Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

Power and strength will always be important in fighting and self-defense. If you are skillful then you can beat someone who is much stronger than yourself, but you need to know hat you are doing and you also need for them to not know what they are doing. But going to the gym, lifting weights and getting built like a body builder is not the only way to increase the power of your martial arts techniques. Following afew basic principles can dramatically increase the your power and effective strength instantly. In this article I will look at the 2 basic principles, and then in another post next week will go over a couple of more advanced principles.
1) Stay relaxed. People often feel that they are stronger when they tense their muscles, but actually the opposite is true. If your muscles are tensed even a bit before you move then this creates disharmony, meaning that some of them wil be pulling in different directions, cancelling each other out. It can also create knots which interupt the flow of movement and reduce your power. It is much easier said than done in a real life situation, but if you find yourself in a violent confrontation you should always try to keep your body as loose and relaxed as possible until the moment that you strike, even if your mind is as far from being relaxed as it can get!
2) Use your entire body. Again its easier said than done, but you can dramatically increase the power of any technique by moving the whole body together and in harmony, and by putting the weight of the body as well as the strength of the muscles behind your strikes. To give you an idea of how you can learn to do this here is a video showing a training technique that can be used to teach a student the mechanics and the ‘feel’ of how to put all of their strength and weight into a punch: