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Strength and the Martial Arts
The girl was 11 years old. She was the most diligent student in my class. When I would demonstrate how to stand, how to kick, how to block, she would watch intently while the other children horsed around and blew off steam (which is kind of the point for a child’s martial arts class). But not Tammy. She went off and carefully set up the technique I had shown her, and practiced it repeatedly. Her brow furrowed when she was unhappy with the result, and she’d try again.
Recognizing that she was one of the ones there to seriously learn, I spent a lot of time helping her. She passed her yellow belt test on her first try, and that earned her the right to represent her class in our annual demonstration for parents and the city.
Her task was to demonstrate how to break a board with a punch. On the night in question, she bravely stepped up in front of 1,000 people and got into a good strong stance. My last piece of advice was, “Don’t worry Tammy. Just remember not to pull your punch. Visualize the point you want to punch as being about six inches behind the board, so you punch right through it.”
Bravely, she drew back and threw a good reverse punch. The board broke with a loud crack! The audience cheered, and my student pranced off stage with a huge smile on her face.
My child class at a demonstration in 1982.
Karate demonstrations often show supposed feats of strength like this. Some martial artists believe that there is a mystical power, called “Chi” that can be tapped into to give you superhuman strength. And certainly you can routinely see demonstrations of what looks like impossibly difficult skills. Martial artists have concrete slabs smashed on their stomachs with sledgehammers. They will chop through a three-foot stack of bricks, walk through fires, have heavy weights placed on them while they lie on a bed of nails, and so forth.
There are no mystical forces at play. Some of these are just tricks anyone can do, while others are applications of inertia, momentum, impulse and other physical phenomena that have nothing to do with woo or mysticism. And sometimes it is just run-of-the-mill strength coupled with years of conditioning the skin and bones of the practitioner.
So how is it possible that this little girl could break a 1/2″ board? The answer is quite simple: When we have children break boards, we use soft pine, and we align it so that we are holding the edges of the board with the grain. This makes the board very weak, and for children, we would sometimes help them along by applying a torque to the board with our hands as we held it. It takes little more than a light tap to cause the board to split under those circumstances. In fact, I remember one demonstration where the Sensei accidentally torqued the board a little too much, and it snapped before the child’s fist even reached it!
Why would we subject children to this if it’s a kind of trick? Why would we demonstrate this ability? The truth is partly because it makes a good show for the audience. But there’s a more important reason: If you want to defend yourself, it’s important to learn how it feels to hit something that isn’t a soft bag. You need to learn not to pull your punches, to focus your punch past the point of impact, and even how to handle a little pain when you hit something that doesn’t give.
Hitting that little wooden board pulls all those techniques together. If your technique is wrong, you’ll really feel it. And if you aren’t being helped by an eager board holder torquing the board for you, you won’t break it if you pull your punch at the end. Finally, it’s a great confidence booster for the student to see that they can actually break a board with their punch. It’s a bit of a rite of passage as children move up in the martial arts. This makes it a useful part of training, but it should never be confused for magic or some real feat of strength because it isn’t.
Sometimes a feat of strength or toughness is real. At the black-belt level, we would have 2×2’s broken over our arms and legs in the demonstration. I can report that this really, really hurts. And you could really break your arm instead of the board if you aren’t prepared and trained. In this case, the training consists of many hours of repeatedly smacking your arms and legs against hard poles or the arms and legs of a training partner. This toughens the skin and bones. Couple this with musculature built up over the years it takes to become a black belt, and your arms can withstand a lot of damage. Part of the technique was also to be able to keep your arm rigid under the force because if your arm moved down the force would be spread out over time and the board would not break. Then you’re just being clubbed.
We don’t do this to break boards. We do it so that we don’t get our arms or legs broken by kicks and punches from an opponent, or break them delivering the same. It is not an uncommon injury to fracture a bone when sparring – say for example you were going to kick someone’s thigh and they pull their leg up, so your shin contacts your partner’s shin at full power. Stuff happens. Conditioning means that by the time you have serious power in your kicks and punches, you and your opponent can take the damage without injury.
