Small Coin, Big Gain: Karate Training with Coins

What do you do when daily training in the dojo turns into routine? For exactly those days, here is a super-training program believed to boost your performance to the maximum. All you need is ordinary coins — always at hand. They are small, but the result is colossal.

Karate uses many tools: makiwara for strikes, traditional weapons like bo, tonfa, and sai for skills. But outside the dojo you rarely have equipment with you. Coins solve that — the very ones in your wallet. Heavier is better: in Japan, 500-yen coins are the pick. Gaming chips or tokens of similar shape and weight work too.

1. The sliding walk

Place coins on top of your feet and move slowly in zenkutsu-dachi. Your steps must be gliding and smooth — feel every muscle working. Short, choppy steps will drop the coins instantly.

2. Watch your elbows

Roll up your sleeves, place coins on the inner sides of your elbows, and perform slow tsuki. The point: punch so that your elbows do NOT rotate along with your wrists — the way they naturally want to.

3. Make it harder: the armpits

Hold coins in your armpits and perform tsuki and uke. Keep your shoulders down and your chest from caving in. The movements must not be small — feel the work of your body's axis.

4. Keep the coins on your hands

Extend both arms forward, a coin on the back of each hand, and perform geri in zenkutsu-dachi. Too easy? Then, without changing stance, extend your coin-carrying arms out to the sides and perform mawashi-geri with a sharp hip rotation — both arms must stay extended. If you wobble, the coins fall.

5. Don't forget kata

Place coins on your feet and perform kata — slowly, without speeding up, with maximum concentration on keeping the coins in place. In Goju-Ryu, try Sanchin and Tensho with five coins at once: two in the armpits, one held between the buttocks, two on the feet. You will immediately feel the difference between squeezing and contracting.

Bonus: no coins in your pocket?

Train on a slippery floor in socks — dozens of kata repetitions will teach your balance fast (be careful with geri at first!). Or fold a newspaper hat, wear it loosely, and perform kata: it falls off at any wrong move, teaching you to control every up-and-down motion of your head.

Based on "Training with Coins" by Shin Tsuki, JKFan magazine №1/2014 (Federation of Shito-Ryu Karate-do of Kazakhstan).

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