How I Healed My Neck with Mobility & Breathing

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Jon

Several years ago, back in about 2004, I severely injured my neck. At the time it happened, it didn’t feel too bad. I thought it was something I would just shake off and keep going. However, when I woke up the following morning, I realized I was in severe pain and couldn’t move my neck.

After panic subsided and I managed to crawl out of bed into a hot shower, I figured the warm water would loosen it up and I’d be fine. The hot water provided some initial relief, which allowed me to begin to move slightly, but not by much.

Fast forward to later that day at the doctor’s office. She examined my neck, checked my range of motion (which was non-existent!) and then prescribed muscle relaxants and talked about surgery.

Surgery?

Drugs?

Ummm… no thank you!

Back at home, lying in my bed feeling sorry for myself, I began to think about how I could start to help myself and heal my own neck. I began to work on mobility far from the source of my pain. Starting with the fingers and hands, I worked my way up my arms and into the elbows. Since this felt okay, I tried the shoulders. That hurt. So I backed off. Again and again just working shallow range of motion on the rest of my body until I could reach, and begin to move the neck. Each time I was able to do a little more, go a bit farther.

When I was finally able to work into my neck, these are the exercises I did:

This was not an instantaneous process by far, but gradually, bit by bit, day by day, and week by week, I was able to increase the range of motion and decrease the pain. Eventually, I was able to completely restore the full, pain free mobility back to my entire body.

In the video above, I also mention some breathing exercises I did along with mobility to help heal myself. The main exercise is quite simple, yet extraordinarily powerful. Using your mind to locate the source of pain, inhale directly into the pain. Visualize the breath bringing healing energy into the area. Then exhale from the pain. Visualize your breath pulling the pain out of the body and expelling it. Repeat until you feel the pain begin to decrease and the area feel warm and energized.

If you would like to learn more about healing yourself with mobility, breathing and posture, I highly recommend you check out:

The Warrior’s Health System : Reintegrating Breathing, Movement, Alignment

Warrior Podcast with Eric Guttmann

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Jon

In an effort to provide you, my dear readers, with the best information out there on strength, health, fitness, and martial arts, I am interviewing top coaches, professionals, martial arts masters, and ordinary people who do extraordinary things. Continue reading →

Traditional Martial Artists of the World – UNITE!

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Jon

Traditional martial arts all have a long history of intense, sometimes downright brutal, physical training to forge the warrior’s combative body, mindset, and spirit.

This training has, up until very recently in history, never been optional. If you did not have the strength of will to endure it and push through then you simply did not make the cut and were not taught higher level skills. Not that you would be considered somehow unworthy or anything silly like that, but you would be thought physically incapable and therefore not worth the teacher’s time to train you.

Each school of martial art had its own type of tanren or forging process to harden the aspiring martial student. Continue reading →

My Heavy Metal Strength Meditation Part 3

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Jon

Guest blog post by Eric Guttmann, U.S. Navy Officer, Author, Fitness Enthusiast and More!

My Heavy Metal Strength Meditation Part 3 – How I trained to achieve 100 consecutive tire flips

It is amazing what the MIND and body can do when you focus on ONE thing to develop. As I have written in the previous two articles in these series, the goal of this strength meditation was to accomplish 100 consecutive tire flips with a 300lb tire. Six weeks after beginning this journey I performed 100 tire flips in 9:55. I relayed this to my friend Bud Jeffries and he asked me if that was my best time. I said no, that it was my FIRST time and that I purposely was not trying to go fast, rather I wanted to build a steady pace tied in to the breathing, like a meditation. Funny thing is, that once an IDEA gets in your consciousness it starts to get internalized and metabolized. Continue reading →

10 Reasons I Love Kettlebells by Logan Christopher

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Jon

I want to share with you all the reasons that I love training with kettlebells.

1 – They’re Different

Back when I first tried a kettlebell I was pretty much a bodyweight only guy. I had been led to believe that “weights didn’t build functional strength”. The thing that led me to believe this was when I worked out in a gym I didn’t get much in the way of results, but when I switched 100% to bodyweight training I started making real gains. Now I know that it wasn’t the weights themselves that caused my lack of gains, but how I was training. Continue reading →

Fighter Conditioning at the Cave

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Jon

Guest post by my friend, Coach Frank DiMeo!

Ever since my early days of martial arts training I have always looked for ways to become more effective.

Much of the best information I gathered over the years came at a painful, and often humbling, price.