My style (Okinawan Goju-Ryu) along with others also uses a “Makiwara board” for toughening hands. It’s basically a board with cordage wrapped around it that has a very slight amount of give. Punching it provides the same feedback as the little board for my student: You really feel it if your technique is wrong. But it’s also used to build up calluses over the knuckles. My Sensei’s hands looked like mallets. Again, this is useful because the hand is fragile and easily broken if you hit a bone hard, as can happen both in real combat or in full-contact fighting. So, you condition your hands. Some of us opted out of this, fearful of losing dexterity because we worked in fields that need fine motor control. However, damage to your hands is a very real possibility when you are punching without gloves. The only time I was sucker-punched on the street, the other person went to the hospital with serious hand damage and I was fine. So we train to avoid that, which includes not just conditioning but how to make a proper fist and deliver it in a way that doesn’t break your fingers, knuckles, or wrist. Breaking boards is a good way to learn the right technique, and you can really tell when you did it wrong, but without sustaining serious injury.
But what about “Chi?” Didn’t Bruce Lee have a one-inch punch that could send people flying? Surely that’s impossible. And you may have seen Aikido practitioners toss around people much larger than they are with seeming ease. So what’s going on there? The answer is physics. Many martial artists may not even realize it, but the essence of many martial arts techniques involves the storing and releasing of energy by leveraging the kinematics of the body. For example, the famous one-inch punch is an example of transferring the momentum of your body into your fist at the exact right moment. So instead of shoving someone, which has a long release time, all the force of the body’s momentum gets released very quickly, which transmits a much higher impulse to the target. I have seen my Sensei accidentally break someone’s ribs with that technique, starting actually having his hand on his chest. No 1″ distance needed at all.
The way it works is through hip technique and knowing when to relax and tense your muscles. You rapidly rotate your body, transferring muscle power into rotational momentum. And at the right moment, you twist your hips and tense, and all that force gets transmitted down your arm and through your hand. The result, when done right, is a very powerful blow. But it’s not chi, and it’s not mysterious. Just plain old physics. The same hip techniques are used when kicking and punching, and it’s amazing how much harder a black belt can hit once they have learned this.
This is not to take anything away from Bruce Lee, who was an amazing martial artist. But I should point out that he was only about 140 pounds, and therefore would have been at a serious disadvantage against a heavyweight fighter. Lee himself said that Muhammad Ali would destroy him in a street fight. Strength and size matter.
Aikido is a form of martial arts that explicitly uses the attacker’s energy and momentum against him. A good demonstration of this is from, of all people, Steven Seagal. The clip below is from the old Merv Griffin show, and Seagal demonstrates the use of the opponent’s energy. Yes, Steven Seagal is (was) a real martial artist. At least before he gained 100 pounds and an equal amount of arrogance. However, watch this video for his technique, and not his explanation. His comments about “energy” are silly. But his throws are a good example of how an opponent’s momentum can be used against them.
I think most people are aware of how some of the other “tricks” are done. Lying on a bed of nails is no big deal because there are a lot of nails. Therefore, your weight gets distributed very well, and anyone can do it. As for smashing bricks and multiple boards, look closely the next time you see someone do this, and you’ll notice that there are spacers between the boards or bricks. So the first brick you break is also accelerated down into the second brick along with your hand. When that one breaks, now you have two bricks moving along with your hand, helping to smash the third one. And so it goes. Take away the spacers, and the trick becomes impossible.
Then there is another entire class of feat that is just straight-up deception or stage magic. The people who use such techniques may be martial artists, but they aren’t demonstrating martial arts. They are demonstrating stage magic. For example, martial artists who claim to be able to catch bullets are always faking in some way. There is a whole branch of nonsense martial arts called “no Touch” that is supposed to use Chi to throw your opponents without even having to touch them. One of these ‘martial artists’ was so sure that it worked that he challenged any MMA fighter to a match. See the video below for the outcome of that.
