Multiple Striking

One of the Isshinryu basic techniques involves multiple striking, responding to an attack with five punches.

This is just basic overload theory, where you throw so many techniques that something can get through to conclude an attacker. The basic version of this involves 5 strikes to the same spot. If the opponent has conditioned themselves to take a strike, use of strike after strike on one spot looks for the time their body response breaks down. I often characterize such striking as layered striking, the use of strikes to break through the bodies outer layers.

There is another version that can use the five strikes to begin with the head and then move the strikes down the body working the centerline.

Another Multiple Striking approach is where one strike rolls into another strike.

I first learned this from Tristan Sutrisno with a series of five strikes flowing from one to the next. Years later I saw Toshihiro Oshiro Uchinadi video’s and he demonstrates a backfist flowing from a punch (the same beginning in the Sutrisno multiple striking series). A natural progression from a strike and then using the pull back to springboard to another technique.

The Sutrisno series actually is not done that way in defense, but shows how any of it’s technique can move into a following strike, and in its case involves 5 separate strikes. A similar multiples strike is shown by Oshiro with the Age Uke http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv2b_IJ0lnA .

Such techniques are quite in keeping with the kata technique usage discussed by Shiroma Shimpan in Nakasone’s 1938 ‘Karate-Do Taikan” which I discussed at http://isshin-concentration.blogspot.com/2010/05/itosus-reflections-watson-look-for.html

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From a Chinese tradition Ernest Rothrock’s “Jing Do – short range striking” concepts follow a very similar approach.

There is no question that directed impact training to develop a strike potential is more important to make strikes work. Multiple striking is a directed back up plan just in case.