Strength in Karate: Total Body Strength

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?

Strength in Karate: Kicks

One of the attractions of karate is that it teaches us how to defeat a bigger, stronger opponent.

And this ability of the small opponent to defeat the larger is talked about in a lot of ways. We say "technique wins," "we use the opponent's force against them," "use proper leverage."


And my personal favorite -- "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog."

And while all of those things are true enough, I think that in a day and age where many karate students have never been in a physical fight outside of the dojo those sorts of sayings result in some misconceptions.


Perhaps the biggest is that because we rely on technique, we karateka don't need to be strong.

Now, there are a whole host of non-martial reasons to be strong. Resistance training and increased muscle mass have been shown to improve insulin sensitivity, decrease the risk of certain types of cancer, improve our ability to live independently into old age, and be attractive to whichever gender we want to be attractive to (ok, that last one might be anecdotal).

But it turns out that strength is also a pre-requisite for effective karate technique. And ignoring this fact can stall a student's progress.

In my mind the techniques where this is most evident are kicks.

As a concrete example, anyone that can sit down and spread their legs 100 degrees apart is flexible enough to throw a side kick at waist height. But many beginning students struggle to kick this high. The most common reason that this is difficult is that the student doesn't have the hip and oblique strength to hold their leg out to the side. This is not unexepcted because the strength required to do it is very specific -- it's not something that's developed via other activities.

One sign that strength is holding back your kicking is the inability to kick correctly as high as you can passively stretch. Another is the tendency to hold your breath while kicking. Many students treat kicking like throwing a shot put. They get ready to kick, gather themselves up, take a huge step, hold their breath, and fling their leg out. All of this happens because the student feels like their leg is heavy, so heavy that only a massive effort can launch it into the air.

We don't think of our arms as heavy. When we want to throw a punch, we just move our arms (with a little practice). But the feeling that it takes effort to kick persists with many students for a long time, largely because the muscles which lift and position the legs are under-developed. And this leads to telegraphed, breath-held, and labored kicks.

The best way to improve our ability to kick is to practice correct kicking (of course). But when we specifically need to improve the strength of our 'kicking muscles' it is helpful to remove the element of balance and focus on controlled leg placement. I've arbitrarily broken this into 3 levels.

Level 0: Stand near a wall or chair, and place a hand (preferibly the hand that is on the same side of the body as the kicking leg) on it to help with balance. Practice the three basic kicks (snap kick, side kick, round house kick) s-l-o-w-l-y. Strive for a smooth execution at a rate of 3 seconds for each kick. Work both legs. At this level the goal is to kick near waist height for 10 repetitions per kick, per side.

Level 1: Use a balance aid as above. Try to minimize the contact with the balance aid. For each kick move from a get ready stance into the chamber position for 10 reps, from chamber to extension for 10 reps (don't put your foot down in-between!), and then perform slow full kicks (3 seconds/ kick). Again the goal is smooth execution at waist height for 10 reps at each 'position' (chamber, extension, full kick).

Level 2: Perform the Level 1 exercises without a balance aid. Once you can do that for 10 reps of each position with reasonable control, you will have very 'light' smooth kicks. Progression from this point on can work towards slower kicks (10 seconds is a good goal), weighted slow kicks (via an ankle weight), holding the kicks at full extension for time, and higher slow kicks.

Consistent practice of these kicking exercises will give a student the hip and abdominal strength necessary to kick well in as short a time as possible. Most students will notice an improvement in their kicking speed, accuracy, and height in as little as 4 weeks.

In case you were wondering, consistent means 3 - 6 times a week every week. Start easy and progress in number of reps and up the levels slowly -- this is a race where the tortoise will be beat the hare.