No matter what type of fighter you are, being stronger and faster is essential. Being able to “go the distance” is also a must as is developing greater stopping power in your strikes and kicks. Continue reading →

Why I Hate Kickboxing

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Jon

For months now people have been asking me to implement a Kick Boxing program at Warrior Fitness Gym. I’ve been resisting the pressure mainly due to one important factor – I hate kick boxing. 🙂

Allow me to clarify. I hate what real kick boxing has devolved into, the dreaded “cardio” kick boxing. To me, cardio kick boxing is almost worse than Zumba as far as fitness goes. Continue reading →

4 Principles For Punching Power

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Jon

Principles of Striking Power

1. Whole Body Power

All movement happens in real life happens in three dimensions, so why train exercises that only incorporate one or two? Training muscles in isolation, unless it is used to rehab a specific injury, range of motion, or strengthen a particular muscle to add to the whole, does not work in martial art. With very few special exceptions, the majority of exercises in this manual will train movements in three dimensions utilizing diagonal, rotary, and angular strength, not muscles. As discussed above, this is the goal of SPP – neurological adaptation.

2. Stored Elastic Energy (SEE)

Stored Elastic Energy is basically the potential energy stored in tendons and connective tissue as a way to power movement. An easy exercise to begin to feel stored elastic energy is to stand in a natural stance with feet shoulder width apart. Bend your right arm and raise it up to shoulder height as if you were about to throw the most telegraphed punch in history (don’t worry, it’s just an exercise). Now, lead from the elbow and pull your fist back. Allow your torso to rotate, but keep the feet planted and the hips facing forward. When you reach the end of your range of motion, hang out there for a second and feel the tension (torque) on the spine. Now simply relax and release that torque to throw the punch. Don’t add any driving forces with muscle. You can’t propel it any faster; you’ll just slow it down. Feel it? Try it again. Do it with the other arm. Remember the feeling. This is stored elastic energy (SEE). This point here about creating torque or stored elastic energy (SEE) in the spine is essential in being able to move powerfully without winding up or telegraphing the movement. If you are having trouble feeling it, try to exaggerate the movement. Make it much larger than necessary to study the feeling. It should feel like a tension in the lower back near the bottom of the spine. When this tension (torque) is relaxed (released), the movement happens.

3. Structure / Kamae

Many people tend to use the terms alignment and structure almost interchangeably but in actuality, alignment is a component of structure. For example, looking at a natural standing posture, good alignment would be:

Crown up
Chin down
Shoulders packed down
Spine lifting up (through crown)
Spine pulling down (through the sacrum)
Hips under shoulders
Knees under hips
Mid-foot balance
Chest is relaxed
Butt not sticking out
Hips are open
Knees are over the toes
Weight evenly distributed (50/50)
No leaning forward or backward

This puts the whole body into proper alignment. Structure also includes (in my lexicon) the balance of tensions within the body’s soft tissues. Think of spine as the mast of a sail boat while the soft tissues (fascia) act as the stays keeping the tensional balance.

4. Breathing

How often do you think about breathing as it relates to striking? Yet it is absolutely essential to maintain proper breathing when in combat or simply hitting a heavy bag, mitt, or an opponent. Lack of breath control affects the rest of your body and hinders your overall performance.

This article is from my e-book manual, Warrior Fitness Guide to Striking Power.

Want to learn even more about how to bring together fitness training with your martial art practice for vast performance improvement? Join me on a 6-week journey where I take you behind the curtain and show you how to build Martial Power!

Healing Yourself With Mobility – Part 3

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Jon

Healing and Mobility Part 3 – Everyday healing of neck, vertigo, and surviving training mistakes with mobility

Guest blog post by Eric Guttmann, U.S. Navy Officer, Author, Fitness Enthusiast and More!

In everyday matters joint mobility also saves the day. If for some reason you sleep with a craned neck and you wake up with neck pain you can easily and quickly get rid of it or reduce it significantly before you even head out to work by doing joint mobility. I have done so on various occasions and believe me that it is better to work with a “little nagging pain” that goes away that day than endure the day with the kind of pain that makes you think about taking a pain killer or that seriously interferes with your quality of life.

Joint mobility also PROTECTS you by giving you a resilient body that can handle training mistakes a lot better. As an example I was in Cartagena, Colombia, (yes, the same city where the Secret Service got in trouble) with the Navy and I woke up early to do incline sprints on the 300 year old walled city. The particular incline I chose was made of cobblestones and had holes in it. On my second sprint up this incline I completely twisted my ankle 90 degrees. Because I had already warmed up my ankle to FULL mobility I was able to finish the sprint, and more importantly FINISH my workout like nothing had happened. In fact, when I came down to do another set of sprints after I twisted my ankle a local came to me and said to me in Spanish “I saw what had happened to your ankle” somewhat concerned for my ability to safely walk on back to the hotel. I simply laughed, shrugged it off, thanked him for his concern and FINISHED my work out by doing FOUR more sets of sprints. I know for a fact that if the same thing had happened to me in my college days I would have been done for, because the same thing DID happen to me when I was in track and field and it took three weeks to heal!

