There’s a lot of variation. Some martial arts, and even some schools of a particular martial art, are big on the kiai thing to the point of expecting you to kiai with every full-power strike; some have little or no emphasis on it. The one constant is that they’ll all tell you to keep breathing one way or another.
The reason why becomes obvious once you start teaching. A surprising number of students stop breathing or breathe very shallowly under surprisingly mild stress (think two-person kata, not full contact or even point sparring).
Continue breathing is one of the first tips for stage fright. Consciously keep breathing on stage to avoid black out. Train this. Nobody told me. Had to read that in “The Charisma Myth”.
The reason why becomes obvious once you start teaching. A surprising number of students stop breathing or breathe very shallowly under surprisingly mild stress
It’s odd, yes. It looks a lot like a freeze reaction, so my working theory is that it would have been trained out of people growing up in the EEA except for the worst, most immediate dangers (hearing a tiger cough in the bushes twenty feet away), but that it’s triggered by relatively mild stressors in the present day because contemporary life is far less violent. Sort of like the calibration error that has our immune systems going on tilt whenever they catch a whiff of grass pollen, now that they aren’t constantly dealing with mild parasitic infections and unrefrigerated antelope meat and whatever random bacterial spores happened to be in the dirt on yesterday’s tubers and so forth.
That’s evopsych, though, and evopsych explanations always run the risk of turning into just-so stories. My confidence in it isn’t particularly high.
Yes, I find it amusing how one style would be insistent that strikes should be on an exhale, and another style would be just as insistent that the only right way to strike is on an inhale :-)
And, yes, tense-up-and-stop-breathing is one of the first things novices need to be trained out of.
Having tried half a dozen styles, I’ve met to find one that suggests striking on the inhale. Citation? Unless it was a joke and I missed it.
Emphasis on kiai varies tremendously, but one of the common themes is that you breathe out for pushing and breathe in for pulling—in/out as an analogy both breathing and movement to help keep your whole mind and body focused on a coherent action. Also, exhaling when you get hit (or just before) tightens muscles in the torso which can be protective.
I had in mind Tai Chi where one of the basic classifications of movement is into opening and closing ones. You inhale when you open and exhale when you close. A lot (but not all) of the strikes are when you open.
There’s a lot of variation. Some martial arts, and even some schools of a particular martial art, are big on the kiai thing to the point of expecting you to kiai with every full-power strike; some have little or no emphasis on it. The one constant is that they’ll all tell you to keep breathing one way or another.
The reason why becomes obvious once you start teaching. A surprising number of students stop breathing or breathe very shallowly under surprisingly mild stress (think two-person kata, not full contact or even point sparring).
Continue breathing is one of the first tips for stage fright. Consciously keep breathing on stage to avoid black out. Train this. Nobody told me. Had to read that in “The Charisma Myth”.
Isn’t this really strange?
It’s odd, yes. It looks a lot like a freeze reaction, so my working theory is that it would have been trained out of people growing up in the EEA except for the worst, most immediate dangers (hearing a tiger cough in the bushes twenty feet away), but that it’s triggered by relatively mild stressors in the present day because contemporary life is far less violent. Sort of like the calibration error that has our immune systems going on tilt whenever they catch a whiff of grass pollen, now that they aren’t constantly dealing with mild parasitic infections and unrefrigerated antelope meat and whatever random bacterial spores happened to be in the dirt on yesterday’s tubers and so forth.
That’s evopsych, though, and evopsych explanations always run the risk of turning into just-so stories. My confidence in it isn’t particularly high.
Jupp. Was my thought too.
Yes, I find it amusing how one style would be insistent that strikes should be on an exhale, and another style would be just as insistent that the only right way to strike is on an inhale :-)
And, yes, tense-up-and-stop-breathing is one of the first things novices need to be trained out of.
Having tried half a dozen styles, I’ve met to find one that suggests striking on the inhale. Citation? Unless it was a joke and I missed it.
Emphasis on kiai varies tremendously, but one of the common themes is that you breathe out for pushing and breathe in for pulling—in/out as an analogy both breathing and movement to help keep your whole mind and body focused on a coherent action. Also, exhaling when you get hit (or just before) tightens muscles in the torso which can be protective.
I might have overstated my case :-)
I had in mind Tai Chi where one of the basic classifications of movement is into opening and closing ones. You inhale when you open and exhale when you close. A lot (but not all) of the strikes are when you open.