I mangled my thumb :P

In the spirit of rampant enthusiasm, after getting home from work and starting my workout tonight, I began my usual exercises on the punching bag. It’s been a while since I’d worked on my backfists, so after some kicks and punches I thought I’d give it a whirl. Two weeks ago I got a bit enthusiastic with practicing knifehand strikes on the bag and had a great amount of success, so I figured some backfists would be good practice. Looks like I got too enthusiastic, and my form was a bit sloppy, as I now have a bruised thumb from the whipping action at the end of the strike due to not completely closing/forming my fist on impact.

A year or two back I found that backfists were a great way to demonstrate the effectiveness of a whipping-motion in a hand-strike, and this was emphasised more-so by starting off with open hand and using the clenching motion of forming a fist towards the end to dramatically increase the final intensity of the strike. I got the idea from reading up on the principles behind a 1-inch punch, whereupon you use every ability of your muscles (including the expansion and contraction of the fist upon impact) to deliver the greatest amount of dynamic impact possible within such a short space. I’ve also read up since then that you can apply similar theory to many other strikes in karate, but obviously you get to this stage with time and practice. Anywho, as nice as the theory was, if in practice your form isn’t accurate (or consistent), there are obviously going to be consequences, as I found out tonight!

Ah well, another lesson learned 😛 Mind, it’s nothing serious, but I ended up stopping my workout and put an icepack on it as preventative action, then nearly gave myself a freezer burn on another part of my thumb while doing so 😛 If this is what I managed to do to myself on the punching bag, I’m afraid of what I would have done once I started handling the weights. Methinks I’m having a clumsy night.

It also doesn’t help that the enthusiasm with which I attacked the bag tonight was in part inspired by watching Rapid Fire last night (see my previous post), so I’ll try and re-focus my attention on getting my kata correct so I can show off some solid form in class this week. Speaking of class, it looks like I may be roping Jyastin-kun back into training, as he’s coming along with me this week to see what he thinks of where I’m currently doing karate. We’ll see how it goes, hopefully he gets a kick out of jumping back into karate after a couple of years off.

Well, with that all done, I’m off to watch some kata on YouTube!

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