When you strike, do you relax your body or tense up on impact?

Question

Depending on the style, I heard some relax and some tense up on impact when they strike. I usually find relaxing and feeling my own body weight on impact generates more power.

When punching or kicking, I find that relaxing the arm or leg that is doing the striking and feeling the weight of the rest of my body tend to produce a more powerful strike than tensing up on impact.

Answer 1

Always relax.

Tensing and flexing is just a waste of energy.

Of course you want to keep your fist tightly clenched through impact and your wrist firm, but at the same time you have to remain loose through the shoulders, neck and back.
Even then, I am not talking about tensing, I am talking about strength and power through the impact zone. That's altogether different.

Answer 2

A common kung fu technique is trained by going through intervals of completely relaxing your arm as you extend it for a punch and then at the last second - tense up every part of your body to the point where every muscle in your body is shaking & then relax and repeat over & over again. This trains your muscle to be relaxed as the punch flies out there but tense at the moment of impact. Grandmaster Doc Fai Wong speaks in an inside kung fu article about how the softballs that used to be in little league - the big soft squishy soft ones were actually a lot more dangerous then the small hard ones used in older kids baseball and if they hit a kid in the chest could cause a heart attack by disrupting the heart rythm. Its weird because when you are working out I think it feels like when you are tense it feels stronger, which is what I always thought until my sifu talked me into adding tai chi to my kung fu practice. Surprised me when I was finally able to push someone double my size back with a punch. Something I had never been able to come even close to doing.

Answer 3

Relaxed then snapping to hard slightly before impact is ideal. It generates the most powerful punches. Don't get caught connecting relaxed tho heh, bad. To genereate the perfect strike, channel energy from your root (feet) and through the hips and out the fist. Pretend your body is a towel and the end result is the whipping u can make with a towel. Once you master this, you will achieve.

Answer 4

When punching if your body and arms are relaxed your punch will be faster, upon impact the fist is to be clinched and driven well past or through your opponent.

This may be achived with a step toward or a pivot toward your opponent.

If you have proper posture and the punch's power is coming from the floor through you legs up your body through your fist, you will have a very powerful punch.

The fact that it was thrown while relaxed means it hit the target faster than if you were tensed up in body and stance.

lr

Answer 5

Wow, reading over all the other answers here its obvious different styles have different methods so I can only speak for what I know and have learned from my style. We all have different ways of getting there but the out come is somewhat similar.
I do Okinawan Sho-ryn-ryu. My style says what most say here. Relax during extension for minimal resistance and maximum speed. Then at the point of impact you tense your body and extend. There is a law of physics that they use in ballistics , weight x ((speed)2)
kinetic energy = /2
This states power is increased exponentially by speed as it increases . More than if weight is increased. So speed is the thing you can alter... you get more power.

Answer 6

One of the high points of kung fu is being able to use soft energy ( I guess you could call it relaxed) until the very second you conect and then switching to hard. This not only applys your full strength at a speed you couldnt reach if you just hit as hard as you could. But the shift from soft to hard produces an extra shock in the punch. Its like a less comminted one inch punch.

Answer 7

Relax so you can get more speed. Tense at the last instant for power.

Answer 8

the ideal situation is to tense up at the point of impact; otherwise, energy/force are wasted in the muscle and bone and cannot be delivered 100% to the opponent.

Answer 9

You should never be relaxed on impact! At all other times, yes. Before the moment of impact you should be relaxed and immediately afterwords but to relax on impact is to hurt yourself.

Answer 10

The mre relaxed you are when you throw a punch or kick the faster it will be. Speed = power.