Hey Tim
I would love to hear your view or anyone else's comments on this subject.
Some say that strong neck muscles can help prevent a k.o. True or not true.
Tim when you were preparing for full contact competion in taiwan what did your teachers recomend?

Strong neck muscles are always a plus, as is learning to keep the head lifted and the chin tucked in at just the right angle.

I have seen large strong, men go down with a relatively light tap in demonstrations and I have seen smaller men get punched full tilt in the front of the throat in a real fight and barely flinch as they kept attacking.

It is also true that the element of surprise can also help the choking/striking process and certain parts of the neck are more vulnerable than others.

David,
Strong neck muscles can help prevent the kinds of knockouts caused by rapid rotation of the head that pinch the brain stem (the type that occur from being struck by a hook for example).

Straight blows to the chin or forehead are more likely to cause a knockout regardless of how strong the neck is.

When I trained in Taiwan we did matwork exercises that strengthened the neck. And like Michael mentioned above, you have to learn to tuck your chin and roll with blows as much as possible.

To a great extent, the ability to "take a punch" is genetic.

Tim
Thanks for the info. What are some of the mat exercises. Can they be discribed easily. If so I would love to hear about some of them. Or is there a place you could refer me to so I can read about them.
In my san shou class we mainly use neck wrestling to condition the neck. But nothing else.

Actually, neck wrestling is an excellent method of conditioning the neck, and it involves the coordination of the whole body as well.

Isometrics (pushing the head against the hands or mat statically) and self-resistance exercises (moving the head forward/back and side/side against the resistance of the hands and arms) are also good.

Thanks for the info Tim

O by the way I love the discussion board. I just found it the other day.

What is neck wrestling?

Hi Kenneth

The best way to see what it is is to watch a tai boxing match. When you see them strugling to get their hands on the back of there opponents neck so the can pull them into a knee strike then you pretty much have the exercise.
When that is isolated and practiced alone then it is called neck wrestliing. To practice you and your partner place your hands on the back of each others necks. You can have a inside or outside grip or one arm inside and one outside. The goal is to bring your partners head down and break there posture which would normally put them in position to be attacked. The way to bring it down is to get yourself into the inside position since it is strongest. In fact it is quite hard to bring their head down it you are outside. So the whole time you will have both people trying to weaving their arms into the superior inside position. Preventing the other person from obtaining that position is top priority also. You can prevent it by clamping down with your arms when they try to slip a arm into the inside position. And one last thing that is very important. You shoule not try to dissengage more than one arm at a time in a attempt to go for the inside position. You need one arm on their neck at all times or you are toast.
So give it a shot and don't be supprised it your neck is sore the next morning.

Tim you wrote

'To a great extent, the ability to "take a punch" is genetic.'

does this mean if you have glass jaw the best way to remedy the situation is to die and be reborn in a new body.

Is this something you reccomend to your students ( I know there are some people I'd reccomend it to!)?

;-)

Ed

is it true neck wrestling can make you go blind?

Hi David,

Good reply to Kenneth. A few more things to add. By grasping the back of the neck you are mainly trying to use the neck as a handle to off-balance the opponent to the sides. You can twist the opponent by pulling with one elbow and pushing with the other and lean the opp. in the pulling direction. At the point the opp. is losing it you drive a round knee into the floating ribs. The Thais, when they get tired, cheat by throwing these slappy side knee strikes just to rack up points when they're gassing. But in reality it should be a round knee to the floating ribs or kidney.

The grip on the neck also puts you in a good position for the real goal, which is to quickly slide your hands up the that bony point at the back of the head (sorry forgot the proper word for it), squeeze the elbows tight and lever the head down. If you're familiar with "Effortless Combat Throws" it's the same dynamic as the Rear Head Tilt, only forward. Then it's a straight knee to the face or solar-plexus.

I've found that most westerners doing neck wrestling here in Thailand don't work on the off-balancing aspect of the drill so much, prefering to work more on the hand placement alone. If you've ever had any Rou Shou, Pummeling or Push Hands training you'll have a leg up on the Muay Thai fighters when it comes to this drill.

As posted above, its great for the neck and especially for training posture. Thais don't duck, they prefer an upright posture. It's also pretty good for training balance as well.

I have been told more than once over the years that the slight lean inherent in the bow-stance in the Yang-style and the somewhat greater forward lean in the Wu-style bow-stance was done partly to make it easier for a taiji practitioner to slip the hands of an attacker over the top of the head if that person tried to grapple the neck/head.

It is also true that the "lift the back of the head, tuck the chin" is also crucial to slipping an attempt to get the hands around the base of the back of the skill.

Many of the old postural requierments have as much to do with sound fighting fundamentals as they have to do with "raising the qi" etc. The only problem is finding teachers that still understand these things or have re-discovered their martial usage.

And, yes, there are more reasons to do taijiquan than simply learning about how to defend yourself...

J. Erik

Thank for adding in the extra info! very usefull to me and I am sure everyone else.

Has anyone forgotten weight lifting to make the kneck stronger? You can shrugs to make the trapezius muscles (which are actually part of your shoulders...)stronger but few people know about actual exercises that strengthen the muscles that run from your head to your collar bone. To strengthen these muscles you need to get a kneck strap and some weight plates I did this a few months ago with a homemade contraption made of a old baseball hat, some thin rope and a whole lot of duct-tape.

Boxers, wrestlers, and football players use these exercises to strengthen their knecks. Ever seen a 300+ lbs guy fly in the air and land on his head at a weird angle that could break someone's kneck but the guy gets right back up, unharmed during a pro football game? He does a lot of kneck exercises with weights.

They say that the way to tell a guy who can fight apart from a guy who just body-builds is to look at how thick his kneck is in comparison to the rest of his body. Thin kneck, big muscles, can't fight.

David, Erik, thank you for your great posts. Seems a necesssary drill for clinch-fighting. I learned about point-of-balance many years ago studying ninpo taijutsu, it explained those times I was taken down before I even knew what had happened.