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Any tips on how to improve your overall pain threshold? Or is it pretty much sight specific conditioning?
For example, 360 defences kill my forearms. Repeated practice would probably condition my forearms, but will it condition my overall tolerance for pain?
Just curious if anyone does anything special to condition themselves?
(I know Giantkiller has to have something crazy 😆 )
Pain threshold seems to be about two separate things, your mental response and your physical response. Your physical response needs to be trained physically…meaning more practise with the 360’s, taking hits, etc. But what gets most people is the mental response, where the fear of pain is worse than the actual pain, and they stop when they’re capable of keeping on going. You need to separate your mental condition from however your body is feeling, and commit yourself to keeping on going. At some point, your body might not be able to keep up, there were a couple of times when raising my arms for 360’s was a serious battle, but the point where your body starts to give up without your consent is well beyond the point where most people think they can’t take anymore…and training your mindset is the easy part, IMO.
Just to add something I noticed.You will learn to differentiate between injury pain and discomfort pain.Although not always 100%, but it’s pretty reliable. 360 pain is discomfort pain, you’re not breaking anything, it just hurts. A knee giving out,elbow popping or seeing stars is injury pain-then you must stop!
Let me quote my teacher.
Learning to fight is 90% mental and 10% physical.
My suggestion to you is before you start class decide if you are going to be victim or the victor. If you choice the victor, you will be surprised how the pain goes away. It helps me repeat \”victor, victor\” (mentally) while I’m doing drills that cause pain.
It is all a state of mind.
I know about the mental conditioning for tolerating pain. I am asking if anyone does any physical conditioning for it. When I was in Okinawa, a friend of mine was taking Okinawan Karate and he was constantly hitting himself in the shins and thighs with a stick to contition himself.
I guess, I am asking if anyone does anything similar for Krav.
We just did roundhouse kicks to the legs. The only way to get stronger is to just keep getting kicked.
I was picked to kick the teacher so he could demo the technique. I almost broke my chin kicking him in the thigh. I think the only way to get conditioned is to keep on kicking.
The end result of this kind of training is long term damage to the body. I know people can pull out the guy they know who did it and is fine, but I’ve met more than my fair share of older Muay Thai guys who have trouble walking and Haiwaiian stylists with arthritic hands. I can understand the reasoning for it, but personally I’m against training like this.
\”I almost broke my chin kicking him in the thigh.\”
You’re definitely doing something wrong. 😆 😉
I’m with garddawg on this one.
pain
Ones threshold for pain cannot be practiced IMO. When you’re in a street fight the pain tolerance will be altered by the amount of adrenaline that is produced by your body at that time. when you’re in class you may not get the same result because you aren’t facing the same circumstances.
i do know of some that kick or hit objects to toughen up the skin, (knuckles, elbows,etc.) but it’s to toughen the skin not your ability to take pain. I’ve never seen anyone alter the ability to take more pain. There is people out there with a high threshold and people with a low threshold, and all those that fall in between.
You want something crazy? I’ve got just the thing!!! 😀
Just a little anecdote I thought of relating to pain threshold:
One time we were sparring in class. I was going with a guy, who is generally not too big, but a lot bigger than me (about 150% of my bodyweight).
We were supposed to go relatively light, but he was going much stronger than that. He hit me with several big punches and kicks, including to the body, but I didn’t go down. Then, suddenly, he hit me with a huge kick to the liver, which instantly dropped me. As I was going down, he followed that up with a strong kick to the head (we weren’t wearing headgear at the time) that made me see stars.
That really made me mad, but I was in pain (If you have ever been hit in the liver, it hurts like hell and you can’t breathe). I felt dizzy for a moment and could not see myself get up. My first thought was to stay down for a couple of seconds, until the pain went away and I could breathe normally again. Then I saw the guy walking towards me and I suddenly thought that if this were a real fight and I lay down on the ground like that, defeated, that would be the perfect opportunity for him to come after me and finish me off. So, I would have to find a way to push all of the pain away, get up anyway and finish him before he finishes me.
