by E. Paul Zehr
Figure 11.1. Traditional body conditioning exercises in Chinese martial arts. Left, conditioning the head; right, a technique called “iron broom kung,” or conditioning the foot by hitting it against a tree. Modified from Chow Spangler (1982).
We can see Batman going through a parallel form of training in the Frank Miller Batman: Year One story arc in “Who I Am and How I Came to Be” (Batman #404, 1986; shown in Figure 11.2). At the top of the panel, Bruce Wayne is shown driving his hand—fingertips first—through a stack of bricks. This kind of strike is called a “knife hand” in many martial arts traditions (although often the hand is vertical). In the middle and bottom panels, Bruce is kicking a tree in a manner very similar to that shown for the iron chi kung training in Figure 11.1. Assuming Batman did enough training with proper technique, you now know from Chapter 10 (have a peek at Table 10.1) that he would be able to move his hands and feet fast enough to generate the kinetic energy needed to break bricks and wood. However, breaking things with your fingertips is actually very difficult. Also, breaking a wooden board is not the same thing as kicking a tree in half! Looking back at Figure 10.1 tells us that the object you are hitting has to bend a fair bit before it will break. I don’t think the tree here will really break in this way! Despite that, Batman is shown training in ways that could be forms of body hardening.
A modern-age example comes from the experiences of the writer Mark Salzman, who in the early 1980s traveled from the United States to China to learn martial arts. His experiences were subsequently described in his excellent book Iron Silk. Relevant to the subject at hand here was his meeting the Chinese martial arts master Pan Qingfu. Pan practiced a harsh form of hand training—only on one hand—that gave rise to an enormous and tough callus in his knuckles. In fact, his nickname, according to Salzman, was “Iron Fist.” Pan developed his callused hand by performing punches against a 22.5-kilogram (50-pound) iron plate that was nailed to a concrete wall. He was reported to hit the plate between one thousand and ten thousand times each day.
The three components to this whole method are changing bone density, hardening the skin, and changing the perception of pain. The conditioning of the bone underlying the skin fits right into the framework we talked about back in Chapter 5. So, subjecting the body part to repeated impacts may affect the bones in the fingers (called phalanges) or the long bones of the shin and forearm. Because we already talked about bone density back in Chapter 5, I am not going to go over that again. Instead we will focus on the skin and pain perception.
Figure 11.2. Batman’s extreme body conditioning and training. From “Chapter One: Who I Am and How I Came to Be” (Batman #404, 1986).
Only Skin Deep?
Conditioning the skin is probably the easiest to think about. This part of body conditioning is essentially forming a callus on purpose. A callus is the dermatological name for a part of the skin that has become thickened and hardened as a result of repeated pressure or contact. A runner can develop a callus on her foot due to the repeated pressure and to friction’s occurring inside the shoe during running. So, to induce a similar kind of adaptation in the skin of other body parts, such as the hand, a special method is needed. That is because repeated stresses such as those happening during running are not common on the hand (or head).
This kind of thing can happen even in common practices like playing a guitar. Guitar playing will stimulate the growth of a callus on the fingers used to manipulate the strings against the frets. If guitarists don’t play for a long time, their calluses will shrink and pressing down the frets will be painful.
Even if hand conditioning is not a major objective of the training, some forms of this persist in many martial arts in the form of what are called “knuckle push-ups.” These are just like ordinary push-ups except they are performed on the first two knuckles with the hand and forearm aligned as in a punch. Another important part of the special training methods is to keep the callus from becoming especially hardened. If it is hard and dry it is also brittle and may easily rip. So, a supple callus is in order! Various tinctures and herbal ointments have been used in different traditions to help speed callus formation, reduce healing time, and keep the callus from drying out.
Calluses develop via a process known as hyperkeratosis. Pressure or friction of the skin due to compressive or shearing stresses leads to overstimulation of the keratinocytes in the outer skin layer—the epidermis. Keratinocytes make up about 90% of the cells found in the epidermis and come from stem cells in the skin. Producing more cells is a normal response to protect the skin and is the desired outcome of the body conditioning. This is commonly used also in the martial art of wing chun.
Repeated impact that creates calluses may “deaden” the sensitivity in areas you are trying to build up. There are receptors in your skin that tell about touch, pressure, and tissue damage. Well, those receptors in the hand or foot that repeatedly feel the impact of hard objects may no longer respond to touch or other inputs in the same way. However, getting accustomed to hitting a hard immovable object may easily prepare someone for striking a soft movable target like a person!
But when Batman fights even a soft movable target—and even if he emerges unharmed—he will be hurt and feel pain. Body conditioning trains a person to deal with the pain of fighting in practice so it can be ignored during real combat. The great martial arts historians Robert Smith and Donn Draeger in their fantastic book Comprehensive Asian Fighting Arts wrote that a martial artist “needs to be stung frequently and hurt occasionally. For without this he cannot learn to respond coolly.”
No Pain, No Gain?
