subject: The Secret Of Knocking People Out In The Martial Arts! [print this page] MMA gladiators circling the eight sided ring, searching for the shot, and, WHAM, somebody is knocked out. The price of the ticket, the roaring crowd, they are all worth it if you can see a good knock out. What most people don't realize is that a good knock out, with a little practice, is actually easy to do.
Four decades ago, in Kang Duk Won Korean Karate my instructor told me that A tight fist is a heavy fist. Man, that was just what the doctor ordered! Just curl the fingers into iron bands, tie them together with a thick thumb, and, zingo bingo, you have yourself a board breaking fist.
The trick, of course, is to be totally relaxed before, and to be totally empty after. This is the idea of focus, and if you understand it you can knock an opponent all the way out. Hard to do it the way they put fists in gloves before a fight, but there it is.
Think about it like this, a radar station is looking for planes, it is looking, and what would happen if the skies all filled up with static? The radar operator would be blind, he wouldn't be able to see the planes for the static. So when you relax, and make your fist loose, you are trying to get rid of the static, make it so you can perceive what is going on around you.
Then, without the tension of your muscles holding you back, you can better see the path of an incoming fist, the angry emotion, the guiding intention of the attacker, your fist will move faster because it is empty, and it will hit harder when it becomes tight. Muscular tension will slow down your motion and your fist, and that fist will fly fast and true, and your radar will better help it find the target. The moment of fistal collision and your hand gets tight, and that increases the weight of it, making it hard enough to knock somebody into dreamland.
So there are two things a fighter, whether in the UFC or on the street, must do if he is going to get knock out power. The first, of course, is to be empty, loosey goosey, not tied in place by his own muscular tension. This frees the inner radar to pick up the attack, and enables the MMA fighter to move faster because he is not thinking of his body as weighty and heavy.
The second thing is to make the fist tight when it hits, and loosen it immediately afterwards. This is real nanosecond stuff here, but it really works. The energy comes to bear, the power focuses, and that which was empty and quick suddenly becomes full and heavy.
If you are a UFC or strikeforce MMA fighter, or even a spectator, think about the physics I have described here, and try to put them into your strikes. This is actually a classical concept from traditional Karate, and it is used extensively in the ancient Shaolin types of kung fu like Hung Gar or Choy Lee Fut. Emptiness and focus, these are the keys that will put the mugger, or the ring opponent, down for the ten count snooze!