Now, I don’t think this particular guy would have hit me at this point, he would have probably waited for me to get back up, but I just wanted to see if it were possible for me to indeed push the pain away and just keep on going. So, I was using the mild anger I still felt at him, not only for the liver kick, but also for hitting me while I was down, shot back up, yelled something very loudly (which I rarely do, because I’m by nature more of a quiet person) and jumped at him, throwing wild (but controlled) punches. I was able to drive him halfway across the room into a wall, punching the whole time and he didn’t throw a single punch in return. Then several people came running across the room and pulled me off him, obviously fearing for his life. 😆 I stopped punching immediatly and tried to explain that I was just trying to keep on going despite the pain and such, but I guess I made everybody nervous. Note to self: If you should ever try that again (in class anyway), don’t use the scream, I think that was what needlessly terrified everyone. But interestingly enough, the pain I had felt was now completely gone.
Anyway, I guess the moral to this story is, it’s the attitude that counts. With the right mindset, you can push through lots of pain.
How this will help you with your 360 defense I’m not sure, but you wanted something crazy and that’s the best I could do on short notice… 😉 😆
There’s not too much you can do when you take a hard liver shot. If any of you saw the Bernard Hopkins vs Oscar Dela Hoya fight, you know what I’m talking about. I’ll assume that Dela Hoya is conditioned to take punches and knows how to overcome being hit. One hard well placed liver punch put him down on the floor gasping for air and rolling around in pain.
The fight was immediately over.Many of the high level practitioners of martial arts utilizing conditioning gear (makiwara, wall bags, wooden dummies) have said that the main function of such gear is to develop good body structure and alignment, and conditioning is secondary. A makiwara or wall bag will teach you to align all your joints and transfer your body weight all the way into a strike. The wooden dummy, at least the sort I’m familiar with (this kind: http://www.plumblossom.net/ChoyLiFut/chingjong.html ) teaches you which parts of the arm and the geometry of blocks and how to use the body efficiently. Sand bags teach you to drive strikes deep into th body. Anyway, my point is that all of these \”hard\” methods are designed primarily to teach alignment, not to make the body parts harder. I think this type of training is far more useful than some of the mindless training I’ve seen before, where people hit their arms or shins with sticks. Having solid movement skills is much more important than being hard. You can never train to take the hit from the biggest guy you could possibly encounter, but you could move out of the way of the strike/stab.
If you want to condition yourself to block out pain, you could slowly burn your hand like in Taxi Driver 😀 Actually, I shouldn’t make jokes like that around some of you people- you might just do it.
There’s another thing that is self-explanatory, but people fail to realize, which is that the \”threshold of pain\” means, by definition, how much pain you can stand. Someone with a high threshold does NOT feel less pain, but the amount of pain anyone would feel, they deal with better. It doesn’t distract or affect them as much. So, to think that there are conditioning methods which makes certain things hurt less…I think that’s a fallacy unless you’re talking about literally deadening the nerves.
Realizing that pain tolerence was just that…tolerating the existing pain, not making it less…actually helped me deal with it better because I wasn’t trying to avoid pain at that point, I was trying to deal with it effectively.
Remember, pain exists for a reason. You want to avoid things that cause pain, but it is also important to learn to fight through pain. This is more of a mental exercise, than a physical one.
Several decades ago when I was in college, I read an interesting study concerning pain thresholds. I think the study was done in the 60’s. The subjects were health care workers that went to live with American Eskimos for several months. It was found that uniformly the health care workers pain threshold rose. As was stated before pain threshold did not mean the abscence of pain but rather the point where discomfort was acknowledged as pain. The study conclude that if one is exposed to people who have high pain thresholds their threshold will rise. Another interesting part of the study was that several months after leaving the Eskimos, the health care workers pain threshold had returned to their previous level.
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