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 →

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!

The Day That Changed My Life

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Jon

I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was 16 years old, sitting in the back seat of my parent’s car thumbing through the latest issue of Black Belt magazine when I came to a full page advertisement for the 1989 Tai Kai with Ninjutsu Grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi. To my shock and utter astonishment this 3-day seminar with the master ninja and his top students from Japan was being held in the United States. Not only was it being held in the US, but in my home state of NJ, not even an hour drive from my house! Something clicked in my brain – I HAD to go to this thing! Continue reading →

Training in Confined Spaces

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Jon

If you have Warrior Fitness Training style questions, send them to me. I answer any and all serious (well, mostly serious) questions about training, my Warrior Fitness System, my views on fitness, martial arts, self defense, strength & conditioning, or training for sport/athletic performance.

Here’s a video answer to a question I received the other day from Robert, a Bujinkan student in Sweden. Continue reading →

This is Dangerous to YOUR Training

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jon

Alright. Strap in, kids because this is gonna be a bumpy one.

There is a huge problem that affects many people training in martial arts today that needs to be addressed because it is severely inhibiting their progress and skill. It applies to fitness training as well, so if you don’t train martial art read this with whatever type of training you do in mind. Continue reading →

Combat Conditioning and A Challenge

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Jon

The video below is a brand new combat conditioning circuit I put together for martial artists. It will be especially good for my Buyu (warrior friends) training in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu. If you are ready to put your body, mind, and spirit to the test, this circuit is guaranteed to kick your conditioning into high gear. Continue reading →

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