THERE'S NO NEED FOR TENSION!

By Yang Shuangxing

Many martial arts devotees firmly believe that they're to tense their muscles like iron just at the moment of impact (when they strike something), and then they should relax. Most of them have been told that this is how it is to be done by their instructors and at the risk of losing some fans, I'm here to say that this is entirely wrong as well as unnecessary, for the most part.

I say “for the most part” because some measure of muscular effort is required to stop your blow; otherwise, it'd just keep going and you'd be out of control. Remember in the movies when the bad guy throws a wide punch and the good guy ducks? That punch just kept going, leaving the villain open to a quick counter, right? Well, we want to be careful not to punch or strike that way...

Normally, when we deliver a blow, there's no need to stiffen up like a wooden soldier at the end of the technique. In the past, some teachers were taught that stiffening the muscles just at the point of impact would provide more impetus to the blow (by increasing the amount of mass involved and stiffening the body – especially the joints – so that there was minmal “give” when the “reaction force” traveled back through the body). The truth is that tensing the muscles does not increase the mass one whit and attempting to time this hardening of the body AT THE INSTANT OF IMPACT is, frankly, pretty much impossible.

The instant of impact is measured in micro-seconds. If you throw a tennis ball against a wall and it bounces back...the tiny instant in which it is in contact with the wall is its point of impact. Same idea with delivering a blow. The point of impact is too fine to be seen by the human eye and if you consciously try to stiffen up at that very second, you're going to be too late or too early... And even if your timing was, by some miracle, perfect – it wouldn't matter much at all. You're not going to increase the mass behind the blow one iota by tightening the muscles.

The key is actually STRUCTURE, which is why I wrote my 6^th book – MARTIAL STRUCTURE. Our martial arts forefathers knew this but over the generations, much of it hasn't been properly passed down. Some of it has been misunderstood, mistranslated, or tossed out altogether.

It comes down to aligning the joints that are involved in delivery of the blow. Consider: a joint joins together two bony structures. If it's perfectly aligned, the two bony structures act as one; as if they're just ONE structure. However, if the joint is misaligned (even slightly), impact's reaction force is going to cause it to “give” a bit, depending on how serious the misalignment is. And that “give” means a loss of (striking) power. Period.

The body must be perfectly aligned rather than stiffened. Tense muscles prevent us from moving quickly, so hardening them reduces the acceleration of our technique; keeping them pretty much relaxed allows for maximum acceleration and at the instant of impact, everything must be properly aligned. Never stiff.