As mentioned in a previous post, strength is an important part of the martial arts. It runs counter to the way many of us think about the martial arts but pioneers of modern karate were famous for their strength.
Gichin Funakoshi was said to never have lost an 'okinawan hand wrestling' match (I don't know if that was more like arm wrestling or more like thumb wrestling . . .) and Funakoshi himself wrote that his instructors Azato and Itosu frequently conducted an arm wrestling contest (in Karate-Do Nyumon).
Donn Draeger was famous for his arm muscles and one of his lasting contributions to Japanese martial arts was to introduce Judo-ka to weight training.
Shorei Goju-Ryu's founder, Robert Trias, seems to be typical of many of the early martial arts importers in that he had boxed and served in the military prior to his martial arts training.
As martial artists we know that skillful technique can allow a weaker person to overcome the stronger, but there is an underlying assumption of a base level of strength before we can implement skillful technique. If that's confusing, let's put it this way -- a karate-ka doesn't have to be stronger than their opponent to win, but they do have to be strong enough to perform their technique. Good technique and tactics can avoid a force-on-force shoving match, but good technique requires the strength to hold proper body alignment under external force.
Which is why the most important type of strength for karate is what I call 'Total Body Strength' or the ability to tie the whole body into a single unit to effectively transfer force from the ground into an opponent (or from an opponent into the ground).
Fortunately, strength is probably the most improveable athletic ability. It's certainly the simplest athletic ability to train. Unfortunately, developing Total Body Strength takes repeated effort over an extended period of time, especially since the martial arts require good strength-endurance and not just high maximum effort strength.
Here's a list of exercises for building Total Body Strength. I've ordered them by how transferable I believe they are to karate performance:
1) Carries -- Carrying weights for distance makes you strong in a connected way. Try holding the weight in your arms, overhead, across your shoulders, or in your hands at your sides. Try one handed and two handed carries. These are even more effective with unevenly distributed weights, like sandbags.
2) Heavy pushes and pulls -- Think of pushing a car with all of your friends in it. Or, if you don't have a lot of friends, use a sled purpose-built for conditioning.
3) Push Press -- Using your legs to drive weight over head is a very pure example of directing ground force to the your hands
4) Stabilization 'Core' work -- Practice Pallof presses, planks, and suspended pushups.
5) Swinging things -- You can chop wood, sledge hammer an old tire, swing kettlebells and clubbells, or throw medicine balls
Traditional Okinawan karate conditioning focused on 1) and 5). It's still common to see Goju-ryu practitioners hold heavy jars of sand by their finger tips while performing San Chin kata. And the 'stone' implements of Chi Ishi and Ishi Sashi were used by Okinawans much as kettlebells and clubbells are today.
Also 'traditional,' at least in my personal experience, is to use your training partners as weights for carrying. I spent several karate classes with a partner on my back while I walked in deep forward fighting stances.
If you spend time bringing your base strength levels up via exercise, you will still need to make sure you can apply that strength in the context of karate. San-Chin practice is intended to train karate-ka to summon all of their strength and apply it to blocking and striking.
At Broad Ripple Martial Arts, we teach San Chin as a black belt kata. For the purposes of transmuting trained strength into karate-useful strength you can learn just the basic step, block, and strike sequence that is the core of the kata.
If you don't know the San Chin exercise or you are unfamiliar with any of the exercises listed, you should ask! Any black belt instructor will be able to show you San Chin, and most of them can show you the exercises I've listed.
And I don't need to remind you that there is a CrossFit certified trainer running a gym right in the dojo, do I?
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