Finally, I’d like to talk about the role of strength in martial arts in general. Let’s say my 11-year-old student had gone on to earn a black belt. Would she be able to fight an adult and win? Almost certainly not. The idea of little martial artists beating up on adults is a creation of the movies, and not reality. In fact, the first thing I used to teach my students was that if they were joining our dojo to learn how to beat people up, they were in the wrong place. If they thought martial arts would let them challenge a bully and win, they were in the wrong place. Because in the real world size matters, toughness matters, and meanness matters.
If you don’t have those things, all the training in the world won’t help when someone who loves fighting descends on you and begins hammering away. If you aren’t a fighter and you aren’t used to getting your bell rung, after the first punch your brain will start jibbering at you and you will forget everything you knew. To that end, perhaps one of the best benefits of martial arts training is to condition you to being hit so that your brain doesn’t shut down on you when it happens in real life. But that only happens if you train in a way where you are actually being hit and not just pulling your punches.
The advent of Mixed Martial Arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship was very useful here. In the early days of these matches, legitimate Karate masters would challenge the brawlers — and get beaten severely. Stylized fighting is no match for size and aggression and some boxing or ju-jitsu training. Now, the MMA fights are carefully controlled by matching fighters up by weight class. And even in mixed martial arts, the best fighter in the world may not be able to move up even one weight class and remain competitive. A difference of 10-15 pounds is all it takes sometimes.
Back in the day, I sometimes taught self-defense for women. My task there was not to train women to beat up men because that simply wasn’t going to happen. The weight and strength differences are just too much. So instead, we would teach situational awareness and escape and evasion tactics. Learning how to spike an ankle with your high heel, then to kick off your shoes and run. We would teach women to carry their keys in a way that would allow them to punch a pain point or gouge an eye with a key, then kick off the heels and run. But most importantly, we would teach women how to stay out of dangerous situations, how to evaluate threats, and how to not look like a victim.
Running away from someone a lot bigger and/or meaner than you continues to be the best form of self-defense. Martial arts are a great way to learn how to control your body better. You will be a better fighter with martial arts than without, all else being equal. Martial arts will teach you balance and coordination, and you might learn some culture along the way and gain flexibility and extra confidence. It might allow you to handle an untrained opponent in an impromptu encounter. But it won’t turn you into a wrecking machine, and it won’t allow you to carve a path through the local tough guys who like to fight. It won’t allow you to beat up an attempted rapist. Because strength and aggression still matter. A lot.
Published in Sports
My contribution to the march group writing project.
My son earned his black belt in Tae Kwon Do. His instructor was from Korea and had been an instructor for the Korean Armed Forces, as well as the coach of the Nepalese Olympic Team. Two other instructors were members of the Nepalese Olympic Team.
He went to Japan to teach conversational English to Japanese Corporate employees that were being transferred to the States, and he had earned a Japanese language degree. He took his brown belt with him and found a dojo that accepted him as a student. He said when the other students discovered he knew what he was doing the real work began.
That must have been a great experience! I had the opportunity to go to Okinawa to train at the main school while teaching English to make a living, but I turned it down to go to college. I’m still not sure I made the right choice there – it would have been a great learning experience, and not just in martial arts! I’m envious of your son.
Excellent post that brought back lots of memories. When I trained 40+ years ago (oof, has it really been that long?) we used to break boards in demos. As you said, it’s no big deal; the biggest trick is to not hurt your hand, and that’s not that big a trick. We used to bring people from the audience up and have them break a board using the back of their elbow, which is incredibly strong and difficult to hurt. A more impressive (to the audience) trick was to have someone hold a board by the top edge, with it hanging down loosely. The most powerful regular punch would simply send the board flying without breaking. We would hit the board with a good reverse punch but instead of following through, we’d pull our fist back a fraction of a second after making contact. The board would go flying again…in two pieces. My theory is that the punch imparts a large impulse to the board, but we pull our hand out of contact before the shock wave in the wood has a chance to reflect back into the hand. All the energy was trapped in the wood, and the board would break.
