skills come into play. I'll elaborate on this more in the next post.

Inoculation to Pain

I'm not a big fan of body hardening, but I do think it has a place in karate training, but not the way that many people pursue the activity. Most karateka that I know of that engage in conditioning exercises do so to make their bodies more resilient to damage. They harden their knuckles and arms, their throats, their shins and sometimes their testicles through striking them with various objects or having someone strike them. I've seen very impressive feats done due to this type of training. But, I'm dubious of how much it actually protects you. Even if all your nerves are dead you can still break. I think body hardening can be a replacement for full contact sparring. Let me explain.

The only real value that full contact sparring has in my opinion is intensity and pain. If you're a self defense minded individual, it serves little purpose being so beat up all the time you can't defend yourself. The safety equipment required makes most karate techniques impossible and all the safety equipment in the world can't protect you from a concussion. If you're sport oriented and know the date and time of your next fight then you can do some really hard training and give yourself time to recover. The drawbacks out weigh any of the benefits in my opinion. This is where body hardening comes in.

The fact of the matter is that fighting hurts. Especially in karate when your forearms can become a cyclone of death meant to destroy anything it touches. We need to inoculate ourselves to pain, so we're not stopped in our tracks the first time we get hit hard, or strike hard. This is where body hardening comes into play. Body hardening allows you to slowly build up intensity and control the conditions to minimize the risk of injury. It doesn't take much to bang your forearms and shins on a piece of wood a few times a day, and you don't have to worry about your partner rattling your skull by accident. It's a much simpler way to see if you can take the pain than finding someone you trust to rumble with.