The Last Dragon was a great movie showing the evolution of Leroy who discovered himself against Shonuf. Take a look at the clip and maybe even watch the hokey movie and think about your own mastery of technique and power.
As entertaining as it is, there is considerable science behind it. How do we arrive at mastery? We may not see a glow around our hands or even our body but the motive force is still there.
We need to move from an intuitive understanding about energy and power to a way to quantify what is energy.
DEFINITION OF ENERGY
Physics defines energy as the unit of work that is associated with a unit such as Joule (Newton meter, N*m) or CGS system as erg Dyne*cm). It is basically the force applied to move an object over a distance:
w= Work
f= Force
v= Velocity
s= Seconds
m= Mass
d= Distance
a= acceleration
g= gravity
h= height above the ground
so where f= m*a
and w=f*d
We live in this wonderful world in which energy cannot be destroyed, only changed in its type. This really is the "force" that we see in Star Wars and the kernel of truth in what we use as ki (chi).
We can store it or expend it. That's it. We have several ways to use it. The stored form of is potential energy (PE), and the energy in motion is kinetic energy (KE).
Here are the equations:
Since we live in our gravitational field:
PE= mgh
and kinetic energy is defined as:
KE=1/2 mv2
So in the application of the kinetic energy we perform work. In our martial arts, we can harness this to perform feats of skill such as breaking boards:
In future posts we will explore how the cardinal movements in the xyz coordinate plane can be used to define ki.