Tag Archives: kenpo strike

Hitting Harder in the Martial Arts by Hitting Softer

Newsletter 875

How to Hit Harder in the Martial Arts without Hitting Harder

Excellent!
It’s friday.
It’s end of the week work out day!
Get all set up for working out all weekend.

Hey,
great title, eh?
So let’s start at the beginning.

My first experience in resistance was a kicking bag.
Kicked the crap out of it.
Bounced it up to the ceiling,
day after day after day.
Yet,
it wasn’t right.
It didn’t feel right.
Hit it,
kick it,
it didn’t feel like a human body.
But I practiced it for power,
then kicked bodies for control.
Worked my techniques,
practiced my freestyle,
but knew there was something lacking in my reality.

Then they came up with kicking shields.
Excellent.
Much better than a bag.
You had to hit it right,
in spite of the fact that your partner could flinch and twist.
You had to figure out how to move his weight,
without sending him through a wall.
A lot better.

But the interesting thing was that the old drills,
drills I had been doing for years,
began to connect.
I began to ‘feel’ inside my opponent’s body
with my fist and foot.

Look,
this isn’t strange.
If you put your hands on somebody’s arm
you can feel the biceps.
You can feel the striations,
you can feel the bone underneath,
you can feel the nooks and crannies,
you can feel how the arm works,
and you can feel what it takes,
and where,
to damage it.

That’s with your fingers,
but you can feel with your fists.
You can feel with your feet.
And here’s something interesting.
The universe is mostly space,
and this includes the human body.
So if you knock on a door
you can listen,
and ‘feel’ (become aware of as if through radar)
And if you knock on the human body
with your fist or foot,
you can listen,
feel the space inside,
as if radar,
like thumping on a watermelon to see if it’s ripe.
It’s easy.

And,
when you can do this
an interesting thing happens.
you can hit softer,
put more awareness into he strike,
and cause more damage.

It’s true.

And here is why:

you begin to believe in your punch,
and your belief is so strong
that your opponent believes in your punch.

It is so fascinating,
to ‘nick’ somebody with a punch,
and watch them feel the pain.

But you have to be very careful.

But the more you experience this
the more you believe
the stronger your punch gets
and the softer you punch
the more effect it has.

Fascinating.

So keep hitting that bag,
build your reality,
but study the punch,
feel it,
build a belief in it,
after a bit of time,
not a great amount of time if you matrix,
your punches are going to be amazing!

Real gorilla stoppers.

Here’s all the data on punching…

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/hard-punch/

Now,
have yourself a GREAT 4 of July,
do a bunch of extra work outs,
and celebrate the freedom
and the second amendment,
that allows us to practice our killing art.

Have a great work out!

Al

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/matrix-karate/http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/hard-punch/

http://www.martialartsinstructortraining.com

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

go to and subscribe to this newsletter:

https://alcase.wordpress.com

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Google doesn’t like newsletters,

so this is the best way to ensure you get them.

You can find all my books here!

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

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

An ‘Energy Free’ Karate Punch

Newsletter 820 ~ Sign up now!

Arthritis and a Martial Arts Punch!

“It’s not how hard you can hit,
it’s how much weight you can deliver.”
Al Case

I just received a great letter,
a fellow name of Damian,
said Yogata helped his arthritis,
and he talked about how
he sometimes had trouble with a fist because of arthritis.

yoga martial arts style

Click on the cover!

I recommend Yogata,
or any form of yoga,
but I really want to talk about punches,
which may impact on concepts about arthritis.

Arthritis is an interesting condition,
doctors sometimes lump everything
under the term arthritis,
and there are a lot of causes
behind arthritis.
It’s all sort of generic,
but generic with a bite.

So here’s the thing:
injury leads to inflammation.
The body is swelling.
Sometimes the swelling is obvious,
sometimes not,
but the pain,
or lack of usability,
is real.

Many, many years ago
I realized I wasn’t a breaking kind of guy.
My instructor was,
many people are,
there is something seductive
about Power,
and power is often associated with breaking things.

But I figured out that it’s not how hard you hit,
it’s how much weight you can transfer into the opponent.
So I thought about it,
and I realized something:

“you don’t have to tighten the fist.”

This is weird,
we all tighten the fist,
and it is important…for beginners.

Tightening the fist upon impact
teaches focus,
introduces one to concepts of power,
but,
at a certain point,
you don’t need to tighten the fist.
Here’s something to think about”

take a stick and poke it into a watermelon.

Did the stick get ‘tight?’
No.
It just had to be aligned,
and it required a certain amount of ‘quick’ weight.
Although,
when you think about it,
you could puncture a watermelon with a stick
using ‘slow’ weight.

So I started working on the idea
of poking the bones of my arm/fist
through an opponent’s body
without tightening the fist.

Having the idea of puncturing the body
in my mind.

It worked.
No fanfare,
no big deal,
just relax,
align the bones,
feed a little energy into the structure
to keep everything in line,
relax and throw the body.

Worked like a charm.

And…
I started holding thumbtacks in my fist
and breaking things.

And…
here is the kicker,
the more I relaxed,
the better I was able to thrust my
thumbtack holding bones
through an object.

There’s all sorts of things to think about here.
My favorite is this:

if you threw 20 pounds at somebody it would hurt.
(especially if that 20 pounds
had 200 pounds of body behind it)

So when you tighten the arm,
when you focus the fist,
the tightening of the muscles actually holds the strike back.

That’s very zen,
very tai chi,
very true.

BUT,
don’t stop practicing with a tight fist,
you need a certain degree of focus to develop internal power.
And hitting with just the bones,
as I describe here,
is not the only strike,
and focusing the energy is VERY important.

In fact,
I would say that it would be VERY difficult
to learn how to strike with a relaxed fist
if one doesn’t first gain an understanding
of how to focus the energy with a tight fist.

Anyway,
those are my thoughts,
and I want to thank Damian for making me think,
and sharing his win with me.

If you have arthritis,
or ANY condition,
there are ways to keep training.
You just have to relax your thinking,
look around,
and find what works.

And you can find what works
in Yogata,
http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/yogata-the-yoga-kata/

in The Punch
http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/hard-punch/

and if you think I’m just talking,
check out the video on this page…
http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/4c-matrixing-chi-power/

Take care…and
have a great work out!

Al

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/4c-matrixing-chi-power/

go to and subscribe to this newsletter:
https://alcase.wordpress.com

Remember,
Google doesn’t like newsletters,
so this is the best way to ensure you get them.

You can find all my books here!
http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/

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