How to Train More Every Day

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Jon

The only way to go from average martial artists to outstanding is to train more. You may be limited in how many classes you can attend on a weekly basis or how many seminars you can attend on a monthly basis, but you are not limited in how much solo training you can do on a day to day basis. The key to greatness lies in solo training. This is how you build yourself up to mastery. Step by step, session by session, day by day. There is no other way.

That being said, I humbly offer the following 4 suggestions on how to train more every day.

1) Awareness, Awareness, Awareness

Keep your eyes, ears, and senses open to your surroundings. Make it a habit to not allow anyone to sneak up on you or surprise you. Make a game out of knowing where people around you are, even if you can’t “see” them.

2) Don’t Just Walk, Ninja Walk!

Take the opportunity no matter where you are to practice your balance, footwork, and movement skills. This doesn’t mean you have to stalk your boss in the company restroom – unless you want to get fired! But when you move, whether it’s in the office, walking down the street, in the grocery store, or out in the woods, pay attention to your balance, body control, and coordination. Raise and lower each foot purposefully. Do not let your walking be “controlled falling”.

3) Mini Training Sessions

All of us seem to think that if we can’t dedicate a solid hour or so to solo training than we just don’t have the time to do it. My solution for you is this – train in 5 minute increments. No matter who you are and what type of work you do, you have 5 minutes to spare during your day. If you look for it, you probably have many blocks of 5 minute increments during your day. Don’t waste them! Use them to train. In 5 minutes you can practice all the Sanshin No Kata 5 times each side. In 5 minutes you can do 100 push-ups (maybe!). In 5 minutes you can practice ukemi. In 5 minutes you can do a flow drill. Be creative, figure it out! All those mini blocks of 5 minute training sessions add up to huge amounts of time over a week, month, year, and decade. You’re in this for the long haul, aren’t you?

4) Set a Goal

Figure out what your own personal training goals are and write them down. Give yourself a deadline to achieve them. Add actions steps to help you reach each one. Develop a plan of attack and hold yourself accountable. Need help developing a plan? Ask me. I can help you. It’s what I do.

How Natural is Your Shizen No Kamae?

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Jon

This may come as a shock, but I believe many people training in the martial arts today are doing shizen no kamae (natural posture) wrong. How can this be? After all, aren’t you supposed to be just standing there naturally? Well, yes and no.

The problem stems from the fact that even though this is a “natural” posture, there are not that many people who stand naturally, naturally. We need to be taught how to be natural; or perhaps it’s better to say we need to unlearn and strip away from our bearing all that is NOT natural to find a true shizen no kamae.

TenChiJin

In order for the body to be supported with minimal effort and tension, 2 forces that act on us all the time must be understood and mastered. The 2 forces I am referring to are Ten (heaven) and Chi (earth). Ten and Chi are controlled by Jin (man) standing in the middle of the 2 – TenChiJin. Ten, the force of heaven, is gravity pulling the whole body down towards the earth. Chi, or the force of earth, is support pushing the body up opposing the force of gravity.

The body itself though must be conditioned to manipulate these 2 forces (there is a kuden). When the body is properly conditioned it then acts like a tensegrity structure – bones act like compressive struts pushing out while connective tissue pulls in. This combined with an understanding of how the forces of heaven and earth work create a profound neutral within the body, or zero state.

How Do We Stand?

In practical terms though, how should we stand? Let’s start with the head and work our way down…

Lift upwards slightly with the crown of the head allowing the chin to lower.

This straightens the vertebrae at the back of the neck. Shoulders are back and down sitting on the spine.

The back should be flat.

Do not tuck the pelvis.

The spine should be suspended from above like a skeleton hanging in a Science classroom.

Do not have the arms lay flush against the body.

There should be a golfball sized space under the armpits.

The bottom of the spine pulls straight down from the tail bone.

Feel like you are sitting on a high stool.

Allow the knees to bend slightly.

Feet should be shoulder width apart and pointed straight forward as if on railroad tracks.

Legs should feel like they are squeezing a beach ball.

Remember though, the ball puts outward pressure on the legs as they squeeze in.