Our philosophy of self-defense was like yours. People are a lot better off with training than without but it doesn’t make one invulnerable. The point of self-defense is to live another day. Plan A is to get away without a fight even if it hurts your ego. Plan B is to fight back hard until escape is possible. Plan C is that if there’s no escape at least you can make the other guy pay for what he wants. BTW there are no rules. People are reluctant to bite, claw and gouge eyes (I mean really brutally gouge them), but they shouldn’t be if they are in real danger. Attitude makes all the difference when in self-defense mode:
Fascinating. Great post, Dan!
Very interesting conversation starter. With as many people as we have around here who have martial arts training, I’m sure we’ll get a few stories out of this.
And as Dan mentioned above, this conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under the March theme of Feats of Strength. If you have a tale of strength or the lack thereof in any form, perhaps you would like to share it to start a conversation. We still have seven gaping holes in the schedule, starting with having no volunteers for this Friday. Wouldn’t you like to fill a hole in our schedule?
Too bad @franksoto is on hiatus. It’s one of his favorite subjects. Or perhaps we might hear from @bossmongo or @dajoho?
I found the last video fascinating. The ‘no touch’ masters seem to really believe in this stuff, and their students seem to as well. It must be some form of mutual reinforcing suggestion – The student flies or rolls when ‘thrown’ by the ‘chi’, maybe because thr student really wants to believe it – like stage hypnosis. And the fact that the student actually does what the ‘master’ is trying to make him do reinforces the master’s belief that he really has this power.
This sounds almost far fetched, but I have no explanation otherwise for why a man with fake skills would actually accept a $5000 match to fight a man who was almost certainly going to hurt him in front of his students. So he has to be deluded, and therefore didn’t cynically hire actors to pretend to be thrown. So they must be real students, and they must really believe they are being thrown. It’s a fascinating case study into the power of suggestion and bias.
:-)
I had an aikido instructor who could throw off an assailant with surprise, and it was a terrific sight to see. Just as the attacker was ready to complete his attack, the instructor boldly moved into the attacker’s space, chin jutting and eyes flashing, fast, timed just so. Even when you knew it was coming the timing was so good and the motion so convincing that it was like an invisible wall ran into you.
Dan, very informative and full of common sense. Good job.
Kent
I really don’t get why Wing Chun masters get psyched out by boxers. I’ve watched with morbid fascination as folks like Grand Master Wong on Youtube forget that they can just snap a kick at the boxer’s legs. Boxers don’t train against kicks, while kong fu does. It should be obvious, but instead, facing a boxer, they forget half their limbs.
I couldn’t see Muhammad Ali taking on Bruce Lee after having a patella broken. It would all depend on whether Lee remembered his legs were weapons.
Here in Tokyo, fortuitously the apartment I moved into is two commuter-train stops away from where the SKIF/Shotokan Karate International Federation honbu (HQ) dojo is — the home of Kanazawa Hirokazu-sensei, if that is a familiar name to you Dan or any other readers here.
I’m presently in a down-to-the-wire situation with my Japanese work visa set to expire on 02 April, and no job offers yet since resigning from my last employer (here in Tokyo) in mid-Summer and throwing myself into the job-hunt.
I keep telling myself that if I do finally snag a job offer and thus manage to get an employer sponsor for my work-visa renewal in time to make the 02 April deadline (i.e., thereby allowing me to keep staying here in Japan legally!…), I will finally get around to signing up for keiko (training) at SKIF.
In that event, it will mark some 25 years since the *last* time I learned/trained in Shotokan Karate — I’m way overdue after having taken it up in the company Shotokan Karate Club that I joined when I was with Kajima Kensetsu (Kajima Corp., kind of like the Bechtel of Japan). We used to train after work in the employee cafeteria — it was a miracle I didn’t slip and fall on the hard concrete floors in those days…
Superb post! I meet the most talented and interesting people here on Ricochet and profit from reading their experiences!
Learning how to take a hit is an underappreciated part of any martial art. In fencing, beginners are given an exercise that consists entirely of planting their feet and getting lunged at so that they learn that 1.) you will feel it if you get hit, 2.) it isn’t debilitating, and 3.) your parries will prevent you from getting hit -but you have to parry the attack without flinching. And also -if you flinch, your opponent will use that to get by your defense.
