039. Impacts
Powerful hit can solve all kinds of problems.
Sooner or later, colliding with other people and objects in your surrounding is inevitable. That’s why it would be wise to become capable of generating impacts, as well as be prepared to withstand the incoming impact forces. Besides, everyone should be able to perform simple impacts, like hitting nails with a hammer or chopping wood with an axe.
A word of caution needs to be said here. Light impact training can be very beneficial, but powerful impacts carry a significant probability of injury. Unlike ballistic training which can be brought near the maximum levels of effort and exerted power, the same approach should not be done with impact training. Therefore, you can hit hard, but never ever near your maximum hitting potential.
Body Impacts
Examples of body impacts in sports are body checking the opponent in ice hockey and hitting ground from judo throws. As can be seen from these examples, back side of the shoulder and latissimus dorsi muscle are the only safe area of torso for generating and receiving impacts. To train body impacts, stand by the wall and gently hit the wall with above mentioned area of your back. This exercise should toughen up your body and eventually, prepare you for movie-style door breaking.
Limb Impacts
Typical examples of limb impacts are kicks and punches in Muai Thai and other martial arts. If you can find a heavy boxing bag, you can hit it with fists, elbows, feet. shins and knees, but never without a protective gear. For the first few months, hit the bag very gently, so your arms and legs could have plenty of time to adapt to this type of training. If you don’t have a heavy boxing bag, you can roll a few blankets and fix them to a tree with sticky tape. Be careful, because tree won’t cushion hits like a hanging boxing bag. This type of training will build agility dominant peak power, but also could be practiced as a form of aerobic conditioning. Hitting a bag eagerly for 5-10 minutes will make you puff and pant, that’s for sure.
Impacts With Hand-Held Objects
Beside building powerful arm muscles, vibrations transferred through the hand-held objects will strengthen your bones, joints, tendons and ligaments. This is the safest way to train impacts, because no body parts will come directly in collision with any object or person.
Practically, you would take some object in your hands and hit other objects with it. The most popular example of this type of impact training is hitting a tire with sledgehammer. More work oriented example is digging ground with a pickaxe. Slightly dangerous activity is splitting wood with timber axe. If nothing else, just use a long wooden board or a heavy stick and hit the ground with it.