Relax to maximise your potential

A typical tense, defensive posture. Note the hunched shoulders and the guard drawn in too close. The frown and pursed lips are another giveaway that this person is feeling under pressure... Probably because he's training without any clothes on!

One of the most common problems that I see limiting people’s karate, is unnecessary tension. Sure, everyone goes through stages where their stances are bad, or their techniques require attention, but tension is a problem that many karateka often leave un-addressed right up to black belt and beyond.

By tension, I don’t mean mental taughtness, where people walk around the dojo stressed out, and in need of a massage – I’m talking about physical tension, which is most commonly manifested by hunched shoulders.

Excessive tension is primarily a male shortcoming – we all walk around so uptight in our daily lives. But it’s deeper than that – despite what you might like to think, we’re all nothing more than animals, and many of the things we do are both instinctive, and unconscious.

Although we no longer have to fight for food or mates, males still inhabit a world in which potential conflict is a daily fact of life, and the need to prove oneself ready for any conflicts is a deterrent that prevents them from occurring more frequently. We subconsciously use our bodies in many different ways to show our readiness. The classic example is the weight-lifter’s arm’s out from the sides posture, which gives them a distinctive bowling walk. This posture indicates muscles hat are so large that they prevent the arms from hanging naturally, yet it’s also adopted by many people who do not have the physique to require it, as if to warn off potential adversaries that they are muscled and dangerous. Another common one, is walking around with clenched fists, as though ready for a fight. Most people are aware of such an overtly aggressive posture, so they avoid it, but the hunched shoulders that go with it, are rather more subtle, and most people don’t even know they’re doing it.

The problem is, aggressive body language often provokes an aggressive response from other alpha males (males who are top dogs in the pack)…

	When you are tense, your antagonistic muscles work against the motion you want to achieve, slowing you down and reducing your power.

Far more important than that, for the karateka, is the fact that tension actually reduces your effectiveness. Your muscles work in pairs – agonistic and antagonistic. One muscle moves a body part in one direction, and the other moves it in the other. For example, the bicep and tricep – one pulls, the other pushes. When you want to punch, the tricep at the back of the arm contracts, launching the arm outwards. However, if you’re standing there with your bicep tensed, you must either relax the bicep, or fight against its counter-action. Either is undesireable.

If you have to first relax the bicep, it slows down the initiation phase of the punch, and delays your action or reaction in a combat situation. However, if you punch against the action of the bicep, then the bicep works to slow down the movement and limits the overall power of the technique.

To make matters more complicated, you also need to learn to tense a different set of muscles a moment before impact so that you damage the target and not your hand and arm.

As if that wasn't demanding enough, you then need to instantly withdraw your fist from contact with the target to ensure that the energy you've imparted into the target does not rebound back up your arm, diminishing the power of the strike. Now see if you can guess the most effective way of withdrawing quickly? Yep, you guessed it - you have to relax your arm again!!!

This process of strike and relax is demonstrated at the start of kata sanseru, and contrasts sharply with the similiar-looking (but operationally different) punch/block sequence in the middle of bassai dai.


The same muscle partnerships occur in almost every part of the body, and tension before you move reduces your effectiveness.

Now here’s one of the real challenges in relaxing – you need to be able to isolate different parts of your body from each other in order to do it.

“Why?” I hear you demand (easy, easy, no need to get rowdy! – I’ll tell you okay!). The reason is that you often need one part of your body to be tense whilst another is relaxed, and these changes often occur simultaneously, or with mere split-seconds between them.  Take a stepping punch for instance – your legs are tensed as you explosively move forwards, but it’s only as you reach the point in the step where your legs are about to relax, that your arms start moving. Another even simpler example is a standing punch – you snap one hand out in a punch, but at the same time, the other hand needs to be held up, in a relaxed guard, ready to move instantly as needed.

The ability to operate parts of your body in isolation is a skill that must be learned, just like any other. In fact, it’s one of the fundamental karate skills, which you should be thinking about as you move through the upper middle grades (blue - brown). You learn to punch by throwing one hand out and drawing the other one back, but in real life you need to keep one up as a guard, and it’s about this time (or sooner) that you should be developing an awareness for what the other parts of your body are doing whilst you’re focussed on a technique.

For many people, relaxing can be one of the most tension-inducing and counter-intuitive exercises they’ll experience. I remember when I was a hyper-active seven year old, my nan decided to teach me to meditate in order to introduce some calm into my active life. Fifteen minutes of my fidget-filled, ant-in-the-pants “meditation” later, and my nan needed a couple of hours of solitary meditation to recover!

However, forcing yourself to relax in karate is not only beneficial; it’s vital. There are any number of excellent relaxation techniques, which I’m not going to go into here. However, I will just say that relaxed posture starts with relaxed breathing. If you’re panting like a dog at 120 breaths per minute, it’s going to be doubly challenging to relax the rest of your body. You’ll need to breath slow and deep to start forcing that tension to drain from your body. Some people recommend relaxing by starting from the top of the head and working your way down, consciously allowing the muscles to surrender their tension one at a time. Personally, I like to start with my shoulders, because that’s the most important muscles for striking.

Whatever technique you choose, or how you achieve it, learn to leave the competitive, dog-eat-dog, gotta-prove-yourself attitude outside the dojo along with your tight neck, hunched shoulder, and stiff robotic legs, and let your body become the fast, limber, explosive weapon it wants to be!


Thanks to Martin Allen for his input on the physiology details of this tip.