“Energy transfer occurs as an
oscillation of dynamic energy”
If you perform a strike in an oscillating manner, the impact is often as though you were landing on the ground and absorbing the gravitational energy through your body. The only difference is that the impact is being absorbed through the striking limb. This means you can spring off of the opponent as well as stop them in their tracks with impact.
When you use an oscillating force, the energy you send into the opponent does not fully dissipate out of you and into them. It oscillates back and forth which gives you the ability to immediately spring into some other action, much like when you bounce a basketball on the floor and you dart off somewhere. This kind of rebound action is possible with the basketball because you send energy into the ball, which moments later is then reabsorbed by you after it hits the floor. When you correctly judge where it will go, you get into position and wait for it. It’s not that you lose the ball and gather it back again losing you momentum each time.
In martial arts, and elsewhere, a certain transformation of energy takes place from stored energy into movement energy. We call these different manifestations of the same force “oscillatory” energy. In martial arts, you hit the opponent or target and then re-position yourself during that moment when the energy is transferred into the target briefly. This frees you up for a moment to seamlessly transition into the next phase of action without having a large amount of stored energy to shift. This happens all at once without having to having to gather and reestablish yourself at each step, if it is done properly.
“A punch or kick is simply an inductor
which initiates the potential energy”.
In basketball, there is a moment when the energy transfers into the ball and away from you physically. This means it turns from stored energy to movement or dynamic energy. Nothing is lost in this process. The energy is conserved and remains constant throughout the oscillation back and forth. For example, in martial arts you hit the target, and this same energy from the impact is then released back into your own system when you pull it back. This involves a certain perception which is felt during the impact of a strike and which continues after.When the martial artists feels and anticipates this felt recoil after the initial impact, they align themselves physically to take full advantage of this energy before it dissipates.
When you launch a kick, it is not that you just passively shape the foot to brace for impact. You should find that your foot or fist shapes itself spontaneously to the angle it lands on the target, just as it would if you were to jump over a fence and land on an uneven surface. Your ankle might have to adapt spontaneously to land on terrain that could either be softer or more uneven than expected, for instance. This would be automatic if you were alert and ready, and would minimise injury.
You wouldn’t want to land on just the ball of your foot if you were to absorb heavy impact, because the ankle would likely get sprained. You would want to transmit this force through the entire system and align the body accordingly. Here you are not looking to unload energy into the ground. If you are preparing for an almighty crashing impact, it is best to use the entire surface area of the foot properly and absorb gravitational energy in such a way that it does not damage the ankle. This is just one example.
In martial arts, you are not looking to strike the surface with a part of the foot or hand and just unload energy there. Only in a very rudimentary sense are you doing this.
The strike you are doing, whether this is a punch or kick, is simply an inductor which initiates the potential energy. When it comes to striking a target, you are simply shaping the striking limb so that the energy is transferred effectively throughout the entire system as a whole. This energy transfer occurs as an oscillation of dynamic energy.