Why is “less than a second” considered a martial arts secret? One thing that you will know like you know your name is this. Striking the body with whatever weapon is appropriate is a much more complicated thing to do than you would think. Sometimes it’s a moving target for one thing, and for another and so are you. Hitting someone is best done from a slightly rising stance.  In the Chung Do Kwon Tae Kwon Do classes you are taught many things about how to punch so that you maximize your punching power but also your stopping power.

When you punch, kick, block, or strike with elbow or the forehead the technique is the same.  To begin with striking the body means understanding that the energy you produce in your body is going to go into the attacker’s body and travel all the way through his body and down to the ground. But what you really need to understand what happens with a invisible rule that cannot be changed for anyone. Here it is: the energy that you put into the attacker’s body travels down to the ground and instantly rebounds right back to the point where it was struck. Once it reaches that entry point it will re enter the student’s body causing all sorts of internal havoc for the defender. It does not have to be that way, and if you are taught how to punch by an expert martial artist the defender will absorb all of your negative energy, with none of your energy coming back into your body.

My students are taught to strike with a twisting punch so that the energy that is put into the body is directed by the rotation of the fist (in a forty-five degree twist.)  The goal of the entire punch is to transfer your chi into the attacker’s body as much as you can. The twisting of the fist is used to make the Chi/Qi travel inside the body in a spiraling of energy rather than just through and through his body. When a bullet passes through a body, the damage, although significant is nowhere near as damaging to the body as when the bullet has an X cut in the top center of the slug. Why?  Because the slug spreads apart inside the body and rips out the opposite side of the body when it exits. 

When the fist is made to twist upon impact (on impact the palm is up) the Chi/Qi that goes into the body will continue to rotate and do more damage than if it was just a straightforward punch. The energy is quite upsetting to the internal balance of the body.  So, what happens once you deliver the punch, and your Chi/Qi invades the attacker’s body? What happens is that the attacker has to deal with an invading host of energy that did not come from his body, but from yours. The thing is that his energy is spiraling in bigger and bigger circles inside his body. The problem for him is that this energy from you has the job of harming his internal energy field, by rotating in bigger and bigger circles.

That is provided you are trained to get off the spot that you deliver to the attacker after all your force and all your Chi/Qi is delivered.  Imagine a big truck with a big trailer backs up to a receiving dock and bumps hard into the loading dock and everything inside the floor of the truck slides out and in one second the load is dumped out of the back of the trailer and quick as a wink he pulls away from the loading dock. The goal of your completed strike is to retract your hand once you are done with the rotation part of the punch. This means that by breaking off the punch by retracting it, the chances of you getting hit by your own Chi/Qi and force are greatly reduced.

As much as I have told you about the retraction of the punch, I now need to tell you the second part of the trilogy regarding any strike you make. As you are retracting your punch, you must relax those hardened muscles of the entire body that created that strike and you must do it instantly. Why instantly, you ask?

Try to stand with your fist stretched out in front of your face as if you were punching someone. Make every muscle in your body as hard as if you were trying to impact his body. Now here is the test, can you move your body easily and simply and make another punch without making your muscles relax first? Of course you cannot move even the smallest muscle. So maybe training your self to relax after each strike and you will put your body in position to go from soft to hard again. You just shaved a split second off of the time it takes you to do something else, especially if you are fighting multiple opponents; this little martial arts trick is vital to you.

After reading this, it seems so simple and so easy to understand, but believe you me, I was never told this as a young martial artist and the only reason I can think of is because my own instructors did not know these facts themselves. I have come to the conclusion that the study of martial arts is about some big things, but it is also about a few thousand little things. Speaking of the little things, I could have done more as a teacher, had I known these little things when I was teaching Tae Kwon Do at the age of 19. This way I figure it is, if you know these secrets long before you are a teacher, you will be just that much better if you have learned all this now as a beginner. One last thing to remember about punching, kicking, or blocking is that you must always think that you are going to snap the strike back to your body twice as fast as you send it out. The idea of snapping your punches, blocks, or kicks is to really hurt the other person as quickly and as seriously as you possibly can. But snapping kicks back as fast as you can sets you up to be able to kick again or do the same kick or punch in another direction. Martial arts are learning about fighting multiple attackers all the time, even if there are not multiple attackers to have combat with.  So, the snapping back has two major reasons for being a part of what you will be taught: to retract the weapon back to its “chambered” location, is so that you don’t absorb the very energy that you produced and delivered to the “loading dock” (the person’s body part) and it is so that you are ready to shoot another of your weapons at another target, or maybe in a different direction, without a second’s delay. That’s martial arts and making use of self-defense strategy at its finest. This is the student I want you to become one fine day.