Makiwara

Makiwara is the name of a wooden plank we have at the dojo. It is used for one of the most vital trainings of karate, making muscles stronger and keeping your wrist straight. From my personal experience I know that training your punches and kicks in this plank is very important since I once saw a man brake his wrist in a championship. The makiwara shows us how we are hitting and what we need to improve; if your wrist is not straight you will soon learn that because you will feel that it hurts when you punch. The makiwara also is good because it makes our bones stronger for our punches. When we hit the plank our knucles get "used" to hitting strong objects, this makes them harder and more tolerable to the force that we feel after punching something. The last benifit that comes from training with the makiwara is making your punch faster. When you do not train in the plank you usualy use the strengh of your muscles to hit fast. For karate there is nothing as wrong as using strengh to hit. In karate we hit with the force that comes from twisting our waist, this makes the punch almost twice as fast as any punch make with your arm muscle only. The makiwara shows you if your getting it right or not since the impact of a punch that uses pure muscle force will me much greater on you. You can usualy brake it down to; if it is strong and hurts, your doing it wrong For this type of training to work one has to be very determined in karate because it is usualy only used for the black belts and must be used with wisdom since you can very easily brake your wrist and peel of your skin (which I already did like 10 times and it burns like hell).