Tag Archives: jon haas

How I Healed My Neck with Mobility & Breathing

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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.

Neck pain

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

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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!

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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 →

The Worst Reason Ever

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The other day my daughters and I were sitting in a local diner having breakfast.  As we sat there looking at the menus and discussing  what we were planning to order, my 4 year old looked at her older sister and said – “Hey!  Get your elbows off the table!”

“No way!” replied my 12 year old, “why should I?” Continue reading →

The Most Powerful Form of Training

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“Look at this guy – he’s a beast!”

“You’re an animal!”

“He’s got beast strength!”

In the fitness world it’s become very common to refer to extremely strong and capable individuals as “Beasts” or “Animals”.  We use these terms to separate them out from the regular crowd, to distinguish their strength as something more than human.  These people push past their puny human limits and transcend into the realm of beast-like strength. Continue reading →

Why I Hate Kickboxing

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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

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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.

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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!

MP

Intelligent Tension For Striking

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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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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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Healing Yourself With Mobility – Part 2

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Healing and Protecting the Lower Back

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

In my last article I mentioned how I healed a sprained ankle myself using joint mobility. Now whenever something happens I can quickly and easily fix it myself.  For example I was training my heavy snatches with a training plan I wrote for myself.  This plan laid out progressively heavier snatches as I got stronger and perfected my technique.  I was to spend a minimum of a week with each weight class or until I mastered the weight before going up another level.

I started to progress faster than I anticipated and I got so eager that I ignored my own training protocol and quickly jumped to the 88lb kettlebell instead of spending time training that week with the 70lb kettlebell like I had planned.  As I snatched the 88lb with abandon I felt a sharp pain in my back and instantly knew something had gone wrong.  On the drive back to work the curves on the road became sheer AGONY for my lower back! I managed to see the chiropractor the next day and did my joint mobility everyday morning and night, slowly working through the pain and increasing my range of motion.  Within FOUR days I was snatching the 70lb kettlebell with perfect form and also learned to honor my innate wisdom in planning.

Many of my friends to whom I teach the lower back and spine mobility 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.

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Now, if you remember on 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:

MovingFreelyDVD-219x300As 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!

MovingFreelyDVD-219x300If 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.

 

Eric GuttmannRead Eric’s complete bio HERE.