Vesia expands upon my previous Star Trek martial arts post by covering Spock’s martial arts skills:
“Actually, there may be some real science to the Vulcan nerve pinch, applied exclusively to the base of the neck. The neck is home to the apex of the (cervical) spine which enters the base of the medulla and a ganglia of neurons, synapses and baroreceptors which are responsible for blood flow to the brain via the carotid artery.”
I’ve become such a pantywaist desk jockey that when I now invoke the “prison days” (15 years removed!) I feel like a parody of myself. That having been noted, I have to invoke those days one more more time!
Back in the day we were taught two techniques: The brachial stun and the lateral vascular neck restraint (basically a standing side choke). The latter could be a pain compliance hold if you dug that bony point of your wrist into Mr. Inmate’s neck, or it could put them out if you got serious about your crankage.
Though stylized and even parodied in movies like Austin Powers, the brachial stun does work too. We were taught to use a hammer fist because it was thought that the wide surface of the fist would cause less damage than the knife hand (aka “judo chop”). In training we had to watch a video of a CO who willing took a brachial stun for demonstration purposes. Basically they sat this beefy officer in a chair and a smaller officer got behind him, loaded up, and dropped him like a sack of potatoes. It looked a lot like this old video from TDA Training:
So, thanks to Spock’s training, it is possible that his shutos and nerve pinch may both indeed work!
Vulcan martial arts are highly ritualistic and based on philosophy, similar to Human counterparts such as karate and Silat.
Lastly, watching the Marine in the video deliver some non-chambered short power got me thinking about the kung fu days. Mantis had a mixture of long fist power techniques (extreme chambering) and some shorter chambers that those in taekwondo or karate would recognize. Sifu always told me that my short power was good but that my long fist needed work.
Three levels of chamber/power generation:
1. Short (Marines and other modern fighting methods)
2. Medium (karate, tang soo do, and tae kwon do)
3. Long (Northern Shaolin variants)
I always thought that the long fist kung fu portion of Mantis was too slow and stylized to work. However, if you watch the “kung fu street fight” video, you can see that this kung fu guy was able to still pull it off against a street hack. (FYI Mantis does have some very good trap-fighting that includes both short & medium power strikes)
Since I have long fist on the brain, let us close this post with some footage of Nicolas Yang demonstrating some advanced forms.
Beautiful!
-BCP
