The Way of Least Resistance

Choson Ninja and the question of "conditioned" knuckles The other day one of my colleagues at the Traditional Fighting Arts Forums alerted me to a fellow who calls himself Choson Ninja. He has a series of videos on Youtube and in this particular one he tells you about the dangers of getting "ugly" knuckles from hand conditioning. The general thrust of his argument is correct: conditioning can lead to deformed and ugly knuckles - especially so if you are doing it incorrectly. Certainly, even moderate makiwara practice will cause you to develop callouses. How "unsightly" these are will depend on how much and how "hard" you do your conditioning. However I disagree with Mr Choson about much of what he says in his video. To begin with, his knuckles are not really that conditioned . Rather, they appear to be damaged from breaks. Mr Choson certainly doesn't have anywhere near the kind of callousing one gets from regular conditioning such as st...

Is goju karate bad for your health? I was recently asked about whether goju ryu is potentially bad for your health. The correspondent was particularly concerned with knuckle push ups and makiwara punching causing arthritis, and sanchin kata having other adverse effects (eg. raising blood pressure). Knuckle push-ups Knuckle push ups will not cause arthritis. There are 2 kinds of arthritis; the rheumatoid type (ie. caused by an immunological disease be it rheumatoid arthritis or any other reactive arthritis related to Crohns disease, psoriasis, etc.) and osteoarthritis (which is commonly associated with age (wear and tear) and can result from joint degeneration following an injury or repeated injuries and inflammation, among other things). Knuckle push ups and makiwara obviously have no relationship with rheumatoid-type arthritis. As to oseteoarthritis - they MIGHT have a relationship but only if you keep injuring yourself. To avoid this risk, you should: (a) do your knuckle push ups ...

I have often been asked: "What is the correct alignment of your forearm to your fist in a standard punch?" Given that in karate and most Eastern martial arts (excluding arts such as Wing Chun) the standard punch strikes with the 2 big knuckles, you could be forgiven for thinking that the top of the forearm should align (be flush) with those 2 knuckles. Makes sense doesn't it? But actually this is not the case. Indeed, if you make a fist and then hold your forearm vertically, side on (so that your fist is pointing up and you're looking at your wrist so that you can see whether it angles the fist up or down), you'll notice that you could, if you wanted, make the back of your hand flush with your forearm. That means that the top knuckles are in a straight line with your forearm and your energy is going to be transmitted in a straight line (theoretically). The problem however is that if you look at the palm side of your fist, it now slopes down quite a lot - i...