Different martial arts teach and instill different postures that have been designed to offer the ideal position(s) to best use attack and defend actions for that specific style.  Although what works for Aikido is so substantially different from Kickboxing or Wing Chun they all make sense when you apply the techniques from their particular repertoire.

This post addresses basic concepts about what a strong posture is and how it can be better understood and improved.

Some basic attributes of a strong posture

1. well balanced: attacks can come from different directions and your posture should be able to cope with it;
2. well rooted: you should feel in control of your balance and how to shift it back, forth and sideways;
3. relaxed: the posture should not involve any unnecessary muscle;
4. with a proper guard: a strong posture for martial arts will always have to reflect the most adequate guard for that style;
5. ready to action: you should be always ready to react to an attack so your posture should reflect that; do spend some time analysing “what if” situation and try to be realistic with your own level of fitness and proficiency in your style.

Developing a strong posture

A strong element of self awareness is essential to well perform martial arts techniques and moves: good news is that the actual training helps developing the self  awareness that helps its own improvement.  Following the teaching of an expert teacher you can surely have a feeling of what is suggested and required by the style you are practicing.

The next step, once you are fully comfortable with the basics is experimenting and see what works for you, your body shape and level of fitness: what is ideal for an Olympic champion of tae kwon do will not equally work for a software engineer practicing Ju Jitsu.

Understand and improve your strong posture

In my opinion the best training for your posture is to increase your level of awareness about it.  Be aware of your position feel it with your eyes closed.  Then try moving forward and back, then side to side and then in circle: stop in between, literally freeze in position and check.

A mirror is also a great tool: if you see your image and can balance all elements associated to it you are likely to store them into your unconscious memory when automatic reactions are originated.

The final and next step is asking a friend or training partner to test your posture by pushing, pulling or simply testing where weak points can be found.

Posted under educational

There are lots of people out there that play the occasional football or tennis match or spend a week per year skiing.  Most martial arts require a different approach and cannot be practiced occasionally if you want to enjoy the benefits that they can bring and avoid injuries.  While I adopted a regular, quasi religious training regime since I was a teen ager I see many of my students or other fellow martial artists having a very irregular training regime: I believe this can be the strongest cause of injuries and loss of motivation.

When you are at the beginning of your training you have a steady increase of performance in terms of speed, power, flexibility and, progressively, technique.  Your mind, as well as your muscles, get trained and they learn the subtle intricacies of how and when firing the right muscles in the appropriate time and order.  You can consider that some of the muscles used in certain techniques are not used much in our normal daily activities.  For the same reason these muscles have a stronger tendency to loose their performance when not used.

While in regular training you enjoy progresses in your training and this enjoyment is released in the form of endorphins that make you feel good.  If, for any reason, you stop training for a few days or weeks your muscles tend to loose some of their fitness.  When you try a technique that was nice and easy last time you did it you find yourself suddenly struggling with it or, if that happens in a self defence situation, risk your life in the process.

A regular practice for amateurs should be considered when training 2-3 sessions per week, possibly practicing all year round: each training session should be between 1 and 2 hours long.

Posted under educational

Copyright and courtesy of Duncan Grisby 2009

Practicing martial arts, as well as any other physical activity and sport, can cause pain due to accidents or simple practice: this post discusses some of the aspects of pain and my view of dealing with it.

What is pain?

Wikipedia states that:

Pain is the unpleasant feeling common to such experiences as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting iodine on a cut, and bumping the “funny bone“.^[1] The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”.^[2]

Pain motivates us to withdraw from damaging or potentially damaging situations, protect the damaged body part while it heals, and avoid those situations in the future.^[3] It is initiated by stimulation of nociceptors in the peripheral nervous system, or by damage to or malfunction of the peripheral or central nervous systems.^[4] Most pain resolves promptly once the painful stimulus is removed and the body has healed, but sometimes pain persists despite removal of the stimulus and apparent healing of the body; and sometimes pain arises in the absence of any detectable stimulus, damage or pathology…

Different people will have different feelings of pain corresponding to the same stimulus.  At the same time tolerance to pain is a very subjective thing.

Low pain threshold

To some extend having a low tolerance to pain has one advantage: people with low pain threshold will usually try to reduce or avoid pain, causing them to be more careful then others about everything.  That could be not ideal for a martial artist.  Low tolerance can in fact be very annoying because any little impact or strike can cause extreme discomfort therefore incapacitating fighters to continue their actions; worse it can trigger irrational reactions and limiting their ability to fight with a clear mind.

High pain threshold

At the opposite side of the spectrum people with high tolerance to pain will care less about being hit: this can sometimes cause them to be more exposed to danger and more likely of being involved in more serious accidents.  A high pain threshold can be at the same time a serious competitive advantage for full contact fighters: being able to continue fighting despite pain can make the difference between winning and loosing a fight.

Conditioning

Some martial arts encourage the practice of specific conditioning exercises that allow students to improve their resistance to pain and how to deal with it.  From a physiological point of view repetitive strikes to any body parts are far from useful; while extensive and repetitive bruises on the body and limbs can be un aesthetical, internal organs and the head can suffer permanent damages when they receive repetitive strikes.

I usually encourage my students to avoid, to the best of their ability, hits in the head while I am obviously aware it can be difficult while sparring.  To anyone who states that to be a good martial artist (or fighter) you need to be able to receive any kind of strike without showing pain I would answer in two ways:

• A good martial artist should be good at blocking or avoiding strikes. Yes, in the case a strike goes through she will get on with life and try to block better next time.
• There is a large number of (ex) boxers with permanent brain damages, mostly caused by repetitive head strikes: it’s just a simple demonstration that you just cannot train the brain to absorb these impacts.

