Trick wrote:klonk wrote:If you can make strong contact out of a charging punch, very well, but there is still this problem, your momentum makes you vulnerable to an adversary's counter. Getting hit as you advance is "using the opponent's force against him," in Asian parlance. If someone does that to you, you made a mistake. You will know it at once.
In other words, you leave yourself no room of error if you charge in with a punch. If he deflects you and counters, you just got hit with the force you were bringing to him, plus any tip he cares to pay for your effort.
As I understand you have been into Shotokan karate previously ? A style which Much emphasis on “one strike one kill” which to be successful requires a good sense of timing whit a “no doubt” mind, since doubt makes hesitation which will most certainly lead one to be the one outtimed....In the “Xin/Brain” thread one poster mentioned wuxin/mushin which hold an important place in Japanese budo(and of course in CMA too)
The dynamic punch charge gif the OP posted, I can imagen serves to train the no doubting spirit
I think it was Funakoshi who wrote that the idea is you should have no doubt that one technique will settle everything. There is a hint of subtlety here: It settles the matter win or lose, and I would say that charging in heedlessly is a good way to lose.
The xu xin/mushin mind is an astonishing thing, but you give it its best chance to work well if it has watched you train in sound techniques. You give it tools to work with when you do that. A banzai charge, fearless without a plan beyond being fearless, is not a good plan because it is not a plan at all. We get the word "berserk" from the Scandinavian version. It may be that berserk is wu xin in some sense, but it is not good wu xin. Good wu xin is refined by technical accomplishment.
I am not saying that persons illustrated or discussed in this thread are berserk or without excellence of technique, only that the mistake I point to clearly exists, so one should be careful not to make it. To train a running punch so that it becomes a refined skill must be quite challenging, becase some aspects of your attack are defined, and you are committed to them, a step or two before you reach your target. You are acting in the moment, but the moment that is the decisive one has not quite arrived yet.
I say "must be quite challenging" because I have not given much attention to training the running punch, myself. It seems to me an attack strategy offering many pitfalls. If your opponent rightly reads what you are doing an instant before you arrive, the least humiliating reception you can expect is a foot sweep. He has other options including deflecting and a counterstrike, or deflecting by means of a counterstrike, or redirecting and throwing, or redirecting and pushing. I am not a good enough martial artist to suppose I am clever enough to deal with all that, even when I am not thinking.
I define internal martial art as unusual muscle recruitment and leave it at that. If my definition is incomplete, at least it is correct so far as it goes.