The Strike - Isshinryu

  

I guess it best to start at the beginning.

 

That end of the summer I started college I was at the beach with my family. I bought a copy of Bruce Teger’s book on Karate and read it. That was probably the first I had ever heard of karate.

 

In college I remember buying some issues of Black Belt magazines, but I recall more stories in there about Judo than anything else at that time.

 

Then one of my college roommates began the study of Shotokan at Temple U, under Okasaki Sensei. As his roommate he taught me something about striking and blocking in order to have someone to practice with. But in no way was I a karate student.

 

Along the way I gained some understanding that there were different karate styles with different traditions, but what they were I had no idea.

 

Then as a young married man I was working construction in Salisbury Maryland. One day one of the other men there talked about a Karate Barn outside of Salisbury. So that night I went to take a look. That evening I observed a class. Went back the next night to talk to the instructor, and I found myself accepted to be a karate student the next class.

 

I knew nothing about Isshinryu or what the training was. I just showed up, went through the warm up stretches and drills, then I was handed to two green belts, along with several other beginners. They showed us their Chart 1 and Chart 2. That took the rest of the class.

 

I was shown how to strike (it was different from the way my friend in Shotokan did it, but I had enough wisdom to not discuss that). I don’t recall the method of punching was ever named, just strike here or strike there. I was shown how to do it.

 

Nobody in class ever talked about what other styles did, or why there were differences. We just were pushed to do what we were shown better.

 

When attending tournaments you realized that only Isshinryu was punching the way we were using. But that made little difference to us, we just used what we had.

 

About that time I also started following the karate magazine of those days, and acquiring what books I could find (few on Isshinryu). Ot was probably there I first saw out strike was called a vertical strike, and read if its superiority of other styles of punching. But I was never told that in training. And I didn’t pay much attention to those magazines. As far as I knew karate was karate, there was not much distinction about Okinawa versus Japan as I recall.

 

While I had occasion to train with many people, I never had any problem adopting to whatever fist strike they used. At times that  training went deep and I observed them hit very hard with their strikes too. I never felt any way of striking was superior.

 

Then again as I always went there to learn, I never had the chance to let them feel my strike either. They were always deep in to their own studies, and were not sharing because they had any interest in Isshinryu..

 

But while I learned many useful things, I never neglected my own Isshinryu studies either. For one thing I was teaching Isshinryu.

 

As opposed  to many of the articles I was reading about Isshinryu, I never really thought their point the vertical fist of Isshinryu, was superior. I realized what was important was how well the individual trained in their own art, and could artfully exercise it was most important.

 

Time passed and though I was still teaching Isshinryu, I incorporated many subsidiary studies, to challenge my students even more and to give them knowledge about part of what other did, to prepare them for the reality out there.

  

So there I was 20 years into my own training, believing 20 years of work meant I knew how to strike with my Isshinryu fist. Then I met Sherman Harrill and boy did I get schooled.

 

I of course was blown away at the diversity of application potential for Isshinryu, Sherman demonstrated. But it took time to learn some things. Sherman explained it this way. “Most people needed to attend several of his seminars before the began to realize what was happening.”

 

I am not sure if it was the 3^rd of 4^th seminar we had with him. I was allowed to record them, but those recording are difficult to watch after all he was sharing application after application and the mind makes it difficult to focus on what is going before you eyes.

 

My students used to meet the day after those seminars to talk about what they had learned from working with Sherman. I remember that Sunday morning. We were comparing the marks that remained on our bodies after being struck by Sherman. For one thing to record exactly where that strike took place, after all we had the marks on our bodies for reference.

Sort of like those pictures from the bubishi perhaps, showing striking points.

 

But Tom Chan (who had been a Uechi student prior to switching over to us.) who made the best observation. Sherman knew Tom had a Uechi background, enjoying working with Ueichi people, he used to spend some time with Tom talking about Ueichi too). Anyhow Tom observed that when Sherman struck him, it was not with the flat fist, rather with the standing ridge of knuckles, just a few degree difference.

This was a private meeting between my students the day after the clinic. When Tom related that to us we began to look at the remaining strike marks left from Sherman, on our bodies.  Those strike marks confirmed what Tom told us. This was a lesson we did not realize Sherman had given us, and he never mentioned it.

 

But that made a big change in the way we looked at Isshinryu. The strike contained its own force enhancer by using the fist to strike that way.

 

That made an incredible difference with the way we used our strike there after.

 

For one thing a student doubting our strike, when lightly struck with the vertical knuckle fist could experience more ‘pain’ from a strike,

 

In practice this did not change for most kyu students, but as they became brown belts it was shared more, and became a trademark of the dan striking used.

 

There was so much more I got from Sherman, later to be reinforced from John Kerker too.

 

To summarize what I learnt:

 

What is known as the vertical strike is more than that.

Actually the strike can cant from say 11 o’clock to 1 o’clock,

The body is not really vertical and better strikes into a body can vary for greater effect.

Then again a different way of looking at the vertical strike,

Is not just a strike with the first two knuckles,

Rather shift the strike a few degrees over and become a strike with the vertical ridge of knuckles (a very powerful force multiplier and only a slight paradigm shift.

 

Of course there is much more I learned too.

 

For one thing Sherman was a big proponent of  Makiwara as the ultimate force enhancer behind his Punch. We were struck too many times to doubt that.

 

That reality is something each instructor must address or not in their own practice, With the use of the Makiwara, the punch becomes more devastating. Yet there are varieties of practices, which such is not an option, and they can work too, abet in different ways.

 

Perhaps the lesson is not that words are so necessary. The proper words do not always tell the whole story. Rather they can tell part of the story, and long experience fills in the rest.