Tag Archives: martial power program

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 →

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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