Anybody who regularly visits my website, will know that I believe techniques are not so important as a stand alone item, but are more important for the principles that they teach us. Those principles teach us better body mechanics and structures to make our martial art more functional for real world self protection. It’s not just about having a technique looking pretty or sounding good when we get a nice satisfying snap of our uniform.
Ultimately it should be about functionality or there is not much point. Very often it’s just a small adjustment in alignment or positioning that can yield big differences in the effectiveness of the principles learnt from practicing a given technique. So in this video we look at the correct alignment of the hand forearm when performing knife hand block/strike, known as Shuto Uke/Uchi in Karate.
All too often hand and forearm are completely straight, which means that when it actually strikes the target there is a chance that the wrist may buckle slightly, hence losing some power. It might only be a very small bit, but hey, if you’re going to practice it you may as well practice to obtain the optimum efficiency.
By just pulling the hand back a bit in the direction of the thumb, the little finger side then aligns more with the forearm. There is not much movement before this locks out. This makes the whole hand and wrist structure considerably more stable when striking the target as there is nothing to give way.
You can see this demonstrated in the video below, please leave your comments and feedback.