Condition Your Hands for Martial Arts Training
Conditioning your hands is just as important as conditioning the rest of your body in martial arts.
Steps
- Begin slowly. Get used to forming and shaping your knuckles by doing fist push ups while standing and using a wall. Do the push up as you would on the ground. By doing them on the wall, it helps not to put too much pressure on the knuckles of the first two joints. This also helps getting the muscles used in doing push ups to get stronger and also hits the muscles at a different angle. Also do inverted palm push ups (palms facing your body) for strengthening your wrist.
- After a couple of months of this on a daily basis your fists will be accustomed to the pressure. Now you should begin doing normal push ups on the floor. A soft surface, such carpet or grass, is recommended.
- Try getting accustomed to doing wrist push ups, inverted palm. This will help in strengthening your wrist when hitting hard surfaces and also for joint manipulation techniques.
- After months of doing this, add more repetitions: 25, 50, 100 reps a couple of times a day.
- Begin Makiwara training. A Makawara is simply a 2x4 or 4x4 piece of wood wrapped with rope, either attached to a wall or fastened in or to the ground. Its sole purpose is to be struck with multiple body parts.
- Weapons used: the hand, from the fingers to the wrist joint has at least nine or more striking points. There is forearm conditioning, inside and out for blocking and striking. Elbow, front and back. Shins, inside, front and outside. Knees, top, front, inside and outsides for blocking and striking and the foot, instep, side and heel. These are all "weapons" to be conditioned.
- The conditioning of these body parts creates a condition called, "Wolff's Law": the principle that changes in the form and function of a bone are followed by changes in its internal structure. This means that hitting your bones on a solid object changes the pattern of the bone structure. Most bones are like a web, but by applying constant pressure to the bones, it changes the pattern from a web to a more solid structure. Kind of like when you break a bone and it's repaired, that part of the broken bone becomes stronger than the surrounding bone.
- There are other ways to condition the body called body punishing. This is a more extreme type of conditioning, but more commonly used in systems like Muay Thai.
Tips
- Giving your body time to heal is important.
- If training is done correctly and done over time to develop the bone's structure to the desired hardness, there should never be a problem. It's when we try to push too hard and want it to happen overnight that physical and/or psychological setbacks become imminent.
- If training is done correctly, nothing should be broken by using a Makawara or anything else you strike. You must know your body and what it is and isn't capable of doing.
- As a wise old man once said, "Patience, Grasshopper."
Warnings
- If you DO NOT take your time and use common sense, you can hurt yourself. There is no need to hurry! If anything hurts, then stop, do something else and give your body time to heal.
Related Articles
- Be Relaxed During Sparring (Martial Arts)
- Learn Wing Chun
- Make a Natural Bo Staff
- Perform Taikyoku Shodan
