Oldstone Place

Solomani did a great summary of this Martial Arts documentary I watched last year. Basically it goes through a bunch of martial arts myths and abilities and uses science to figure out if it’s true and how they do it. Essentially they used a modified $150,000 crash-test dummy for the testing. Here are some of the results:

• Who has the strongest punch? Boxing with 1000 pounds of pressure per square inch. Equivalent to a sledge hammer hitting you in the head. The only martial art that can knock a man out in one punch. Also explained why a person can be knocked out - as in what physically happens to the body once you are hit that hard.
• Who has the strongest kick? Mu-Thai
• Who has the fastest strike and are they faster than the strike of a snake? Kung-fu. Kung-fu can throw out about a hundred strikes a minute - faster than the human eye can register. A single kung-fu strike is about 40 times faster than the strike of a snake.
• Is Drunken Boxing real and if so is it effective? Yes. It’s a form of kung-fu. It’s effective because it confuses the opponent and though you look off balance you actually have better balance and are much more flexible - that is, much harder to knock down or pin.
• Are Martial Art masters telepathic? (As in they can anticipate so well it seems they are reading your mind). No but they have honed there reaction time down to beyond normal human standard. For light to hit and register in a normal person it takes 1/5th of a second. Then there is an x factor of maybe another 1/5th of a second or more determining what to do. MA masters have honed the whole process down to 1/5th of a second. Basically as soon as it’s registered they react instantly. Due to drills and practice over years.
• Does a ninja (or ninjitsu master in this case) have better balance than a cat? Yes MUCH better balance. Balance is measured by sway. Cats have only a tiny amount of sway and they have 4 legs. The ninjitsu master, with only 2 legs, has zero sway.
• Is the ninja paralysing strike real? Yes. There are 8 spots on the body which have large clumps of nerve fibres which are relatively exposed compared to other nerve endings. Striking these nerve centres in a certain way short-circuits the nervous system temporarily paralysing a person.
• Is the ninja death attack real? As in can you kill someone in one hit? Yes. Using the ninjitsu death-strike and hitting the nerves around the soul plexus with the right pressure fools the brain into thinking the heart is enlarged or is beating too rapidly. The brain then slows the heart down to what it thinks is a normal beat. But if it is actually beating normally what actually happens is that the heart stops instead of slowing.
• Most powerful martial art? Ninjitsu - doesn’t have the power of boxing or mu-thai or the speed of tae-kwon-do and kung-fu but it can do everything the other marital arts specialise in plus the paralysing and death strikes as well as the supreme balance skill.

They also tested a bunch of weapons to see which was the “ultimate weapon”, excluding the gun, the katana won. Won’t go into details as this is already too long!