8. TRAIN WHILE WATCHING THE TUBE
There are some areas in your karate training where you need to train with intense concentration, such as when you are polishing a complicated kata movement or an intricate fighting combination. But there are also things you can do while training by yourself that don’t require a lot of concentration. For these exercises, it’s okay to do them while watching your favorite TV program.
Stretching
Turn on MTV, drop down on the floor and do a few of your favorite stretches. You can listen to the program, occasional glance at the screen and improve your flexibility.
Reflexes
Turn on a talky program, such as the evening news, and begin shuffling around on the balls of your feet. Select two or three common words, such as the, a, and is and listen for the newsperson to say them as you move about. When you hear your selected word, explode with a kick or punch. While this is an audio exercise, it nonetheless conditions your reflexes to react.
Stretch while watching TV
Visually, try punching or kicking each time the scene changes or someone on the screen does a particular action. For example, throw a technique every time the news anchor blinks or looks down at his papers, or every time a field reporter adjusts his hand-held microphone. The idea is to create a reflexive response to a visual stimulus. While the stimulus in this case is harmless, the benefit overlaps to stimuli that is not harmless, such as your opponent’s surprise punch.
For an extra hard TV workout, throw punches and kicks in response to both visual and audio stimuli. Throw a technique every time you see that news person blink, say “a,” look down at his papers, say “the,” adjust his hand-held microphone, and say “is.” Do this for 15 minutes and your reflexes will be so on edge that you will need to meditate afterwards just to relax.
9. TRAIN OUTDOORS
This goes along with “Environmental Training,” but it’s so special I wanted to list it separately. Training outdoors is a wonderful way to get fresh air, a little sun and to experience a whole different feel to your usual workout.
I have had some incredible solo outdoor workouts. I’ve done kata in a forest clearing in Kyoto, Japan, and I’ve trained in the middle of a dirt road in Vietnam’s countryside. I’ve practiced karate reps on the beach at sundown, and tai chi at sunrise. I’ve practiced slow punching combinations during a snowfall and worked my kata in the rain. I’ve worked out in parks, in backyards, in driveways and on street corners. I even attempted to sit in horse stance and do a few punches during a hurricane in Florida, but that ended when I was sent rolling painfully along the ground.
I saw lots of examples of solo training outdoors in the Orient. I watched people doing kung fu forms along the banks of the Saigon River and, from my hotel window in Seoul, Korea, I watched a taekwondo man practicing kicks on the roof of a 25-story high-rise. In Hong Kong and China, I saw countless people training by themselves wherever there was a little space, like the guy working out on a six-foot wide traffic medium on a busy Hong Kong street.
There is something about training by yourself outdoors that lifts your spirit and leaves you with a sense of having experienced something special. Give it a try, you’ll like it.
10. TRAINING IN WATER
I’m not talking about punching and kicking in the shower; those little drops don’t offer much in the way of resistance. But when you are submerged in a body of water up to your neck, you get resistance throughout the entire range of your technique.
If you haven’t trained in water before, take it easy at first and build up to a hard workout. Once I was feeling fat and sluggish on vacation, so I decided to train for an hour in the ocean, doing dozens of punches, kicks, blocks and lunges. It was a dumb decision. I was soooo sore that I had to cancel a hike the next day, and I had a sore hip and knee for a week. Start out slowly and progress slowly.
The beauty of training in the water is that it provides constant resistance. With many barbell and dumbbell exercises, gravity helps you do part of the movement, which reduces the resistance you want. When you curl a barbell, gravity takes over about 3/4 of the way into the upward arc, which causes the bar to drop the rest of the way to your shoulder. This does not happen in the water. For example, consider doing an uppercut punch, a motion similar to the curl. When you execute the movement under water, don’t stop the punch where you normally would, but continue pushing your fist up and into a big arc until it’s 2 or 3 inches from your shoulder, just as you would curl a barbell. Since gravity has little effect under water, the resistance remains constant throughout the movement.
Here is a good underwater workout to exercise your arms and legs in all the basic directions. To stimulate the fast-twitch muscles, the ones that make your movements fast and explosive, do the following movements as fast as you can. But, and this is a big but, do so only after you have done a set or two at slow to medium speed to thoroughly warm up your muscles and joints.
Reverse punches
3 sets, 10 reps
Backfists
3 sets, 10 reps
Uppercuts
3 sets, 10 reps
Roundhouse punches
3 sets, 10 reps
Backhand blocks
3 sets, 10 reps
Palm sweep blocks
3 sets, 10 reps
Front kicks
3 sets, 10 reps
Sidekicks
3 sets, 10 reps
Roundhouse kicks
3 sets, 10 reps
Back kicks
3 sets, 10 reps
For sure there are many other techniques you can do, but this is a good starter workout because it stimulates your foundation techniques in all basic directions of force.
Let’s say you feel strong in the basics, but you want to train a couple of other techniques that you consider weak. Working them once or twice in the constant-resistance environment of water will bring them up to speed in a month.
By the way, skinny-dip training is another option.
10 ways to Improve your Hand Techniques
Kicking stylists will probably disagree, but real fights involve mostly hand techniques. While my approach to training has always been 50 percent punches/50 percent kicks, I’ve used my feet only a few times in my many physical confrontations as a police officer. Most often, I had my hands on the guy when the fight exploded, so I was at a range that was too close to get off a kick.
I’m definitely not saying that kicks are unimportant. When I did use them, they worked like a charm (one time in a Saigon bar, I sidekicked a guy coming at me with a barstool. He flew backwards across the room, crashed through a door and landed on his back out in the kitchen. He started to come back at me, but changed his mind and ran out the back door). But in my experience, and in the experience of others who have survived lots of real-life encounters, hand techniques are used the most often.
Here are 10 ways to make your fists fast and powerful.
1. SHOULDERS
Far too many students raise their shoulders when they punch, in particular, when reverse punching. Sometimes they look down their extended arm as if looking down a rifle barrel at a turkey shoot. Lifting the shoulders