Joint mobility has also helped me with my wife. She had a case of vertigo a year ago and I taught her joint mobility, as the medicines the doctor gave her only made her feel worse. The joint mobility (and acupuncture I gave her) where the keys to her recovery. To this day she does the neck series everyday as a preventative and feels great every time she does it.

As I mentioned in my previous article, many of my friends I teach these drills comment on how their lower backs loosen up and become pain-free after the mobility series. In fact, it was at the prodding of these friends that I decided to do my FULL mobility DVD, because they wanted something they could study in their homes after I left.

Now, in the first article I mentioned my father’s statement of “If you do something everyday, then everyday you will be able to do it.” Every morning I go through my routine and establish full mobility in every joint. I easily touch my wrists to the ground every morning. Now I ask you, if I establish full mobility every morning and touch my wrists to the floor easily and gracefully every morning, am I going to have full mobility and easily touch my wrists to the floor at 100 years of age? The answers is ABSOLUTELY YES! All I have to do is keep doing my FULL mobility routine every morning.

I have been practicing joint mobility for five years now ever since I had the epiphany with my healed ankle. I have been studying, incorporating, experimenting and refining my routine based on the works and/or my personal interaction with Pavel, Steve Maxwell, Scott Sonnon, Navy kinesiologists, Chek Practitioners, Z-Health, Mike Mahler, Chuck Habbaken, Bud Jeffries and others.

If you want to get your hands on the best mobility training out there and the EXACT one I have used to heal myself multiple times from the injuries sustained through training and life then click in the link below:

As an added bonus I am including a FREE BONUS which is my SECRET stretching routine to open up the hip and lengthen the spine which I found are the keys to maximizing my Qigong practice (which would be the second thing I most recommend for longevity).

Done together the joint mobility and stretches can be knocked out in under 26 minutes, yet your health and quality of life will expand to new and greater levels that will seem like a 1000% return on your investment.

Another bonus is a makeshift mobility test that you can do to gage whether you are at a Level 1, Level 2, or Level 3 joint mobility. If you train others you can also use it to gage where your clients are at and to monitor their progress over time.

So order this DVD now and try it for yourself. I know that you will feel immediately freer and open, even diminishing or completely getting rid off nagging pain if you are carrying any, at the end of the instructional session. That is right, I am saying that after going through the instructional part just ONCE you will feel an immediate improvement in your mobility! Commit to doing it everyday and you WILL have FULL mobility for the rest of your LIFE!

If you live in the New Jersey area and prefer personal instruction in mobility then I highly recommend you check out my friend Jon Haas’ school, Warrior Fitness at 4004 Sylon Blvd, Hainesport NJ, 08036, or give him a call at 609-556-8712 to set up an appointment or attend a class.

Read Eric’s complete bio HERE.

Intelligent Tension For Striking

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Jon

How intelligent is your usage of tension in striking?

All too often in training our punching and kicking techniques, we find what I’ve come to label as “dumb tension”. This is used by martial artists across the board either accidentally through lack of understanding of how the body should work, or taught and passed down from teacher to student on purpose through a lack of knowledge.

Dumb tension is defined as either the complete usage of whole body, generalized tension to attempt to deliver extra power to a specific kick or strike, OR the complete lack of any and all tension to attempt to whip a wet noodle-like strike at the opponent or target. Both of these things miss the boat, in my opinion.

Walk the Middle Path

Intelligent Tension (IT) is simply walking the middle path between the two extremes and using the appropriate amount of tension required, and only that amount, to coordinate whole body power into a strike. More tension does not necessarily equal more power in terms of striking. Actually, the more tension recruited for a movement, the more you apply the brakes physiologically since your body is now moving against itself in an attempt to use generalized tension. When both the agonist muscle and antagonist muscle are working against each other the result is less overall power delivery for the strike. Learning to appropriately activate only the muscles necessary to accomplish the task removes the brakes, ups the power wattage, and increases the efficiency since you are no longer using energy you don’t need.

Additionally, the more tension created in a movement, the less mobility you have. If you look at tension and mobility on one line with tension on one side and mobility on the other, the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. When we train the nervous system to fire high tension all the time, we lose mobility and range of motion. While this is perfectly acceptable and absolutely essential for a purely low-gear strength based activity like dead lifting, it is not fine for martial arts.

This article was a short excerpt from my manual, Warrior Fitness Guide to Striking Power.

Get The Warrior Fitness Guide to Striking Power (e-book) and the original book, Warrior Fitness: Conditioning for Martial Arts (e-book) FREE when you pick up my brand new program – WarFit Combat Conditioning!

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