Getting that “flinch” reflex to sit down and shut up takes a couple days of hours getting stabbed with the foil, but it starts to fade pretty quick. It isn’t quite mind over matter -you just have to remind your brain that it can disengage the usual safeties in a fight.
Why far-fetched? Doesn’t the same explanation explain progressives, except their policies damage their “students” and they don’t expose themselves to risk.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable theory. The problem with a hanging board is that the energy you impart to it will be converted to kinetic energy in the board (it moves the board) instead of the energy being dissipated by the wood causing it to break. I’ve always looked at it as a simple problem – you need to hit such a board in a way that creates a really sharp impulse, so that the inertia of the board holds it in place and the energy is therefore dissipated by breaking the board. I used to break boards like that with a backhand, pulling it back just as you did right after contact. If you keep following through, your hand just helps push the board away.
But it may be more complex than that, as I have seen demonstrations (not martial arts) of the exact thing you are talking about – if you hit something normally, the contact period is long enough that the energy wave can travel through the object, reflect back, and be re-absorbed into the thing that hit it in the first place. If that thing is no longer there, the energy has no place to go other than heat and deformation. So your explanation could be exactly correct.
Yes. And remembering rule #1: There is always someone tougher than you. If you go looking for fights, you are selecting for the people who are willing to fight you. That subset of people is much more likely to contain someone who can and will really hurt you than if you were forced to defend yourself against a random assailant. So don’t go looking for fights.
Real self defence practitioners will all tell you that the best self defence is to avoid putting yourself in a situation where you need to use your skills to survive in the first place. Or, to paraphrase Frank Borman’s comment about pilots, “A real martial artist uses his superior judgement to keep him out of situations which require the use of his superior skill.”
That’s why real martial artists tend to be humble and polite.
Once you get up to black belt level, there’s another good reason not to get into fights – if you go to court, your training WILL be used against you. It’s a myth that anyone has to register their hands as a weapon, but if you get into a street fight and you are a black belt and the other person isn’t, you can bet that their lawyer will use that to claim that you used unreasonable force. Happens all the time, even if the other guy was just as good a fighter, and it won’t matter if he started it.
Well, that’s what everyone thought before the MMA came along. If you watch any of those matches, you’ll notice that there are NO traditional martial arts fighters fighting solely in their style (with the possible exception of Brazilian Ju-Jitsu). The truth is that just ‘snapping a kick’ at a boxer’s legs won’t do much to the boxer, but it might force you to move into his zone where he can hit you with a punch that, if you aren’t a boxer, will likely do you some serious damage. Boxers have tremendous punching ability. While a traditional karate reverse punch might be able to develop 300-400 ft lbs of energy, a good heavyweight boxer can generate over 1,000 ft-lbs. And they build up their neck and shoulder muscles so they can take a similar kind of punch. If you haven’t done that, a single full-on punch from that boxer will likely result in lights-out.
Before the MMA came along, I heard lots of water cooler talk from traditional black belts regarding how they’d handle a fight. “I would just wait for him to create an opening, then I will use my technique XXX, and it will be all over.” And at the beginning of mixed martial arts fighting, lots of traditional black belts tried to do exactly that. Get into a ‘strong’ stance, then wait to be charged and use their powerful trapping or kicking or punching techniques or whatever to disable their opponent. The people who tried that got charged, surprised when their special technique did not have the effect they expected, and by the time they got their heads back in the game they were covered with 250 lbs of screaming madman and were completely helpless.
The truth is, traditional martial arts are not the secret to invulnerability. The various martial arts often originated in cultures where peasants were not allowed to own weapons or train as soldiers. So they had to hide their training behind stylized dances or ‘kata’, and they learned to use agricultural instruments as weapons. The Kata then evolved into a way to transmit knowledge across schools and across generations, much like ancient poetry.
Some martial arts evolved for very specific purposes. Aikido was developed to give unarmed people a chance to disarm and deflect the attack of someone with a sword.
