Despite the multitude of different martial arts and infinite variations on training methods there is one common component that links all systems and styles – the human body.  Regardless of culture and ideology, size or shape, armed or unarmed, modern or traditional or any of the other divisions that have arose in the martial world the human structure is the one thing that unites all.  Understanding the core principles that govern the human body forms the foundation of all arts and our awareness and view of the body has a direct correlation with how we engage it and more importantly develop its potential.  At the heart of studying these core principles is the awareness of how the human body is constructed and how best to train it for optimum performance.

The common view of human construction is that our body is formed as a series of bones that sit upon one another to form the structure we know as the skeleton.  In my treatment room I have a skeleton and in order for him to stand erect he has numerous bolts, springs and wires that hold him together – without them he’d be nothing but a pile of sticks on the floor.  In reality our skeletal structure is exactly the same and on its own it has absolutely structural integrity.  Far from being a like a house of bricks with one bone being stacked upon another our body structure far more closely resembles a suspension bridge in design than a static pile of bricks.  Our bones form only one component of a far more dynamic whole.  It is only through the way the soft tissues of the body (muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia) weave the bones together that allows us to stand tall and dynamically move and interact with our environment.

In the book ‘Anatomy Trains’ renowned structural bodyworker Tom Myers likens the relationship of the soft tissue and skeletal system of a human to that of a mast and rigging of a sailing boat.  In sailing if you didn’t have the rigging attached to the mast and various points of the hull, the mast would be ripped from the deck as soon as gust of wind caught the sail.  What the rigging allows for is the distribution of the ‘pull’ on the mast to multiple points on the sturdy structure of the hull.  In exactly the same process if you think of the spine as a mast and our muscles as the rigging, when the spine is pulled forwards the rigging at the rear will tighten and pull to stop the spine from snapping forwards and vice versa if it is pulled backwards.  Many people who have back pain often visit me to have that specific area treated and are surprised when I sometimes start work on the front of their bodies to address ‘pulls’ that may be causing the ‘rigging’ in the back to pull harder.

To enable dynamic movement our bodyweight needs to be suspended within the ‘rigging’ of the body rather than being precariously balanced on the bones.  Understanding the way this system of ‘rigging’ pulls and slackens is the key to grasping the anatomy of human movement.  Thinking holistically will provide clarity and reason for all of our movements and may even help identify areas for improvement and allow you to develop a ‘holistic’ training regimen.

Another misconception that often shapes peoples training routines is that muscles work independently of each other.  Luckily this view is beginning to change as many athletes and martial artists are pursuing what is being coined as ‘functional strength training’ or ‘whole body workouts – yet still far too many people still train their body parts in isolation rather than as a holistic unit.  In my opinion I think isolation training actually negatively impacts on the performance of the body when compared against whole body function specific training programs.  The only context I recommend isolation training to my clients is during rehabilitation to bring an isolated body part back up to strength after which I advise them to switch onto exercises that will re-integrate the damaged or dysfunctional area back into line with the whole system.  Other than for aesthetic reasons I see absolutely no benefit to isolation training and in clients I have dealt with who follow “legs today, chest tomorrow and then arms the next day” programs I see imbalances in the body that lead to injury and tension in the system as a whole.

The key to both health and performance in the martial arts is having balance and harmony in the body.  When in balance the body can operate as a coordinated unit rather than as a series of isolated units that fire up independently all scrambling to fulfil their roles in life.  In tai chi we have a concept called ‘passing muscle to muscle’ whereby we train the muscles of the body to work co-operatively and efficiently and this is one of the primary purposes of the seemingly slow pace you often see tai chi practiced at.  This pace is needed to ensure that the muscles engage sequentially in a clean continuous partnerships and this level of coordination cannot be achieved through isolation training.  It is like tuning a car.  Once the muscles are tuned properly you can then begin to increase their capacity by moving more enthusiastically to stimulate synchronised growth throughout the whole body.

This then takes us onto another vital concept when engaging the body in a therapeutic manner to encourage health - something in our system we call ‘stimulation not decimation’.  Back in the glory days of the 60’s and 70’s martial arts people used to do thousands upon thousands of exercises, drills and techniques – many people believed that the muscles and bones would respond favourable if pushed to a point exhaustion.  The theory was that as the body recovered it would repair and adapt itself into a stronger machine. Many of the old timers from this era now spend a lot of time nursing chronically bad backs, knees, shoulders and other constant aches caused by the years of abuse.