Now let’s look at what pain is. Then we will be in a position to assess how easy it will be for Batman to deal with. Well, the next thing I am about to tell you may seem surprising, but an important thing to understand about your body is that there are no such things as pain receptors. That’s right—you don’t have any receptors to detect pain or to make you feel pain. But, you do feel pain from time to time, and obviously Batman certainly has many a pain-filled night while out patrolling the streets and heights of Gotham City.
Instead of actual pain receptors, what we have is nociceptors—literally receptors for detecting tissue damage. Actually, if all that nociceptors did was detect tissue damage, they would be kind of useless, because the damage would already be done! The real job of your nociceptors is to go off at the onset of damage to our tissues. These receptors are in the skin, joints, muscle, internal organs, and so on. They become activated by stimuli that, if continued, could lead to damage. Think of the skin on your hand. If you absentmindedly place your hand near a hot burner, it seems to really hurt while you yank your hand away. Yet, often there is no damage at all to your skin. No blister forms and after only a few minutes you feel fine again. The nociceptors were activated by (in this case thermal) stimuli, and you perceived this as pain. This is mostly to get your attention!
Whether we perceive these sensations as painful or not has to do with what goes on in the brain and spinal cord. This is why different people can respond so differently to the same stimulus like hot sand at the beach. This is also why it is possible for some people to have a “high pain tolerance” or “threshold.” The sensors in our skin that tell us about tissue damage don’t have a different threshold. But the way the information from those receptors is processed can be very different. I think it is fair to say that Batman, while having the same receptors as you and I, has a much higher threshold for pain. In fact, you can completely override the automatic and reflexive responses that would normally be activated by the nociceptive input. Flashing back to the hot burner example, you could, through sheer force of will, keep your hand near that burner if you really focused your attention on doing so. You would still have an initial reflex flinch—those nociceptors activate powerful reflexes—to pull your hand away. You could, though, force yourself to keep your hand there. I am not advocating this of course, but merely using it as a very striking example of how so-called painful eve
nts can be handled.
Why all this is possible has to do with how the sensation of nociception or pain is processed. Pioneering work in this area was conducted by Patrick Wall and Ronald Melzack in the 1960s. Their research led to the discovery of endorphins and enkephalins, which are the internal morphine-like painkillers of the body. Also, you have likely made use of certain pain-management techniques without paying any attention whatsoever to the underlying neurophysiology. You have probably taken advantage of the gate control theory of pain, which is what Wall and Melzack called the way that we experience pain.
This theory can best be explained by a few examples. If you have ever rubbed a body part after you have hurt it—maybe you banged your elbow or hand on something—you have actually been activating messaging in your spinal cord that made the pain feel less or weaker. This is also similar to what children do it they hurt something—they shake it. All that shaking and rubbing yields feedback from receptors in the body part (in this example, the arm or hand) that in turn inform the nervous system about movement. In the spinal cord, this feedback interferes with transmission of the feedback from the nociceptors. The nociceptive signal does arrive at the spinal cord; it is just that it is basically blocked from fully making its way up to the brain where it would then be perceived as pain—the gate is closed.
The gate control theory of pain is also the basis for a commonly used form of treatment in physiotherapy: transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation. This treatment typically produces pain relief by means of electrical stimulation or vibration treatment over the skin of an injured body part. Commands coming down from the brain strongly affect how information is relayed in these paths. This is how you are able to sometimes ignore or pay little attention to things that you might think of as “painful.”
Another kind of body conditioning related to deliberately activating the nociceptors in the skin and joints is often performed by students in Japanese traditions like judo, jujutsu, and aikido or in applications of the Chinese martial art tradition of chin’na. These are all martial arts involving of joint locking and manipulation.
If you watch aikido practitioners throwing each other, the most striking thing is that the person being thrown appears to fly through the air when a joint lock is used. You might think this is an overly theatrical response to a mere twist of the wrist. Of course, the simplest response would be to just let the person rip the ligaments holding the wrist together. However, jumping into the air and flipping over is often the best way to get out of the pain of the lock. Repeatedly practicing simplified versions of the joint locking exercises is a kind of body conditioning in which the ability to tolerate the painful lock is practiced.
When Batman throws someone using these types of joint locks he is triggering a response based upon the pain inflicted by the lock. This has been very well described by martial arts writer Dave Lowry. He wrote that “with time and practice, your reaction to these kinds of joint locks will become much less immediate. You will begin to see that pain, especially when you know it is coming, is something over which you have some control. You can learn to compartmentalize it and accept it without allowing it to absorb your entire attention.” The point is that the onset of the pain—signaled by the nociceptors—occurs before tissue damage but will still give the response needed in the fighting application. Batman is clearly well trained in this. In the story called “No Rest for the Wicked” (Batman #497, 1993), Batman talks about how he needs to “isolate the pain. Lock it away. Put it in a tiny box in a corner of my mind.” This allows him to carry on with his work.
The way Batman can exploit this in his opponents is well illustrated. A good example is the “The Lazarus Pit” (Batman #243, 1972).
