karate chop

hi everybody i'm john graden from the martialarts teachers association and johngraden.com. let's learn how to make a knife hand. thisis the chop, the deadly chop. in korean they call it a soodo, in japense chop it is calleda shuto, to me it is the knife hand, it's the chop and kidding aside a good knife handstrike is extremely dangerous so pay close attention. what i want to do with my handis to make it very rigid and solid and this

is how i do it. i'm going to take my knucklesand raise them up, bringing all my fingers together and raising and slightly bendingthem. what that does is create tremendous tension in the hand and then i'm going totake my thumb and for most of my knife hands i'm just going to tuck it to the edge. nowwhen i'm doing this strike i can strike horizontally

and using the edge of the hand that is calledthe knife edge of the hand. often when i am standing in line at some place i'll just takemy knife hand and i'll just beat it against the wall or the rail or do it with both handsand i do it all the time just to keep that alive, kind of tough and just be aware ofthat striking surface. on impact watch my wrist, as i strike the surface i'm going topop that knife hand into the target, boom, and that gives it tremendous added velocityand snap. i can strike across with it, i can strike across with it and in fact if i canget some help out here real quick. joe brignoli is going to help me from pro star mixed martialarts and the chop to the throat, the bridge of the nose, between the legs, collar bone,i could come down really hard and try and

break that collar bone now while i am doingthat strike you go right here and here comes the chop it is coming down and watch at thevery last, that is the snapping action that really makes it explode. so the chop can beextremely powerful. if i can spin him i'm going to grab here, spin, and chop him rightinto the solar plexus and that will knock the wind right out of somebody very quickly.the reverse of that if you come on this side please joe is the ridge hand and i'm goingto take my thumb now and bring it across and now i'm striking with the inside ridge ofthe hand and this is extremely powerful and this is the first technique that i have everknocked somebody out cold with and it is a ridge hand. the ridge hand works good becauseof this if he blocks see if he blocks the

chop my elbow won't go that way so i turnthe hand over, tuck the thumb across making sure again again that it is up high and theelbow bends and i can make contact. so the ridge hand is extremely powerful regardlessof the target. again i can spin him and smash him right in the solar plexus with a reallyhard ridge hand. i'm john graden with joe brignoli and i hope that helps. thanks.