Whilst there is some wisdom in this approach this approach a distinction needs to be made between ‘decimation’ and ‘stimulation’.  Overtly intensive training requires the body to repair damage rather than develop a stronger unit – there is only so much repair work the body can cope with before it breaks down.  This brutal approach to training is what we refer to as ‘decimation’.  ‘Stimulation’ of growth lets us tap into the body’s ability to evolve and requires us to look at the system as a whole and how best to engage it.

In my last article we discussed how humans learn from experience and we can use this quality to evolve the body’s physical capacity.  To stimulate the development of the body for martial arts you need to look at which function you want to improve and then decide an exercise or drill that will suit that function.  You then need to push the body through that drill just to the point that you can feel it start take effect - this is as far as you need go.  The body will take notice and then start to adapt and strengthen the structures you have worked – you have stimulated growth.  If you push past this point you start to decimate the body and it then has to divert resources allocated for recovery and regeneration to repairing and patching damage and ultimately this places a load on the body that you’ll eventually pay the price for.

When planning a program for self-development we need to look at how to nurture the body – not torture it.  In order to do this takes awareness and discipline.   It requires us to dispassionately apply reason and ‘holistic’ thinking to our training.  We need understand the system as a whole and it is impossible to evaluate that which is weak and that which is strong without first considering an individual components part in the whole – the evaluation of strength and weakness is always relative to the condition of body as a complete dynamic unit.

In order to ensure that our training is therapeutic and having a positive effect on our body we need to understand how the body is structured and functions as a holistic unit to avoid any training that will take a certain isolated part out of synch with the rest of the system.  I believe wholeheartedly that we should walk away from training in a better state than we walked into it.  As a martial artist I have no interest in what looks pretty I’m merely interested in the practical and the functional.  I love the martial arts and want to train every single day so I refuse to do anything that will stop me getting up and doing what I love every morning.  I’ve long ditched the training sessions that took three days to recover from and opted for ones that stimulate and invigorate my body on a daily basis.  Understanding these concepts is fundamental to long term prosperity and health through the martial arts!

Gavin King is a physical therapist and martial arts instructor based in Essex.  He can be contacted via email on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or via http://www.shikon.com. You can keep up to date with all his articles and training via his blog on The Martial Archive at http://www.themartialarchive.com/gavinking.

I’m not what you’d call a body beauty obsessed person and don’t really have any physical features that I’m particularly dissatisfied with.  Don’t get me wrong I’m no Brad Pitt and am under no illusions that I’m one of gods beautiful people being blessed with a busted nose and generously sized ears, but on the whole I can live with the image in the mirror.  The only thing I desperately wish to change about my body is its posture and this is only something I notice when I catch my reflection occasionally in the mirror during tai chi and I get that immediate sense of ‘fugly’….

Over the years I’ve developed what in the structural bodywork world we’d probably term as ‘lordosis of the lumbar spine’ and a ‘anterior tilt of the pelvis’ – which in plain English means I stick my arse out (see the picture to below).  It has a very direct effect of my tai chi performance causing me to lean forwards, jut my chin out and prevents me from really getting into my feet.  This is especially bad during push hands where there is no hiding place for glaring postural problems.  The really annoying thing about this little physical quirk of mine is that I just can’t seem to shake it, no matter how much I try… I mentioned this to Steve and it became the subject for my lesson yesterday.

Steve had me to stand in front of the mirror and we noticed how subtlety but noticeable misaligned my body was.  My head was shifted slightly to the left, my right shoulder was slightly raised and twisted forwards and this cascaded problems down through my body.  Seeing these obvious faults I started to correct myself I shifted my head to the right to realign it and dropped my shoulder.  Steve pointed out that instead of correcting the problems I’d actually created more tension the body.  He said that my problem wasn’t the alignment of my bones but in the excess tension being held in the soft tissues (muscles, tendons, fascia, etc).

I often borrow the analogy the author of the book ‘Anatomy Trains’ Tom Myers uses when describing the structure of the human body.  He likens it to a sailboat - with the spine being the like the mast of a boat and the soft tissues around it as the rigging.  On a sailboat the rigging is there to stabilise the mast – if the mast is pulled to the right the rigging to the left pulls tighter to compensate.  Likewise in the body if the soft tissues of one side pull in one direction on the spine (or any other bone) other soft tissues will need to tighten to compensate.  This process of compensation creates more and more tension within the soft tissues or ‘rigging’ of the body.

