Conditioning Your Shins

I feel the tremble. I hear the intake of breath.

Yet another person shrinks from my little love tap on their shin.

The two photos I've included are of me using a knife hand on a student practitioner's shin. These particular shots were taken this April 5th 2014. I had a 'Play in Perth' joint training between Joong Do Kwan and an fellow IAOMAS school from Dunsborough.

It's all for a good cause of course. Bear with me folks, most of the trainees I'm hitting are way bigger I am ... I'm not bullying them. LOL. In all truthfulness, I'm striking them pretty hard and it is super unpleasant. The strikes at the top of their shins are bearable - the strikes lower down their shins however, are far from comfortable.

A few discussion points arise from this demonstration - untrained legs are imperfect weapons. Calibrated wrongly, you can be in for intense pain if you collide a sensitive area with a bone-y corner of your opponent's body. On the receiving end, there's some opportunity to take advantage of this weakness to full effect. For me, there is one lesson I'd share: it is that if you need to block an oncoming leg strike with your leg, it is far better to cop it on the top part of your shin even if you do not do shin conditioning, rather than take it lower down on the leg.

Blocking can be done leg against leg for 'Muay Thai' or roundhouse kicks against your outer thigh or inside strikes against your groin.

Knowing full well that the length of your leg is susceptible to strikes might also make you choose your kicks with more tactical deliberation. Just throwing a leg out for the sake of keeping the opponent at bay opens yourself up to a world of hurt - especially against a more experienced practitioner.

There is always the case to consider shin conditioning as part of your ongoing training. A conditioned shin makes the occasional mistake less onerous.Just bear in mind ... conditioning is not a permanent thing - stop conditioning your shins and they will soon revert back to normal.

Keep training folks!

Colin
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