In this comic, Batman is shown fighting empty handed against a very powerful villain who is armed with a knife. Batman uses his superior skills to maneuver the bad guy into an arm bar pin and still gives him the option to give up without being hurt at all! Batman says “I have years of practice in judo—either the knife goes . . . or your arm does.” Even if the bad guy doesn’t give up, the absolute worst thing that will happen is a broken arm. It seems very gracious behavior on the part of Batman, if you ask me, but is in keeping with Batman’s approach to fighting that we talked about in Chapter 9. Batman causes the bad guy to drop his weapon by invoking this nociceptive response but doesn’t actually break the man’s arm or harm him. This does make a nice illustration of the issue we are discussing but causes more work for Batman! In later pages of that same story, the bad guy just grabs another weapon (actually the same knife again), and Batman is forced to disarm him once more.
You can also imagine examples from sports that you may have played or watched where something happens to one athlete—maybe a collision or a twisted limb—that causes him to spill to the ground and roll around in pain. After a few minutes of treatment on the sidelines the athlete is sometimes able to carry on as if nothing happened. It is almost like he wasn’t hurt at all. Well, hurt has occurred—imminent tissue damage and pain was sensed—but harm didn’t happen. There was no actual damage, just the warning of damage about to occur. Your receptors work really well in this regard since they tell you about possible damage usually before it is too late to avoid actual injury. Martial artists exploit this to evoke the response needed during fighting.
Is All This Really Good for You?
Despite everything we have discussed above, we still haven’t really met head on the questions of whether this kind of training is good for your body and if Batman would do it. Taking the last part first, Batman clearly would do this kind of training because it would provide an additional edge for him. But he wouldn’t likely have the time to devote to the harsher versions of this type of training. He doesn’t really need to have the extreme body conditioning because he has a fantastic batsuit. We’ll talk more about that in a few pages. So, that part is simple.
Answering whether this is OK physiologically, that is, does it hurt you, is not as simple. However, the scientific data are really very poor in answering this, so the best I can say is that it probably doesn’t have that many serious “side effects.”
To look at how this type of training would affect a real-life person as opposed to a cartoon crimefighter, let’s turn to the man who trained in what was actually described as “the savage technique”! The person in question was the famous karate man Mas Oyama, who founded the Japanese karate style of Kyokushinkai (“society of the ultimate truth”). This is a very “hard” martial arts style that includes full contact fighting as an integral part of the curriculum. Mas Oyama performed savage hand conditioning that involved repeatedly punching hard objects with the fist until the skin broke and the tendons were exposed. In this type of training eventually a very firm callus forms that is anchored on the tendon. Clearly calling this the savage technique isn’t hyperbole! Oyama conditioned many body parts including multiple surfaces of the hands and feet (described in two of his earlier books What Is Karate? and This Is Karate). In This Is Karate Oyama describes his early training of punching telephone poles until the wires shook in the air and made a humming noise. He also describes using only his bare hands and feet to fight and kill a bull. I think it is clear that the form of hand and body conditioning performed by Oyama is very harsh.
Oyama was involved in an x-ray study in the late 1960s that included only “six so-called serious hand conditioners.” No really obvious degenerative changes in the bones or joints of the hand were noted in the x-rays. However, it is really very difficult to know for sure the long-term consequence of this training. Also, the more sophisticated imaging techniques available today would be helpful in shedding more light on this. It is worth mentioning, though, that the authors do mention that “some decrease in manual dexterity will result from prolonged hand-conditioning.”
I used to perform this training with the knife hand strike. The knife hand is the one using the fingertips that is shown at the top panel of Figure 11.2. Recall that this panel taken from “Who
I Am and How I Came to Be” (Batman #404, 1986) outlines some elements of Bruce Wayne’s training that are quite like the body hardening methods that we are discussing here. I used to practice striking against a lightly padded hard wooden target using the knife hand. I would hit the target only 50 to 100 times each day with each hand, not the thousands that true devotees use. Certainly my knife hand technique was strengthened by doing this. However, I lost a great deal of sensitivity in my fingertips. I realized that being able to type effectively was more directly related to my actual day job than was being able to have tough hands to do knife hand strikes, and so I stopped after some years. Clearly since I have been able to write this book, I have recovered fine! However, the tips of my index, middle, and ring fingers (the ones actually making contact during the striking training) on both hands still have much less sensitivity than my little fingers (which didn’t actually hit anything).
This idea is also echoed in a story told of one of the early masters of Goju ryu karate. Yagi Meitatsu described how when he was young he participated in forearm conditioning (kote kitai). “Every day we’d do this and our arms were always bruised with no time to heal. After practice we’d go and buy ice in a bucket to drink. This kind of training made a strong body, but when I’d go to school my hands would shake so much I had trouble holding a pencil.” A common training method in Okinawan and Japanese karate is to hit a hard, lightly padded object called a makiwara (which is the name of kind of object I hit). The point is to develop such power in the strike that hard objects can be crushed. Also, you can quickly see if the arm and hand alignment is strong and coordinated enough to resist buckling on impact.