Shotokan's Secret

I have difficulty getting students to understand the “pullback hand” principle, in part because it is badly named. The issue has nothing to do with your hand.

Think of the gasoline gauge in your car. We like seeing the needle on “F” and we get nervous when it points to “E”. So there it is, wobbling over the “E”. We want it back on the “F”. Can we fix the situation by reaching inside the gauge and pushing the needle from “E” to “F”? Clearly not.

Picture a student doing oi-zuki in zenkutsu dachi. His punching hand is straight out in front, but his pullback hand is too far forward and looks generally loose and unconnected. So we move his pullback hand to his hip and tell him to keep it there! That’s the same thing as shoving the gas gauge needle from “E” to “F”. It does no good at all.

The principle of hiki te is simply that you are supposed to clench your back muscles when you focus a hand technique. (There’s a nice picture of Funakoshi somewhere, clenching his back muscles for the camera. They stood out in knots.) When your back muscles are tightly clenched, the pullback hand points at your hip, just like the needle pointing at “F”. If the hand is anywhere else, it means that the back is relaxed. The student should be reminded to clench his back muscles, not told to reposition his hand!

The back contraction is needed in order to stabilize the punching shoulder for impact. The shoulder is a “floating” joint with no bone-to-bone connection to the torso... a natural shock absorber that robs us of impact unless we lock it down with tightly-contracted sets of opposing muscles.

It is said that there is also the dynamic side of hiki te, in which the power of the hand pulling back lends some force to the punching hand. I no longer believe that this is true.

Hiki-te is an element of internal focus.

This is an update to the previous article, which I still believe is mainly valid.

Kousaku Yokota has published a chapter on hiki-te in Shotokan Myths, in which he categorically states that the pullback hand makes no contribution to a strong punch. One interesting insight was his statement that the "one-inch punch" requires you to completely relax the opposite arm and let it dangle. No hiki-te, or you'll spoil the punch. I find that very interesting.

Second, I have recently viewed some Wing Chun videos, especially this one. It shows a Wing Chun "chain punch" sequence. Notice how many times your punching arm gets hit by punishing blocks, not to mention your face. If we combine that image with the dangers of letting the opponent catch your arm, perhaps we can see why Matsumura emphasized hiki-te. There is a definite advantage to getting your arm back out of reach as quickly as possible.

The chain punch is an eye-opener. We don't have anything like it in shotokan, except for renzuki, which is much slower and is all punch with no block.

The topic of hiki-te is developed a little further in this new essay on this forum:

Latissimus dorsi --- where the magic is.

So many postings... I really don't recall. BDC