******* Sensei taught me a lot of knock out tricks. This was back
before people were into all this acupuncture based voodoo stuff. My favorite was one he called the Pentecostal preacher trick. You have to know ****** Sensei. He is a very irreverent street cop. He grows on you after a while but some people can't always makes the cultural adjustments that is sometimes required to get used to him.
All the knock out combination tricks I've seen that actually work for me seem to end with either a strike to the brachial nerve plexus or some strike that rocks the brain box. It works a lot better if the person is relaxed like a sensei's trusting student in a dojo or a praying evangelical.
The ones that seem to me to have merit usually:
1) As I said before, terminate with a strike to the brain box area or brachial plexus.
2) Work as combinations that work cross body. I'm told `sending chi energy through the body across the heart is dangerous'. Yeah, OK maybe if I was a Jedi Knight or something but this is what I do.
When I use cross body combination this is how it works. There is a natural tendency for an opponents' body to tense where I hit them. The natural reaction of people is if the right side tenses then the left side relaxes. Then I hit the relaxed side and that hurts them. The 1, 2 combination in boxing works this way. This is why Sanchin is so important where I come from. Sanchin can teach you how to take a punch because you learn to tense whole body. Eventually you learn to tense whole body while in the midst of performing supple actions. It is the soul of our Goju Ryu.
Mike Minor told us a really cool story one time about Oyata Sensei at one of his classes. Somebody wanted to try Iron Shirt against one of the KO tricks. Of course the Iron shirt worked. Its hard to rock the brain box or stun the brachial plexus if your neck muscles are tight. Well Oyata Sensei flicked the man across the nose, broke his concentration and then knocked him out. Hahaha!
This modern neo-chinese type stuff looks like it might be an
interesting sideline but should it ever take presidence over real
karate techniques handed down from Goju Ryu teachers.
Does 'activating pressure points work in a real fight? I've had a
couple of fights in my travels but I always knocked my opponents out the old fashioned way. Hiji Ate to the head works pretty good. The thing is when Adrenaline is pumpimg muscles get tense. I'm thinking this may have an iron shirt like effect like what Mike Minor described. One difference is the nose flick doesn't make adenaline go away. Oyata Sensei was a great fighter and I bet he would say something like if you hit hard enough the whole body becomes a vital point. Maybe not but its just a wild guess that he would have thoughts along this line. No touch knockouts hahaha! Try that in the UFC or in Judo. Look if anybody knows this pressure point stuff there is no reason whay they can't win an Olympic gold medal in Judo. Just push the magic pressure points the guys is stunned or knock out and you throw him for ippon. You should represent your country in
the Olymipics. Come on, Do it for God and Country!
Adrenaline is very interesting stuff. With half of our Yudansha in
our dojo being cops at one time we spent a lot of time on
contemporary useful information as in applied to police work and the street in general. One of the guys read a study on the effects of adrenaline on street cops. The effects on fine motor skills and its tunnel vision effect is very interesting and I think useful info to
know. This is why eye witness are not always very useful. " What did he look like Mrs. Smith? He looked like a gun." The mind focus on the threat ( the gun ) that is all the mind sees. One of the most
important lessons learned in the dojo is how to over come adversity through hard effort. I can't help but think this has to offer some help in overcoming a pressure situation when it counts. Of course as in all things I may be wrong.
I don't know much about acupuncture. I do Goju Ryu. My Goju Ryu
teacher taught that we have 36 primary vital targets there are some others but we have 36 main ones. Anything you hit in Saifa is a really good one. When we hit these `points' we hit them hard. If we can't hit them then we hit what we can hit and hit it hard. I have many Shorin Ryu friends who show me this kyusho stuff and are in pursuit of this knowledge. I think they are barking up the wrong tree personally but I am just a farm boy and don't understand many mysteries of this world.
My initial thought was that this fad came from having a lot of Karate people with 20 plus years in the arts start asking themselves `Is there more to it?'. I think they decided yes there must be so now everyone is looking for a lot of deep secrets and I think the biggest secret is that it is just hard work.
I think there is a lot of people building bridges then trying to find
bodies of water to fit them over (I liked that one *****). I was
teaching some tricks one night to some of my Shorin friends. One
technique was against a front hand punch. What you do is the front hand slaps incoming punching arm (front hand may be optional) and rear hand does kakie uke (using muchimi no grabbing). Then your front hand strikes the opponent just below the obi on a line that would divide his butt cheek in half. ( Shotei works good but I prefer Shita Tsuki, It seems to hurt more.) This causes a reaction in the opponent that sets his chin back. Then I shoot an inside knife hand across the opposite side of his neck then go to rear naked choke. From there pull him into a rear mount and choke him out if it is a one on one encounter. Well they started to teach me that I was striking a Bladder fifty something point and then some stomach point …. Man I don't know about that. But then again I'm not sure
exactly why the butt punch works. My guess is, it is either because 1) it is a balance or pivot point in the body due to the construction of the hip and weight distribution of the human frame or 2) it has something to do with the siadic nerve. Or 3) a combination of the two. I think it is the mechanical structure of the hip joint.
With 360 + points on the body I guess anybody can make waza
fit this model. My Bubishi does not have acupuncture charts.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.