For example I rectified the slight tilt to the left with my head by pulling the rigging on the right hand side tighter.  The trouble is in doing so I hadn't conisdered the potential reason for this tilt might have been that the rigging on my left hand side was already pulling too tight to start off with.  So by pulling my head straight I created tension in my right hand side and added even more tension to the already tense left hand side.  At this point my mind was already melting and I hadn’t even got to the shoulder issues yet.   Looking disheartened I asked Steve what advice he could give me help to sort out my posture,

“I’ve given you everything you need.  There isn’t any more advice I can offer.  I’ve told you how to align your body and how to release the tension through ‘softening’ you’ve just got to go away and do it.  The problem isn’t the alignment of the bones it’s the excess tension in the soft tissues that’s pulling on your bones.  You need to take your mind into the soft tissues and out of the bones… otherwise you’ll be chasing problems forever!”

Steve was right and I was making what I consider to be one of the cardinal sins of bodywork, treating the symptom not the cause.  There are a few forms of bodywork that specialise in bone setting whereby you’ll be clicked and cracked back into place.  To me, using the sailboat analogy, this is like snapping the mast back into place without sorting out the rigging.  What I find with many people who go to practitioners like this is that they have numerous treatments having the same adjustments done over and over again.  They have their bones ‘clicked’ back into place without having the very thing that is pulling them out of place considered.  Bones usually do not spontaneously jump out of alignment instead they are pulled by the soft tissues of the body – so if you don’t address the excess tension in the ‘rigging’ the mast is always going to be being yanked out of place.   This same ‘rigging’ was causing my postural issues.

I was reminded of the advice handed down in the tai chi classics on posture, then of how to take my awareness through my body to find excess tension and then release it through 'softening'.  Sorting out the ‘pulls’ in the rigging rather than adding to them seemed a rather sensible option when it was spelled out.  So now I’m going to take my mind away from the mast and place it in the rigging!

MARTIAL THERAPY WORKSHOP
7 March 2010 – 11am to 3pm

Shi Kon Martial Arts Centre
Chatham Hill
Chatham
Kent ME5 7BB

Gavin King and Benito (his skeleton) will be holding a special workshop on unlocking your health and happiness through simple massage techniques, qi gong and relaxation exercises.

SUITABLE FOR NON-MARTIAL ARTISTS
(PARTNERS AND FRIENDS WELCOME)

£20 DOJO MEMBERS - £30 NON-MEMBERS

PLEASE BRING A LARGE TOWEL/BLANKET AND A PILLOW

Ring 07834 555 772 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for more details or to book a place.

Some martial artists are obsessed with fighting; they think about, dream about it, talk about it, write about it and think if you’re not actively ‘fighting’ every training session you 'ain’t a proper martial artist'… this  attitude I think is worthy of contemplation.

I personally agree with the need to challenge ourselves in allow for growth.  Growing up amongst martial artists and those who engage in physical pursuits has given me very strong sense of the type of personal growth that can be achieved when we challenge our perceptions, horizons and fears and the various methods we can employ to do this.  This experience has also shown me how insular and narrow minded we can become when we take on the wrong opponents and fight for the wrong reasons – in these cases instead of broadening our horizons we can actually isolate ourselves from the world and compound our fears.  So without direction and objective reasoning ‘fighting’ can take us to unhealthy places.

In truth I think ‘fight’ is the wrong word to use and a reason why some ‘fighters’ can’t see beyond the end of their noses.  Myself personally I’ve never really enjoyed fighting – it always seemed rather barbaric and uncouth and went against the grain of the dignified image of the martial artist I've had from a young age.  What I have always longed for is experience and the stimulation I get from entering the unknown.  My personality craves knowledge and wisdom; I like to know how something feels and how it interconnects with everything around it.  Trouble is that rehashing the same experience over and over for me soon loses its appeal, it gets boring and I need to go out and find something else to do to occupy my cravings with.  Without broadening my horizons I do not find anything to satisfy this need for stimulation… this quirk of character has blessed me with a very interesting life, both inside and outside of the martial arts.

