Motus Mentis

I haven’t written about martial arts in a while, but coming across a silly little article in Popular Mechanics prompts me to do so today.

The article begins with some fawning hyperbole:

Forget all those broken boards and crumbled concrete slabs. No feat of martial arts is more impressive than Bruce Lee’s famous strike, the one-inch punch.

I can’t say I agree — for me, the ability to react effectively and proactively under actual combat conditions is far more impressive than staged demonstrations of any kind — but tastes do vary. I will say this, though: the one-inch punch is hardly “Bruce Lee’s famous strike” (though he did it very well). It is a commonplace in southern Chinese kung-fu systems, and a natural application of their core principles. Any southern-style black belt deserving of his rank ought to be able to do this, and many other things very much like it. I’ve taught my Hung Gar students this stuff for decades.

The article gives a good description of how this “short power” is generated:

Although Lee’s fist travels a tiny distance in mere milliseconds, the punch is an intricate full-body movement. According to Jessica Rose, a Stanford University biomechanical researcher, Lee’s lightning-quick jab actually starts with his legs.

“When watching the one-inch punch, you can see that his leading and trailing legs straighten with a rapid, explosive knee extension,” Rose says. The sudden jerk of his legs increases the twisting speed of Lee’s hips””which, in turn, lurches the shoulder of his thrusting arm forward.

As Lee’s shoulder bolts ahead, his arm gets to work. The swift and simultaneous extension of his elbow drives his fist forward. For a final flourish, Rose says, “flicking his wrist just prior to impact may further increase the fist velocity.” Once the punch lands on target, Lee pulls back almost immediately. Rose explains that this shortens the impact time of his blow, which compresses the force and makes it all the more powerful.

By the time the one-inch punch has made contact with its target, Lee has combined the power of some of the biggest muscles in his body into a tiny area of force.

Yep, that’s the general idea (though there’s a little more to it, of course). If the author had stopped there, I’d have had nothing to say. But then there was this:

But while the one-inch punch is built upon the explosive power of multiple muscles, Rose insists that Bruce Lee’s muscles are actually not the most important engine behind the blow.

“Muscle fibers do not dictate coordination,” Rose says, “and coordination and timing are essential factors behind movements like this one-inch punch.”

Because the punch happens over such a short amount of time, Lee has to synchronize each segment of the jab””his twisting hip, extending knees, and thrusting shoulder, elbow, and wrist””with incredible accuracy. Furthermore, each joint in Lee’s body has a single moment of peak acceleration, and to get maximum juice out of the move, Lee must layer his movements so that each period of peak acceleration follows the last one instantly.

So coordination is key. And that’s where the neuroscience comes in.

In a 2012 study, Ed Roberts, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, compared the punching strength (at a range of slightly less than 2 inches) between practitioners of karate and physically fit people with similar amounts of muscle who do not practice martial arts.

“The first thing we found was that karate experts can punch much harder than normal, untrained people. Which isn’t exactly what you’d call Nobel Prize”“worthy work,” he says.

But Roberts also discovered that for the karate practitioners, muscle alone didn’t dictate strong punches. Rather, when he used motion-tracking cameras to track the puncher’s joints, he found that strikes that synchronize the many peak accelerations in one complex move””like Bruce Lee’s””were also the most powerful.

And when Roberts took brain scans of his study’s participants, he also found that the force and coordination of each participant’s two-inch punch was directly related to the microstructure of white matter””the substance that manages communication between brain cells””in a part of the brain called the supplementary motor cortex. This is important, because this brain region handles the coordination between the muscles of the limbs, which close-range punches rely on. The altered white matter allows for more abundant or complex cell connections in that brain region, Roberts says, which could increase the puncher’s ability to synchronize his or her movements.

So Bruce Lee owes his master feat in part to a beefed-up glob of white matter.

So we learn, to our amazement, that Bruce Lee had to use his brain to make all this happen! I don’t know about you, but I was was completely taken aback. After reading this, I began to suspect that there might be certain other physical skills in which the brain plays an important role. (So far, I’ve only been able to think of four: playing the cello, dancing gracefully en pointe, landing the triple Salchow, and painting the corners with the split-fingered fastball — but for all I know, there may even be others.)

I guess we’ll have to wait for the research.