The problem with kicking in general is that A) it saps you of a lot of energy, B) it forces you to extend yourself and put yourself in a vulnerable position. Most MMA fighters use kicking not as a takeout blow, but against the other fighter’s legs in an attempt to wear him down and slow down his movements. Muay Thai kickboxing does this a lot, and most MMA fighters learn a little Muay Thai along the way. But it’s very rare for a kick to end a fight.
What we have learned since the advent of mixed martial arts is that there is no one martial art that will teach you everything you need to know. All the best fighters in UFC or MMA pick and choose techniques from various martial arts. The obvious ‘winner’ in terms of the art that seems to be best suited to at least this kind of ring fighting is Brazilian Ju-Jitsu. Being able to take down an assailant and immobilize them in a hold is a really powerful skill, and if I had to pick the best ‘self defense’ martial art, that would be it. But even that isn’t the ticket to invulnerability, because if you are submitting someone your hands and feet are occupied, and that guy’s buddies will start kicking you in the head.
Years ago, I studied – more accurately, worked at – martial arts for a few years. I never could do any of the “chi” tricks, and they never worked on me. Recently, I had someone offer to demonstrate the effects of chi. As usual, I felt nothing, and he seemed rather nonplussed. When I did the “Iron Man” breathing kata that was supposed to develop chi, all I got was an elevated heart rate and very tired. Still, I think it was worth the time.
Good and interesting post, and your comment on “grappling” is spot on. It works only if the situation is one-on-one.
I really believe that ‘Chi’ tricks are essentially stage hypnosis. You find people that are susceptible and who really want to believe, then you give them the opportunity to believe it. A stage hypnotist’s biggest skill is knowing how to find the people in the audience who are susceptible to the power of suggestion.
We once had an HR person plan an event for our engineering group, and that person foolishly decided to book a stage hypnotist. It was a disaster. Not one person in the audience of engineers could be hypnotized. Everyone was willing to give it a try and keep an open mind, but engineers tend to have analytical minds, and just are not good candidates for this kind of thing. The hypnotist eventually gave up, said we were the toughest audience he’d ever had, and that he’d have to tell his bookers to stay away from engineers and scientists. We bought him a beer in apology. (-:
An Oprah audience is more what they’re looking for – people caught up in the moment, terribly excited to be there, and really, really wanting to be hypnotized.
Someone who generally walks into a martial arts studio that focuses on mysticism and woo is very likely to be someone who already believes in that stuff, or at least has a very open mind to it. Thus, it works on them. At least, until they try to use their new ‘power’ on someone who is more interested in just hurting them, raping them, or taking their money.
I don’t know about fighting, but I used to practice standing meditation and simple moving qigong, and I even got my “third eye” going a few times. I can still make qi go into my “lower dantian” by meditating in a chair. I think the big issue is, people don’t want to do standing meditation for five minutes.
In my amateur opinion I think the best system is Yi Quan.
This only happened once, but I saw a kid from China that practiced Chen-style tai chi and he could clearly move in ways that looked like something supernatural was going on.
FWIW, the only reason tai chi is a big deal as a health practice over straight qigong (which is way easier) is because Mao outlawed qigong but they let people practice martial arts. Tai chi (a martial art, except not one cares anymore) is qigong but it’s way more complicated than you need if you just want to be healthy.
I got some help from a guy from China and I asked him to do a baguazhang ( A Chinese qigong-based martial art) demo. Man that guy could move even though he was 50. Crazy.
I never do anything about it, but I really think Taoism makes a ton of sense, too.
I was already laughing hard imagining this as I finished this sentence.
The other thing that happened was all of the white guys would line up to do “push hands” with him and he would make every single one of them fall on the floor. They would all get up laughing because they couldn’t believe how good he was at it.
delete
I’ve only had the most rudimentary training in hand to hand fighting. I found it simply wasn’t very useful. When I joined the Marines in 1985 we did a couple hours of training that was generally useless and the only thing I remember was Corporal Jestle teaching us that “ears come off.”
