Karate Chop Is Not The Deadliest Weapon In The Martial Arts
Karate chop him, screamed the girl, and I had to chuckle.
This was a flick where neither the actor, the writer, the director knew the martial arts.
See, people used to think that a karate chop to the neck would kill people in their tracks.
When I first began studying the art of Chinese Kenpo Karate I was told that a spear hand strike to the solar plexus or the neck was the deadliest martial arts attack one could deliver.
Just stick those steel hard fingers in the soft areas and watch your opponent die.
A spear hand was supposed to be better than a karate chop, but only by a little.
Then I heard about the Dim Muk, or what is commonly called The Death Touch.
You touch a person on a special spot somewhere on their body and they drop dead.
Of course, it would take twenty years to master the Chi Power, learn all the pressure points and times they were vulnerable, and by that time I'd be ancient and too slow to do such a thing.
One evening a student was walking past my Karate instructor holding a square of thin particle board.
He suddenly grinned and held the board up to my instructor.
Break this, he put forth in a mocking challenge.
My instructor's name was Bob Babich, and he was a short, thin fellow.
Given the target, he dropped his weight, twisted his hips, and snapped a single finger out.
A single finger, and when he withdrew it, there was a nice, neat, little hole in the particle board.
Many people think I am telling fairy tales when I relate them this story, but the fact is that the single finger trick could be done by no less than fifty people on Taiwan back in the 1950s.
Many kung Fu masters from across China had sought refuge in that little nation to escape communism, and many were able to do this rather unique strike.
Unfortunately, there were not enough students willing to undergo the training necessary to such a feat, there weren't as many people to draw from as in China, and the single finger trick has pretty well died out.
Interestingly, one of the fellows who nibbled at the single finger trick was Bruce Lee.
He could stick a finger in a soda (beer) can and leave a hole, and this was back in the day when cans were made of real metal and not this cheap aluminum stuff.
This was good, and one wonders whether he would have mastered the single finger trick if he had lived longer.
At any rate, when students ask me what the deadliest karate trick in the world is I tell them about the single finger technique.
It is not a made up fable, it is the result of real and dedicated training in arts such as karate, kung fu, or any other legitimate martial art that has stood the test of time.
And, as for the karate chop, that is a good karate technique, but it is only the first step on a much more real journey.
This was a flick where neither the actor, the writer, the director knew the martial arts.
See, people used to think that a karate chop to the neck would kill people in their tracks.
When I first began studying the art of Chinese Kenpo Karate I was told that a spear hand strike to the solar plexus or the neck was the deadliest martial arts attack one could deliver.
Just stick those steel hard fingers in the soft areas and watch your opponent die.
A spear hand was supposed to be better than a karate chop, but only by a little.
Then I heard about the Dim Muk, or what is commonly called The Death Touch.
You touch a person on a special spot somewhere on their body and they drop dead.
Of course, it would take twenty years to master the Chi Power, learn all the pressure points and times they were vulnerable, and by that time I'd be ancient and too slow to do such a thing.
One evening a student was walking past my Karate instructor holding a square of thin particle board.
He suddenly grinned and held the board up to my instructor.
Break this, he put forth in a mocking challenge.
My instructor's name was Bob Babich, and he was a short, thin fellow.
Given the target, he dropped his weight, twisted his hips, and snapped a single finger out.
A single finger, and when he withdrew it, there was a nice, neat, little hole in the particle board.
Many people think I am telling fairy tales when I relate them this story, but the fact is that the single finger trick could be done by no less than fifty people on Taiwan back in the 1950s.
Many kung Fu masters from across China had sought refuge in that little nation to escape communism, and many were able to do this rather unique strike.
Unfortunately, there were not enough students willing to undergo the training necessary to such a feat, there weren't as many people to draw from as in China, and the single finger trick has pretty well died out.
Interestingly, one of the fellows who nibbled at the single finger trick was Bruce Lee.
He could stick a finger in a soda (beer) can and leave a hole, and this was back in the day when cans were made of real metal and not this cheap aluminum stuff.
This was good, and one wonders whether he would have mastered the single finger trick if he had lived longer.
At any rate, when students ask me what the deadliest karate trick in the world is I tell them about the single finger technique.
It is not a made up fable, it is the result of real and dedicated training in arts such as karate, kung fu, or any other legitimate martial art that has stood the test of time.
And, as for the karate chop, that is a good karate technique, but it is only the first step on a much more real journey.
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