Part of me can’t help but question if these so called ‘fighters’ are the ones we need to be looking to as role models – are they really the brave and the strong when they constantly engage in the same style of fight day after day, week after week, year after year?  How long do we engage in a ‘fight’ before it ceases to be a ‘fight’ for us?  After which what is the point of continually engaging said ‘fight’?  Will continually doing something we are comfortable with encourage growth?  The human ability to adapt and evolve leads me to think not.

As I said part of my character chases after experience and the martial arts have provided me with a wonderful means to satisfy this need.  When I moved up from the kids class into the adults class as a 9 stone dripping wet 15 year old I was battered every session, but after a while I learnt how not to take as many beatings.  At 16 I joined one of the toughest kick boxing camps I could find and started the process again.  A few years later still with a baby face and bum fluff on my chin I started working security at the nightclubs and had to adapt to that environment.  As a result of all of this experience my training stopped satisfying the cravings so I started my own group and we systematically worked our way through practically every style of fighting you can imagine, travelling, studying and ‘fighting’ with many different people, but again all of this soon became bland and easy and the growth almost ground to a halt.  And then I found shiatsu…

Starting shiatsu took me out of my comfort zone and put me in an environment outside of the world of fighters and martial artists – I started to associate with people who’d never had a fight in their life.  On my very first lesson we had to pair off and introduce our partners to the group once we’d found out a bit about their personal history.  My partner introduced himself, and this is the god’s honest truth, with, “….I’m currently on anti-depressants and having counselling after being abused and a victim of violence and have anxiety attacks because of it.” You should have seen the look of dread in his face when I replied, “My name is Gavin King and I’m a bouncer and a martial artist!”  I just didn’t know how to deal with people like him – I was an alien in this world and it scared the crap out of me.

In this world matters couldn’t be rectified simply by training harder and applying a bit of spite, but these were the only tools I had.  Everything in the martial arts had taught me that being fast and first won the day, but these things meant nothing to these people and I was defenceless and open.  And at first every comment hit home and caused me emotional distress – you’re tense, you’re anxious, you’re not being sensitive to your clients needs, etc, etc.  These were like battle cry’s to me… a voice inside me kept saying well let’s step onto the mat and see who’s anxious, who’s tense and there we’ll know the truth!  The thing I failed to realise is that this was their mat, so I made it mine.  Now I was back in the children’s class again and relishing the first real ‘fight’ I had in years.

Around about the same time I happened upon a lesson with Steve who systematically tore apart everything I was doing; my thinking, my movement, my aggression and showed me my glaring weaknesses.  I found a new fight, tai chi.  Having the mental fortitude to do 10 rounds all out on the bag for me was easy, full contact sparring wouldn’t even raise a earbrow, standing on the door in front of a thousand people became just a job… don’t get me wrong I still got knackered on the bag, got battered in sparring and felt the brown adrenaline on the door, but it wasn’t anything special after a while, it was something I could do.  Being able to do a 20 minute form continuously without the slightest pause in my movement still to this day eludes me – my mind flutters, my body tires and I just don’t have the skills to deliver the goods.  Tai chi is glorious for someone like me because it has no hiding places and there is no cheating - a bonafide unadulterated challenge!

You see it’s all good and well these people telling us to ‘fight’ but who are these guys actually  fighting?  What are they doing that is so special?  Most of those dishing out this advice haven’t even got the goods to be able to handle running their own lives, many are plagued with self doubt, are insecure, penniless, aggressive and to be honest are pretty undesirable people to be around.  These people don’t fight; instead they insulate themselves by cowering in the arenas they are comfortable in.  It’s not something to admire or even aspire to.  In one of my classes I have the pleasure of teaching a lady who has multiple sclerosis and has trouble simply standing let alone marching through a twenty minute form, but she still soldiers on.  That’s a real fighter; someone who steps up to the plate and takes on a real challenge.  For me she is a martial artist worthy of looking up to!

So I guess what I’m really saying is that if you’re going to be picking a fight, make sure it’s a good one!

When I was in my early 20’s I got my first place and moved out of my parents home.   The independence was great, no more being told to pick up dirty socks off the floor or being berated for being too loud coming in after a few drinks.  It didn’t take too long for me to realise that liberation came at a price and whilst not being told to do the dishes was exhilarating  the downside was that if I didn’t do the dishes no one else did either.  Very quickly my lovely new bachelor pad resembled a cesspit and became a rather unpleasant place to live.  Another realisation was that the longer I left between cleaning sessions the more the rubbish built up making the task so huge it appeared impossible.  Things became so bad that I eventually sold the place and got married!

