The role of kitae(conditioning)

[Montana]

Those sound simple enough. When you round kick, are you striking with the top of your foot or with the ball of the foot? Or do you switch it up, or do you start with the top of the foot and work up to ball of the foot?

Top of the foot

[aurik]

Those sound simple enough. When you round kick, are you striking with the top of your foot or with the ball of the foot? Or do you switch it up, or do you start with the top of the foot and work up to ball of the foot?

In our round kick, we either kick with the instep (directly opposite the heel), or with the toe (if you've conditioned it). If you kick with the top of the foot hard enough to a non-squishy part of your opponent, you run the risk of hyperextending your ankle. A toe kick to the outside of the thigh can be absolutely debilitating, especially if your opponent hasn't conditioned for it.

Every so often I'll (lightly) hit an opponent with a toe (roundhouse) kick at the end of an ashikitae session, and you can tell by the look on their face that there's a huge difference.

[Spartacus Maximus]

Uechi-ryu/Pan Gai Noon is, in my experience, the only style in which body hardening is consistently taught and trained as a fundamental part of the curriculum.

As for Okinawan Goju ryu and Shorin ryu, it depends on the lineage or even on individual dojo heads. The style as taught by the first lineage I trained did not teach it. Only after switching to a different lineage and association(led by another student of Chibana Choshin) was I properly introduced to this kind of training…after years living and training with Okinawan karate people in their native islands.

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My best guess is that people willing to do kitae are as difficult to come by as karate dojos where it is taught and regularly practiced. Probably even more so outside of Okinawa/Japan.

[ryanryu]

This is a great thread and got me started again with some of the conditioning I used to do. We always practiced a series of partner-based conditioning drills, mainly for the forearms and abdomen, probably similar to what others have already described.

For solo work, I have two main implements to do the same impact-type conditioning:

An old gem known as the Iron Arm Conditioning Hammer that was gifted to me by my sensei. A quick google search has it retailing for a ridiculous price tag, in my opinion.

Honestly, I get much more use out of the second implement - a hollow 1’’ diameter PVC pipe with foam pipe padding around it. The length is 3-4 feet and it is much easier to swing against your own forearms, shoulders, lats, abs, obliques, thighs, etc. I just vary the speed of the swing to increase/decrease the impact.

All of this is just light conditioning work, imo, a few minutes at the end of a workout, and probably more for “mental toughness” than anything else. I’m just trying to maintain a baseline level of conditioning - not drive my fingertips 6 inches into the a jar of sand or break a baseball bat with my forearm.

[Wastelander]

This is a great thread and got me started again with some of the conditioning I used to do. We always practiced a series of partner-based conditioning drills, mainly for the forearms and abdomen, probably similar to what others have already described.

For solo work, I have two main implements to do the same impact-type conditioning:

An old gem known as the Iron Arm Conditioning Hammer that was gifted to me by my sensei. A quick google search has it retailing for a ridiculous price tag, in my opinion.

Honestly, I get much more use out of the second implement - a hollow 1’’ diameter PVC pipe with foam pipe padding around it. The length is 3-4 feet and it is much easier to swing against your own forearms, shoulders, lats, abs, obliques, thighs, etc. I just vary the speed of the swing to increase/decrease the impact.

All of this is just light conditioning work, imo, a few minutes at the end of a workout, and probably more for “mental toughness” than anything else. I’m just trying to maintain a baseline level of conditioning - not drive my fingertips 6 inches into the a jar of sand or break a baseball bat with my forearm.

My first dojo had one of the Iron Arm tools, and it was nice, but definitely not worth the price. Since then, I've switched to the taketaba (bamboo bundle) and tetsutaba (iron bundle), which are cheap and easy to make, and work very well for solo conditioning.

Personally, I found the taketaba to be too light for me, but it's a good introductory tool--simply buy a bunch of thin bamboo and bind them tightly together at one end with twine, and you're good to go. The only issue is that you'll have to periodically re-bind the twine, because it tends to work itself loose.

Tetsutaba can be a little more involved to make, but I like them better. Get a short length of pipe and a cap (iron, copper, or PVC, doesn't really matter) to use as a handle, then buy a pack or two of surveying flags and some epoxy. Attach the cap to the pipe, fill it with epoxy, strip the flags so you have a bunch of steel wire and stuff them into the handle. You can put small rubber bands around the wire bundle and move them up and down to adjust the tension/firmness, which is really nice.