When the Marines instituted their own martial arts program I dutifully was qualified at the lowest “tan” belt level. I was ready to test for the next level (was it green?) but the school we were in ended before we could test. I’ll say that it was very challenging for a forty year old to grapple with 21 year old men. But even that was mostly useless because technique isn’t going to help me much. At my size I will need a weapon to win in a violent fight.
But really, I’m a small guy. I’ve always been small. I’ve learned that unless the attacker has some semblance of social conscience, I’m not going to win in a fight because size and weight matter a lot.
For example, I went to a DoD school in Iceland. I was in 7th and 8th grade taking PE classes with 12th graders. I probably weighed 70 pounds and several of my classmates were practically fully grown men. I learned to never back down and if someone messed with me I knew I had to hit them hard, but that only worked if they weren’t monsters. If someone was a monster and enjoyed hurting people then I knew I had to just steer clear of them.
I remember one time in 7th grade a 12th grader was giving me a hard time. He was a decent enough person (I conclude from forty years later), but he enjoyed tormenting me from time to time. I remember being in the school hallway when he gave me a hard time, so I attacked him by jumping up and climbing up on top of his head. I wrapped my body around his head and threw him off balance so he fell down. Then I was able to walk away. If he really wanted to hurt me, he would have caught me and hurt me very badly. I knew that, but it worked and he stopped messing with me.
I worry about the ridiculous movie/TV trend that women can beat up men. I think a lot of people only know what they see on TV and they might conclude that women can do such things. The price they may pay for acting on that misconception is frightening.
There was an episode in season 1 of Major Dad where the Major and his adjutant (Lt. Holowachuk) are doing a refresher course in hand to hand combat, and the Lt. throws the Major hard enough to actually hurt him. Much humor follows from the Major having to recognize that he has now reached the age where his skills are more in ordering younger men to fight, than in fighting with them himself. Also the LT spend the rest of the episode in fear because he threw his CO to the mat.
Probably one of the more realistic depictions of military hand to hand training to appear in TV.
Yeah, I think the second lieutenants I grappled with mostly were easy on me. The captains, not so much!
Rank has it’s privileges.
It’s true that there is a lot of nonsense about chi all over the place. At this point, having done some research, I don’t believe that any of the supposed “chi demonstrations” I’ve seen on youtube are authentic.
I also happen to have studied tai chi regularly for 12 years now with a skilled teacher. He can do things with his body that are at right angles to all the assumptions we have about how the body operates. Not different the way, say, a long distance runner is different, where you think “If I could just run faster and farther I would be like him.” Different in the sense of “Wait, how is that possible?”
Proper tai chi is based on softness and relaxation. Achieving softness enables chi to circulate in your body. However, reaching this point takes several years of sincere practice, including a lot of relearning about how to move and breathe.
I’ve already posted once here about how chi is actually not mystical but material. (And I took some flak for that post.) Circulating chi as one moves is like adding oil to and then operating a well-made machine. But it’s a long road to get to even get to this point, even more work than it takes to make music from a stringed instrument.
The OP is right within its limited frame of reference: for practitioners of strength-based martial arts, the references to chi are not real; chi cannot flow in bodies committed to strength and hardness. When those practitioners speak of chi, they are probably simply referring to the feeling they get when they combine mental focus and physical discipline in a particular way.
However, the observation is relevant only to the use of chi in these particular martial arts. There are many martial arts. Practicing tai chi sincerely, according to the principles laid down in the tai chi classics, under the supervision of a skilled teacher, will eventually teach you how to cultivate chi.
When looking at tai chi videos, it is easy to misinterpret what is happening. Take this one for instance, which features Cheng Man Ching, author of Thirteen Treatises on Tai Chi Chuan and the teacher of my own teacher.
It looks like he is just using the physics of strength to push the other person out of the way. It’s his softness, though, that keeps him always in the favorable position for such a push, and the lightning-quick activation of chi that enables him to always have the drop on his opponent. These are qualities that you can’t see in a video.
Notice, by the way, what you don’t see: a seemingly supernatural transmission of waves of force through the air.