Although most of us appreciate that keeping our homes clean and clutter free is an essential part of making them pleasant places to be very few of us pay the same consideration to our own body.  Just like with a home without regularly maintenance and house keeping our body will quickly become a very unpleasant place to be and the longer left between spring cleans the more crap will accumulate.  It is alarming the amount of people I meet who do not like to live in their own skin and scary the number who actually hate it – and as the world spins quicker the number of those dissatisfied with the own internal environment is increasing at an epidemic rate.

In the outside world we appreciate that if rubbish and filth are allowed to accumulate disease will follow, but the only time most of us even pay the slightest attention to the world inside ourselves is once disease has taken hold.  Only once our body becomes uninhabitable do we give any thought to taking care of it – up until this point it’s ‘party time’ 24/7!

Disease (‘dis-ease’) does not target the strong; it doesn’t look for a tough fight.  Like any predator it targets the weak and vulnerable looking for an environment it can grab an easy foothold in before attacking.  So in order to prepare ourselves for the fight we need to give our body a fighting chance by ensuring that it has a strong foundation from which to defend itself.  But like with my old flat, once the filth has piled up beginning the cleaning process starts to look like mission impossible… which is why the task needs to be broken down and tackled one room at a time.

With my clients, some of whom have multiple serious conditions, I help them break down the task of ‘cleaning house’ in order of importance to make things managable and bearable.  Quite often the first room that needs cleaning is their mind – breaking down the habits, addressing the patterns they’re not happy with and looking at ways to systematically work through their issues.  All too often people fall into habitual routines that unless broken make it impossible to achieve long lasting healing.  A common one I see is people will say something like “My body is aching and feeling like death warmed up…. So I’m going to wake it up with a heavy session down the gym!” which to me is like saying, “My house is a pigsty after that party last night… so I’m going to have another session tonight to forget about it!”  And all that results from this mega session down the gym is a total crash in a couple of days time as the body reaches the point when it has to shut down everything else down so it can tidy up - que the colds, flu, joint pain, bad backs, depression, etc, etc that then move in for the kill once the body is busy trying to sort out the mess!

When the body is a clean and tidy having a party is fine and actually enjoyable, but I see so many people who ‘party’ just to forget that how unpleasant a place their body is to be.   I think it really is a shame when someone doesn’t enjoy living in their own skin and see the martial arts as being a wonderful tool to ‘clean house’ - but when abused they are also a great way of increase the rubbish we load our body with.  Look at your training and make sure it is making your body a pleasant place to be… once it is the parties get even better!

The human body is the most advanced machine ever created and housed inside it is the most powerful supercomputer in existence - the human brain.   This super computer is capable of sending and receiving messages to and from the farthest corners of the body at speeds in excess of 180mph and has over 100 billion neurons (brain cells) just waiting to fire up to compute and guide our body through all the functions it needs to carry out.  Every aspect of our existence including our martial arts, is the end result of a computation made by the ‘human super computer’.

Unlike man-made computers, the human brain is ‘self-aware’ allowing it to reprogram itself in response to things it learns and experiences.  Self-awareness is the holy grail of computing and it is a process that martial artists have continually refined for hundreds of years creating a more efficient software program to run the body.  Understanding this ‘reprogramming’ process is truly what makes a great martial arts instructor and is also the key to becoming a great student.

Programming the human mind is an interesting task.  Unlike a computer you can’t just input a few instructions and expect a result – unfortunately there is no ‘Matrix’ style ‘I know Kung Fu’ program we can upload into the brain.  The human mind learns through direct experience – it will be put into a situation, process the information, respond appropriately and will then remember the outcome of that response.   Our mind learns by ‘observing’ the things that it experiences.  Take for example learning to throw a front kick our first attempt may cause us to wobble off balance and our brain will then remember this and will slightly adjust our posture, weight distribution and other factors to attempt to rectify this issue for our next attempt.  It really is exactly the same process your instructor takes you through correction and allows the mind to learn from past experiences and base future actions on those memories.

