Saturday, August 8, 2009

Hitting Faster and Harder the Scientific Way!

By Al Case

Several items are necessary to a punch for it to be effective. Focus must be to a precise spot in space. It must have no energy in it.

That is exactly what I said, a punch must be empty. You probably know that the word Karate means 'Empty Hands.' People have assumed that you won't be using weapons, but they are wrong. What it really means is that the hand has no energy, and thus no mass, and is actually empty in the sense of physics.

Striking with no mass is an interesting sensation. Taken to its purest and highest elevation, it means that you do not feel the strike, and this is possible. This would mean that you are actually outside the body and throwing the body, like a big freakin' ghost would throw a rock.

On lesser levels it means that you don't experience the sensation of weight. Why can a child bend his legs and run under a table with no effort, when if you bent your legs and did the same thing it would take tremendous effort? Because the child hasn't absorbed the concept of weight, yet.

So how do you learn the concept of having no weight? You do it by training yourself mentally. You train the mind to have the body follow directions, and this is done easily through the simple fact of forms.

Some people look down on forms, but that is only because they haven't done them enough to see what happens at the end. When you master a form you become somewhat detached from your body, and you lose, and gain, different perceptions when it comes to motion. It is very interesting to do a form and suddenly be above the body and yet feeling the whistling sensation of being an object thrown through space.

The good news is that this is a pleasant sensation, and yet, when done in a strike, it results in the most unimaginable damage to an opponent you...never imagined. Simply, he doesn't have a defense for something that is apart from the body, and the body of the universe, and seems to slip between time and perception. This, incidentally, is the feeling of Mushin no shin, mind of no mind.

Your body is still going to weigh the same, and then some, when colliding with an opponent, when you practice doing your art with no weight. Just because you don't consider yourself to have weight doesn't mean that the weight isn't there. Actually, it is even more there, because when you move weightless, and think weightless, you move faster, and your opponent will anticipate accordingly.

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