Personally I don’t really mind getting occasionally bruised but I can usually avoid most damages by blocking effectively my opponents’ attacks using my hands protected by gloves rather than absorbing those attacks on the arms.

Redirecting pain?

A few weeks ago I took part to a Silat seminar: the master running it spent a significant part of the training explaining that conditioning is very important for their style and he insisted that pain should be ignored and absorbed and the energy generated should be redirected toward the opponent to generate more powerful attacks: I am in total disagreement with this philosophy because I believe that a martial artist will fight better when relaxed rather than angry.  Anger can cause irrational reactions and, limiting mental flexibility, reduces the chances of coping with a number of situations.

Conclusions

Pain is a fact of life and, if you are involved in an energetic activity like a contact sport or a martial art, can be a normal day to day companion.  While practitioners of martial arts should try their best to avoid getting injured they should also acknowledge the fact that it’s a fact of life and it should be dealt with, without becoming too familiar with it.

Posted under educational

Martial arts were developed to help people fighting, being it for attacking people in battle or for defensive purposes.  If we consider China and Japan, two countries that gave birth to some of the most famous martial arts in the world, they have profound differences in the way martial arts developed over time.  In China martial arts initially developed from the Shaolin temple and from Taoists masters that were teaching martial arts among other things, being also experts of medicine, science, calligraphy and philosophy.  In Japan the martial arts tradition was more based around the training of Samurais and the more military orientation of Japanese martial arts is still very visible when practicing traditional martial arts from this country.

Practicing martial arts in those ancient times was very much a way of life and it often started in very young age, during childhood, continuing for the whole life of the individual that would eventually start his/her own school and move on, maintaining the so called lineage. Fast forward to the 21^st century (and good part of the late 20^th) and things have taken a completely different perspective, particularly when the same martial arts are now taught in countries where the culture and tradition on which they were originally based is simply not there.  Many styles have somehow evolved while new others have been defined to adapt to the culture or habits of the people where these are practiced.

Being a martial artist today in the western world is challenging because of all interferences caused by our modern and stressful lives.  Most of us need jobs to live and maintain an expected standard of living and although there are a number of “professional”, full time, martial artist I would assume that the majority of martial artist have a full time job and practice martial arts for self defence, fitness, health, fun, self improvement or any other suitable reason in their spare time.

I would like to define here my concept of an ideal profile for a person intending to practice martial arts and what he/she should aim to become in the long term.  A martial artist is a person that should be:

• training regularly: often this requires to organize your own life around training rather than the other way round.  Regular training helps absorbing even the smallest subtleties of the style and master them appropriately;
• performing all techniques pertinent to his/her style in a variety of different ways. E.g. demonstrating a strike or a throw at a very slow speed to help a beginner to understand all its subtleties or at maximum speed to show its full, devastating, potential;
• understanding why each technique in his/her style are performed in a certain way and the bio-mechanical and physiological implications for it;
• comparing and sharing his/her knowledge with people of the same style or from different styles in order to always enriching his/her personal knowledge of martial arts;
• having a knowledge of what other martial arts do and what are their weapons and having an objective view of their pros and cons;
• knowing at least the basic steps of development and history of his/her martial art;

In short a martial artist should be actively collecting and learning techniques and combinations of a given style and applying his/her own interpretation of them.  The knowledge of the background of other styles may well influence the final result.

Posted under educational, theory

Courtesy and Copyright © Duncan Grisby 2006

Different schools and styles of martial arts teach the hook kick (also called reversed round kick) in different ways. Main differences manifest essentially in the way the movement originates, how the kicking leg is moving during the kick and what part of the foot hits the target that can be the hill or the sole/ball of the foot.

When I teach how to perform a hook kick, I first clarify that to maximise performance the leg should follow a whipping movement to ensure maximum acceleration of the foot toward the target.

I also suggest to always hit with the ball of the foot. Here are for 3 good reasons both physiological and in terms of pure performance for doing that rather than the (side of the) hill, keeping the foot at 90° to the ankle:

1. better reach: having the foot extended it increases your range by nearly the full length of your foot ensuring you will hit, from the same position, targets that would not be reachable if you bend your foot.
2. stronger impact: if the angular speed of the leg moving is constant having a longer weapon (by the length of the foot) increases the speed of the foot itself, build up a higher momentum and delivers a stronger kick..
3. safer for you: the Achilles’ tendon is a weak point and if you squash it against a skull it will hurt your foot to the point you might not be able of walking for some time. Even if the impact is not straight on the Achilles’ tendon it can still hit the many nerves that are exposed both on the internal and external part of the hill, moving toward the ankle. The ball of the foot is very well padded and can bear much stronger impact than the edge of the hill.
4. improve flexibility: with the full fully extended the natual flexibility of the leg is highly helped; to the contrary trying to extend a leg while the tibial (shin) muscles are tensed in order to keep the ankle at 90° will have some groups of muscles that are fighting against the direction of your kick getting the muscles behind the leg less prone to extend
5. faster: if all muscles involved in the movement are pushing in the same direction and the others are simply relaxed the overall speed will be improved.

In terms of pure power the hook kick is not to be considered at the top of the scale where round kick and other forward kicks can develop much stronger impact. Things change when spinning backward where the whole spinning momentum adds up to the actual mechanical movement of the kick itself.

Extra information about the hook kick can be found by checking this video:

As usual, any comment is highly appreciated.

Posted under educational, styles, video_review