Both directions, not just one.

The weight is carried in the hollow behind the balls of the feet. In Chinese Medicine, this is known as the yongquan or bubbling well point.

All of the above points must be maintained to have a truly “natural” shizen no kamae. Oh yeah, last point – RELAX! 🙂

The Secret to Becoming a Great Martial Artist

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Jon

There is one very special, not so secret, secret to becoming a great martial artist. Want to know what it is?

Do the work.

Train every day. Yes, every day. Great martial artists train all the time. Not once a week. Not every other day, not just during class. Every day. Multiple times a day.

The not so great martial artists are content to train only in class or at seminars. They spend lots of time thinking about training, maybe, but the actual doing, not so much.

For you the process is simple – not easy. Daily training. How do you do this? Figure it out. You don’t have to think about when you’re going to take a shower during the day or brush your teeth, you just do it. Make your training a priority and get it done. While others are busy doing other things, you are training. While others are busy daydreaming about training, you are training. While others are busy running their mouths about training, you are – you guessed it – training.

Soon it will begin to show. The difference may not be too apparent at first, but consistency of training will win out. It may not be so obvious in a year, or even 2. But after 5 years it will be very noticeable. After a decade, you will be miles ahead of the rest of the martial arts landscape.

You will move better.

You will feel different when they touch you.

You will have power in motion and in stillness.

You will stand out, not because of ego or anything like that but because the work you put in day after day, week after week, month after month, and year upon year will cause your skills to grow exponentially. The growth and development created simply by training every day will become self evident.

So ask yourself – do you want to be a mediocre martial hobbyist (not that there’s anything wrong with that), or do you want to be legendary?

The choice is yours. As for me, F__k being mediocre. 🙂

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Fitness Dangers for Bujinkan Students

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Jon

Martial artists need to be extremely cautious when choosing a fitness program to compliment their training. While the right program can support, enhance, and protect budo practice, the wrong one can just as easily derail it.

Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu relies on relaxed, whole-body power devoid of excess muscular tension to properly execute its techniques.

Think About This

Think about this – each and every action you repeat over and over again encodes in your nervous system and creates change in your body, no matter how you value that change. Meaning that if you want to train yourself to move softly, subtly, and with relaxed power for your martial art practice yet you perform high tension power lifting exercises at the gym, guess what gets carried over to your budo? Yup. Too much tension.

If you are working towards using your whole body as a unit in budo practice so that when one thing moves, everything moves (can you do this?), but you perform bodybuilding style splits and isolation exercises in your strength training, what do you think happens to your functional integration? Yup. Bye-bye.

The critical thing to note here is that, as stated above, every action you do, no matter what your opinion of that action is, has an affect on your nervous system. When 2 actions compete, both lose out.

Shouldn’t your supplementary training and fitness support and enhance your main goal of becoming a more proficient martial artist? If it doesn’t, you might want to ask yourself what is more important to you? These are tough questions for a life long, committed budoka to wrestle with – trust me! I know. I walk a thin line in my training every day. But I made my choice long ago… You see, I love fitness, but budo is in my blood.

So when you go looking for a strength and conditioning program to support and protect your martial arts practice, remember something – I have been there, done that, and got the t shirt (several, actually).

Already Done For You

The research has been done. The exercises, protocols, and programs have been rigorously tested. The results are in. I have created several Done For You programs that I KNOW will change your Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu practice for the better. As a 20+ year veteran of the Bujinkan (I started training in 1989), I have put together these programs for you – Bujinkan students and teachers alike. It’s all here….

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 →

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!

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.

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Preparing Ninja for a Mission

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Jon

My name is Ichiro Watanabe. I am a chunin, a middle level ninja of the Togakure clan.

Our small village is secluded deep in the mountains near Mt. Togakushi, otherwise known as Togakure Mountain. I could tell you exactly where, but I’d have to kill you. No joke, it’s a matter of survival for my family and clan.

You see the year is 1601, one year after the famous Battle of Sekigahara which brought Ieyasu Tokugawa to power uniting Japan. There is still much to do, however, and the need for the services of our ninja clan is still very great. Continue reading →

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