Over time, learning through experience allows us to refine the commands the mind issues to the body making our actions smoother and more efficient, it stores these refined commands for the latter use.  This means that in order to improve and evolve, our body needs to experience new situations from which it can gather the data it requires to keep its programming fresh and up to date.  If it isn’t introduced to new situations regularly it is forced to continue to use ‘old’ programming over and over again and the inherent danger here is that we become stuck in a rut and our mind merely runs the same outdated commands over and over again.  It is here that we become aware of the ‘loops’ that can occur in the programming which cause the body to repeat actions and patterns that can actually be harmful to it.  Knowing how to break free of the ‘loops’ becomes an essential skill necessary for progress in our martial studies and to resolve any trauma we may experience.

‘Loops’ in the programming can occur through trauma and habit and these cause the mind stop observing and reflecting on events and to switch to autopilot.  A common example of this that I see regularly is how people react after an injury.  When a part of the body is injured the body will take measures to protect it – if you hurt your shoulder your body will armour up and tighten the muscles around the shoulder to restrict any movement that may damage it further.  This is a ‘reflective learning’ process in action.  Alarm signals were sent to the brain informing it of an injury to the shoulder, it reflects on this and responds by locking down to prevent further damage.  Obviously this ‘lock down’ reaction is important because if something is injured we want to rest it and allow it to recover.  The danger is that the shoulder will now be fixed and not able to move.  Without movement the brain will not experience anything to keep its program up to date so it will ‘remember’ that when the shoulder moves it hurts.  The only way to take an injured area out of ‘lock down’ mode is through the mindful application of ‘reflective learning’ that sometimes requires us to pay a visit to a therapist, but with intelligent and sensitive rehabilitation training, is something we can achieve.

When I’m treating someone with an injury I first find out the extent of the damage to the effected area and how ‘locked down’ it is.  I do this by slowly exploring the injury using both movement and pressure – through gently applying pressure and small movements I can gauge the severity of the damage by observing the body’s reaction to the stimulus.  This gives me the limits in which I can work without causing the mind to panic and this dictates the extent to which I can challenge my client.  My goal with any client is to change the parameters of their mind by allowing their body to experience something new.  Pushing too far will shock the mind and confirm what it already knows however, carefully raising an injured arm in very tiny increments lets it experience that there is a little scope for movement before it panics.  The quality of the experience we give the mind has a direct correlation to the wisdom it will glean from it and this is the fundamental concept behind ‘reflective learning’.

The saying ‘variety is the spice of life’ is very true but as martial artists the type of experience we put the mind through dramatically effects the ‘learning’ it will reap from it.  Shocking the mind will cause it to remember trauma and it will protect itself by restricting and inhibiting movement.  It is very easy to overload the mind causing it to violently fallback on previous programming.  To make a meaningful change in the mind and body the learning experience must be gradual and progressive.

In Japanese martial arts there is the concept of shoshin or ‘beginners mind’, this is a mindset where a student leaves behind conceptions from the past allowing them to totally immerse themselves in the present.  In order ensure that our super computer is kept up to date we must constantly supply it with fresh data, but like any computer it will crash if overloaded.  Immersing the mind in the martial arts provides it with the perfect stimulus to evolve, but like a parachute, it only works when open!

Gavin King is a physical therapist and martial arts instructor based in Essex.  He can be contacted via email on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or via http://www.shikon.com. You can keep up to date with all his articles and training via his blog on The Martial Archive at http://www.themartialarchive.com/gavinking.

I have a lot of ‘discussions’ with many martial artists and personal trainers, particularly on my treatment bench, about my thoughts and feelings on exercising the human body. 

My view is that many of the routines and training regimes implemented today are based on extremely outdated knowledge of human anatomy and physiology.  Many still believe in the myth the of the ‘single muscle theory’ and view our soft tissue system as a series of discreet individual units that in some abstract manner weave themselves together to form the whole we call ‘us’.  What I mean by ‘single muscle theory’ is that each muscle is viewed as a separate component and people prepare for activities that need to employ the whole body by spending most of their time working each body part in isolation – ‘I’ll train arms today, legs tomorrow, etc…’

The reason for this view of the human body is due to the way in which we found out how it was put together which was by taking it apart.  Our troubles started with the device we used to the separate out the units of the body - the blade.  When anatomists first started dissecting the body they started to catalogue which muscles attached where and what happened when these muscles pulled together.  From this they built up a very comprehensive picture of how each muscle functioned individually and successfully isolated the movements it enabled.  Unfortunately in cutting away the individual muscles they removed a vital component in the soft tissue system that binds every together, the fascia, and also didn’t seem to bother to put everything back together again. As such this left us with a very mechanical view of human physiology that has greatly shaped the way in which we approach our training.

