Strength is strength!
I have a lot of respect for people who enter strongman competitions. The training you need to do to cultivate that amount of raw physical power is unreal. It’s simple training (lift the weights), but it isn’t easy training.
When I was training at my martial arts club in Fukuoka, grading tests required us to be able to bench press a certain amount of weight. It started off with being able to bench press your own bodyweight but then went up progressively until it got to bodyweight plus 30 kg for black belt. People who do a lot of weightlifting might not think that benching bodyweight plus 30 kg is that impressive, but right after doing that you needed to do ten, two-minute rounds of full contact sparring with no rest against rested opponents that are going to pressure test (kick the hell out of) you.
The logic behind the bench-pressing part of the exam was that you needed to cultivate a certain amount of strength, but without focusing on it to the detriment of everything else. If you do nothing but weightlifting you will get very strong, but that in itself doesn’t make you a good fighter. You need to spend a lot of time practicing technique and cultivating stamina to be able to fight well and fight for a long time.
If physical power alone were enough to be a good fighter, then there would be no need to do anything other than strength training. Strongmen would just go into the UFC and crush absolutely everyone with raw power alone.
Relying on muscle
I don’t have much of a chance to do it anymore, but I used to be quite fond of bouldering. For those who don’t know, bouldering is a form of technical climbing that can be done on rock faces but is often practiced in specialized bouldering gyms where walls are set up with different types of handholds and footholds.
When I was at my local bouldering gym, I noticed that a lot of the female climbers were much better than male climbers. A lot of this is down to men being ridiculous creatures that rely heavily on muscle to get things done.
There were times when I was bouldering where I would use my upper body strength to just drag myself up sections of the wall. This would work great the first few times I did it but I would quickly reach the end of my muscular endurance and the explosively would fizzle out. Meanwhile the female climbers who focused heavily on their technique would start at one pace and keep going, using both their arms and legs very well and using their brains more than their muscles.
Note: More experienced male climbers a good at balance as well. I am just speaking generally. Novice male climbers gas out quickly.
When a martial artist throws a punch, it is not about arm strength. There are some punches that are simple hand techniques (I generally refer to these as 手打ち (teuchi: hand strikes)), but these techniques are not very strong and are usually just quick distraction strikes to set up more damaging techniques. A punch, and I mean a real punch, starts at your feet. There is a kinetic chain of thrusting and twisting your body that starts at your feet, moves up your legs, through your hips and torso, engages your shoulders, and goes through your arm before ending at your knuckles (which should hopefully be aimed somewhere in the center of the mass they are aiming at rather than on the surface).
Someone who has a lot of physical power has the potential to generate very forceful punches. But relying 100% on that physical power is not a great way to ‘hit hard.’ Technique is very important.
Technique: The force multiplier
If we look at pure force someone who is able to bench press 150 kg is able to exert more pushing force than someone who has a max bench press of 100 kg. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the person who is able to bench press 150 kg is able to punch harder than the person with a max bench press of 100 kg. The person who can bench press 100 kg might be able to hit MUCH harder than the 150 kg lifter by creating the proper kinetic chains.
Good technique goes beyond punching. Swinging a sword and relying totally on your muscle power might feel strong, but it will lack speed, appear to be loaded with tension, and will ultimately not be as strong as someone who knows when they need to put force in and when they need to relax using proper technique.
If you take a whip and just swing it as hard as you can at a target you are never going to get that satisfying crack sound. Not knowing when to add force and when to relax and only using brute force and ignorance will make someone far less effective than someone who knows what they are doing.
In karate the term 決め (kime) is used to describe the split second where a technique changes being as relaxed as possible to suddenly locking in at the decisive point and delivering the power into the target. This is not that much different at all from the action of a whip. Relaxation, followed by locking in is much better than throwing all of your power into every nanosecond of a technique.
Just trying harder doesn’t work
One of the highlights of my week is to sprint up and down the beach. My sprint sessions involve running as fast as I can for 200 meters, taking a short rest (around 40 seconds) and then sprinting another 200 meters. The sessions involve doing this twenty times.
People who are not necessarily good at running should be able to run 200 meters pretty quickly if they put their minds to it. But this isn’t much different to saying, a lot of people could probably lift quite heavy weights if they put their mind to it. While people CAN do this, it isn’t necessarily going to produce the best results. (There are quite a lot of videos online of people doing these ‘cat back’ deadlifts where although they are able to use their back muscles to lift large weights off the floor, they do it with a curved spine and likely will not have a long, injury free career in front of them).
I have been guilty of just trying hard to run as fast as I can when I do the sprint sessions. 200 meters is not very far and just putting in effort will get you across that distance and give you a good workout. But it’s not exactly the best way to get things done.
One of the reasons I started training in iaido was to remove tension from my body. The more I consider my iaido techniques, the more I realize that strength is not a major component of kenjutsu, and even the best practitioners of both iaidō and kendō are not over muscled power houses. I have always considered this to have great transferability to things like karate, but it is also very useful for running as well.
Last week I ran one of the fastest 5Ks I’ve run in quite a few months. I ran it on a Saturday and on the Sunday morning when I was scheduled to do a sprint session I was still a physical wreck. Brute forcing it and just trying hard was not an option.
I went to the sprint session and decided to completely forget about my speed. I just wanted to focus on staying tall, relaxing my shoulders, swinging my arms, keeping my strides long, kicking my heels high, landing on the center of my feet, and cycling my legs under me. I tried as much as possible to not over-exert myself and to just stick to the plan. The result was, that I was just as fast, and sometimes even a little faster than I was when I was in better condition and just ‘brute forcing’ it.
You can’t cut back what you don’t have
In much of this article I have preached that technique beats physical power. But this is not me saying that it is not a good idea to cultivate physical power. My argument is that you should have it, but not lean on it too much.
Someone who has much better technique can beat someone who is much stronger than they are. But technique has its limitations and weight classes exist for a reason. Brute force and ignorance can overwhelm technique unless the good technique is good enough to make up for the difference in strength. That is true not just in martial arts, but in pretty much everything we do.
If you have amazing technique, you can’t add force you don’t have to it. Your maximum strength is the limit. It is always better to cultivate strength and have that as the backup plan than it is to not have a backup plan. You can spend decades cultivating a technique where you only ever use the right amount of force, but you might come up against someone who is on your level of technique but also stronger than you, and they will have the edge when they draw upon that wellspring of brute force and ignorance. It is not always possible to make up for strength differences, but that isn’t an excuse to have a, “can’t win, don’t try,” attitude.
If you have power and overuse it, focus on improving your technique and cutting back on your reliance on raw physical force. If you have great technique but you can be beaten by less technical people who are just using brute force and ignorance, it’s time to start focusing on becoming more of a caveman.
Final thoughts and take home messages
Being physically strong is great. I have a huge amount of respect for people that do the simple, but not easy work of cultivating strength within themselves. But focusing 100% of your effort on just cultivating strength is not the way. You won’t see the strongest of the strong doing ridiculous movements like cat back deadlifts. Technique is important.
Knowing how to move, when to relax, and when to add tension is important when it comes to making the whip crack. You will never be able to reach your full, decisive potential if you focus 100% on physical power.
Focus both on improving your technique and cultivating physical strength. Get strong, then focus on not relying on it too much. You absolutely can’t rely on power you don’t have, so if you have amazing technique but lack strength, it might be time to start putting on a bit of muscle.
Brute force and ignorance will take you far. But the more we can switch out the ignorance with good technique the better.
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