Tag Archives: whole body power

Train the Body, Everything will Follow

Posted on by
Reply
How do you get great at so many different facets of martial art at one time?
 
What one thing can you do to bring up your game across the board, no matter what are you practice?
 

Train the body.

 
✅ Want to get better at grappling? Train the body
✅ Want to get better at striking? Train the body
✅ Want to get better at weapons work? Train the body
✅ Want to become more powerful? Train the body
✅ Want to become harder to throw? Train the body
 

Why does this work?

 
Your body is the delivery platform for every skill in martial arts. Thus, if you properly condition the body, you improve your ability to acquire higher and higher levels of skill across the board. Build a stronger foundation and the tower can go much higher.
 
Once you build a highly conditioned body for martial arts, all your other skills instantly become much easier to train.
 
Instead of focusing on all the many different skills, weapons, tactics, techniques, etc. in the martial arts, look at the one commonality between them all – YOU. To be more specific, your body.
 
If you put in the work at the level of conditioning the body, ALL your skills improve. You are focusing your energy on creating a body specific for budo. This type of training precedes all of your techniques. It builds a stronger, broader foundation so that any skill you choose to work on is automatically improved!
 
Over the past 30 years of training in martial arts, I have been privileged to cross-train in many different arts from Jujutsu to Karate to Russian Systema to BJJ and MMA to Krav Maga and Combatives to Internal Arts and weapons training. In each of these I was able to, not only hold my own, but develop a remarkable degree of skill in a very short amount of time – why?
 
 
Do you want to keep struggling to reach your full potential or do you want a specific, proven, step-by-step system to get you there?
 

What Muscles Does This Work?

Posted on by
Reply

As humans we have a unique, sometimes almost obsessive need to catalog, categorize, and label things.  Exercise is no different.

In the midst of a tough workout session, almost invariably someone will suddenly stop and ask the pressing question – “by the way, what muscles is this working?”

muscles_human_body_front1

Why do our brains do this?

In my opinion, it’s part curiosity, part obsessive need to categorize, but also part delaying tactic.  Just like the little kid who suddenly has a million and one questions about anything under the sun in order to delay having to go to bed, we ask a seemingly pertinent question to delay having to do the exercise a little longer.  Because we associate some type of pain with the workout, be it the physical pain of muscle ache, or the psychological pain of having to push through our limits, we do the logical thing (to us) and stall the inevitable.  The question allows us to push that pause button in the movement and stop for a few moments while we regroup ourselves for the effort ahead.

But What Muscles Does It Work?

Within the Warrior Fitness Training System, the answer to the question of which muscles are working in a particular exercise requires a little more explanation.  In conventional fitness training the answer is usually confined to something like, “well, this exercise works your biceps, that next exercise works your chest, and this last one is working your lats.”

The exercises we do in Warrior Fitness tend to have a much broader, system-wide effect.  Our exercises are always multi-planar, multi-joint, and 3 dimensional.  So the short answer to the question of which muscles does this work is usually – All of them!

How can this be?

Instead of viewing the body as made up of individual muscles, Warrior Fitness teaches that the body is one interconnected system where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, so that when one thing moves everything moves.  Why do I teach it this way?  Well, because that’s how the body is actually built.  More on this later…

What this idea does is allow us to express power in a much more functional way for combat, sport, and life.  Real power is expressed in only 2 ways – from the ground up and from the center out, oftentimes as a combination of both.  Never is power expressed by an individual muscle group alone.  It’s way too weak and ineffective.

The choice is yours.  How do you want to train?  Whole body integrated power is my method of choice.

My latest program, Ninja Missions Program 1 is a fantastic example of how to train for this whole body power.  Make sure you do yourself and your training a favor and check it out!!

Ninja Mission Cover