How to Make a Knife Hand in Karate

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody I'm John Graden from the Martial Arts Teachers Association and johngraden.com. Let's learn how to make a knife hand. This is the chop, the deadly chop. In Korean they call it a soodo, in Japense chop it is called a shuto, to me it is the knife hand, it's the chop and kidding aside a good knife hand strike is extremely dangerous so pay close attention. What I want to do with my hand is to make it very rigid and solid and this is how I do it. I'm going to take my knuckles and raise them up, bringing all my fingers together and raising and slightly bending them. What that does is create tremendous tension in the hand and then I'm going to take my thumb and for most of my knife hands I'm just going to tuck it to the edge. Now when I'm doing this strike I can strike horizontally and using the edge of the hand that is called the knife edge of the hand. Often when I am standing in line at some place I'll just take my knife hand and I'll just beat it against the wall or the rail or do it with both hands and I do it all the time just to keep that alive, kind of tough and just be aware of that striking surface. On impact watch my wrist, as I strike the surface I'm going to pop that knife hand into the target, boom, and that gives it tremendous added velocity and snap. I can strike across with it, I can strike across with it and in fact if I can get some help out here real quick. Joe Brignoli is going to help me from Pro Star Mixed Martial Arts and the chop to the throat, the bridge of the nose, between the legs, collar bone, I could come down really hard and try and break that collar bone now while I am doing that strike you go right here and here comes the chop it is coming down and watch at the very last, that is the snapping action that really makes it explode. So the chop can be extremely powerful. If I can spin him I'm going to grab here, spin, and chop him right into the solar plexus and that will knock the wind right out of somebody very quickly. The reverse of that if you come on this side please Joe is the ridge hand and I'm going to take my thumb now and bring it across and now I'm striking with the inside ridge of the hand and this is extremely powerful and this is the first technique that I have ever knocked somebody out cold with and it is a ridge hand. The ridge hand works good because of this if he blocks see if he blocks the chop my elbow won't go that way so I turn the hand over, tuck the thumb across making sure again again that it is up high and the elbow bends and I can make contact. So the ridge hand is extremely powerful regardless of the target. Again I can spin him and smash him right in the solar plexus with a really hard ridge hand. I'm John Graden with Joe Brignoli and I hope that helps. Thanks."