In the martial arts and sports this created a mentality that encouraged people to isolate in order to improve performance.  Many failed to look beyond the specific body part when looking to form a training regime for a specific action.  For example, in the martial arts when looking to improve a punch people trained arms and would never entertain the idea that working the legs would ever get more bang for their buck when punching.  Thankfully as new information came onto the scene people began to recognise the importance of working the whole body and started to develop overall body routines… BUT they still used the same isolation exercises, just making sure that they worked every body part.  This is where my issue with many training and conditioning regimes comes from, why isolate when the activity you are preparing for utilises the whole body?

As a physical therapist the only time I recommend isolation exercises is for rehabilitation.  Other than strengthening a weak part of the system I see very little benefit in isolating parts other than for aesthetic gains.  Most of the personal trainers and martial artists I speak to do actually agree about the reasons for isolation and often state that this exactly why they are working a specific body part.  For example those who get lower back pain during training will devise exercises to strengthen the lower back – but again this is a symptom of the myth of the isolated body components.  Is the back weak or is it over working due to a problem elsewhere in the system?  Is poor posture or poor form causing the back to over compensate?  If it is then the back isn’t weak it is stressed and  this begs the question, does it really need to be stressed further?

The concept of what is weak and what is strong then becomes relative to how well the rest of the system is performing.  But if your awareness is only on individual actions how could you possibly evaluate weakness in the system as a whole?  So my issue isn’t really with any particular training methodology just the awareness and reason for the need to actually use it.

I believe people need to dispassionately evaluate what they are doing in their training and the benefits it is providing.  Is that bicep curl really making you arms stronger in relation to the function you are looking to perform?  What exactly is your bench press really improving?  Is the squat really making you more powerful?  Are you actually physically weak or just using poor technique?  All of these questions need to be answered by looking at the overall goal you are looking to achieve and the anatomy it is going to employ.  The key to this is to begin to expand our basic idea of how the body fits together in order to understand the impact of the training we are going to be doing.

Written circa 2005

As is customary with most clichéd stories ours takes place in a kingdom far far away where there lived two boys, Sam and John. Both had been friends since they were very young and had always wanted to be cartographers when they grew up. In the year of their sixteenth birthdays both set out to realize their dreams to learn the art of cartography.

In their village there were two master cartographers. John was the first to secure an apprenticeship. His master had a luxurious shop, full to the brim with expensive furniture and exotic ornaments. Johns master brought in an expensive chest which was obviously very old with large gilded hinges and a huge intimating padlock securing its contents. From around his neck Johns master produced a large key, unlocked the padlock and creaked upon the chest lid. Inside the chest were a number of extremely old exquisitely drawn maps.

Written Circa 2006

If there was ever a term that was guaranteed to cause wide spread confusion, ignorance and hostility, it’s chi. It’s a simple little word that if used will generally spawn a host of endless pointless debates where people either demand proof or claim to be able to cook pot noodles without the aid of a microwave. What many fail to appreciate that it is simple and elegant way of describing and observing the complex interactions of our universe. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now it’s no secret that I’m a student of chinese medicine and tai chi, both of which are heavily laced with the theory of chi. With this in mind it could be argued that I have a pretty heavy investment in the existence of the mystical chi. It usually comes as a surprise when I tell people that I don’t actually care whether they believe in it or not. In fact I don’t even care if it even exists as an actual physical entity or not, because its existence is pretty much irrelevant. Hopefully over the course of this article I’ll be able to explain why.

Written circa 2007

I love writing which many of my regular readers will probably have already guessed. It is very satisfying articulating my thoughts into written form. It gives me the opportunity to share my opinions and experience with the world and discuss my views with many different people. It also provides me with a written record of my thought process at a given point in time. My articles are something that I can go back to and serve as land marks on my journey through life. The subject matter for my articles is quite often the result of a chain of thought sparked by a lesson or an event and writing is great way for me to preserve the insights that arose to form the article.

When I share my stuff I am very conscious of the fact that some people (myself included) sometimes read an article and immediately snapshot it into their memory. They form a picture of the author and then judge the person based upon that image. The trouble with putting something into print or onto video is that it becomes fixed and some will cement this image of you in their mind. This can lead to a distorted fixed impression rather than seeing the person as a dynamic developing individual. People become shackled to the person you were at the time of authoring the article which can lead to problems.