Both.

Hi Brian

Im going to be very carefull what I see here as I am on a massive learning curve.


You asked ;
How do you know when your hands are conditioned?
Why would you want them that way? I just don't get it.

Answer?

When I can strike(or a lot of consecutive strikes) some thing such as a maki wari with full power that would normaly have bust my hands. That is when I knew they were conditioned along with my shins/forearms/ palm heel/ feet

I wont condition the outer part of my hand (shuto)
For some reason this doesn’t feel right to me

But I have not gone to the far extremes that I have seen. I still need my hands for physical labour.



Ok
If you read some of the threads on here I forget where they are but either way they refer to

“they sprained their wrists while sparring“,

“they had a street fight and either their opponents hand or even their own hands were made useless by the fact their(normaly their outer knuckles) knuckles were knocked out of place.

I have had this happen to me when I was attacked once, and at the time I was boxing and doing karate.But no hand conditioning.

It is painful and a person loses the use of that hand. This can be bad in a street fight particular if a persons best shot is with that hand.

After that I started hand/forearm/ and other body parts conditioning.
That was 20 years ago.
It isn’t just the hand that gets conditioned it is the ability to strike hard and fast with the correct joint alignment and striking with the correct part of the hand.


One of the best karate ka I saw when I was young was

http://www.shuriway.co.uk/enoeda.html

At the time, after I broke my knuckles I didn’t know much about hand conditioning so I went and looked for the training methods.