According to Yessis throughout the Sports community there is one important problem that people must accept which is a lacking understating and usage of scientific knowledge.
By taking a look at how Sports are organized in different countries, it can be easily concluded that in non communist countries Sport has been looked upon mostly as a leisure activity.
This has lead to the fact that the coaching activity has been mostly performed either for free or for very little income.
Thus, Sports (and Martial Arts) owe an enormous gratitude to the people who invest time and effort teaching their loved
Sport or Martial Art after a hard day’s work, for without them the activity wouldn’t even exist, or at least with the development that it currently has. However, it must also be realized that these people have to divide they time between work (usually in an area not related to Sports Science’s Activities), family obligations and, finally, their loved Sport / Art.
Consequently, this means that, although they usually do their best when teaching, it is an effort highly conditioned by the very limited understanding that they usually have of Scientific Disciplines such as human motor control and learning, physiology of exercise and biomechanics of movement.
Having this introduction in mind, it becomes quite easy to understand that, while volumes are usually written about easy subjects such as physical training, little is written on technique and, additionally, the few items out there on technique have very little scientific support (being at best opinions and hypothesis, incorrectly designated as theories, since they haven’t gone through objective testing).
For example, let’s take a look at Martial Arts’ offensive striking techniques while considering that their purpose is to connect powerfully with an opponent’s fragile body area.
Without going into the different movements available to land a strike, let’s take advantage of Systema’s instructor Kevin Secour’s analogy and consider any of these strikes as mere bullets and that their main effectiveness (power development) is dependent on the different body segments’ positioning and motion, so as to maximize the development of kinetic energy through a deadly combination of body mass and speed.
Hence, when developing an Art’s offensive techniques, one must realize that we’re talking about mere physics.
So, Martial Arts’ strikes power principals function just like in the following three situations where the goal is to apply force to an object so as to promote its movement with a horizontal trajectory. Through the amount of force applied together with the angle between the force application and the intended motion trajectory, it is possible to estimate the effectiveness attained in the three different scenarios.
Consequently, both for maximizing the body mass transferred to each strike as well as to develop the best force trajectory possible, and again quoting Yessis, one should make biomechanical analysis of different striking technique possibilities to be able to scientifically and objectively conclude which is the one that develops the greatest amount of power.
However, instead of taking this type of initiative, people seem to simply observe champions and copy their technique, without understanding if these individuals are the best because of their technique or because they manage to make it work through better tactics or mere aggression, despite its shortcomings.
Even empirical studies of applying the strikes on a sensor in order to measure the power from strikes performed with the body segments in different positions are inexistent. The most the some rare individuals perform is a study of technique by applying it on a partner’s body. Although this type of study is better than none, it is still far from the best possible strategy due to the clear limitations of performing this with maximum power as well as due to the different partners’ pain threshold capacities and its inherent subjectivity.
Last but not least, quoting Portuguese Biomechanist investigator Abrantes, the purpose of biomechanics is to understand movement and detect how the different body segments should be aligned in order to produce the highest power output available, which means that being able to implement this knowledge and have the competitors / fighters be able to develop that specific motor coordination is the following step, but one to be overcome through complementing Sport Science disciplines related to human motor control and learning.
This means that if this second step fails, or if a technically sound fighter is a worse tactician than his opponent and thus ends up losing the fight, it doesn’t mean that sound biomechanically tested techniques should be ignored.
Hope you enjoyed the article.
Feel free to send me your feedback as well as subjects related to training you’d like me to cover in these monthly articles (luispreto@yahoo.com).
