I spent the time in Czech at the end of February priming everyone for the Summer Course in July.  We worked on the importance of studying each bit of advice from the classics in synergy with the others.

“Raise the head as if suspended by a rope from above” goes naturally with “lighten the top of the head”.  There were a few problems with ‘lighten’ in translation, but when everyone realised that they didn’t need a light bulb on the top of their head, (which I would argue with) they realised that when they tried to ‘straighten’ the head they invariably tensed the neck muscles, but when they ‘suspended’ and ‘lightened’ they felt like it was ‘floating’ upward and the entire body moved with a lighter feel.  Add on to that the feeling of tying a weight on to the bottom of the spine and it allowed a gentle opening of every vertebra in the spinal column and access for the bodyweight to the soft tissue of the legs.

This also opened the waist and allowed it to ‘loosen’ and freely drive and manipulate power through the entire body.  The head was the start of the ‘5 bows’ (spine, arms and legs) and the spine itself consists of a separate 3 bows, the upper spine is bowed by the action of the head, the upper back by the ‘sinking of the chest’ and ‘raising of the back’ and the lower back by the softening into the legs and pulling the PC muscle to draw the coccyx forward.  The whole bowing process is driven by ‘peng’, which opens the joints and soft tissue, allowing a free flow of energy and with an action like blowing up a balloon ‘frames’ the entire body with ‘animated’ energy.

We looked at how to put our ‘strength in the tendons’ by angling and rotating the joints to ‘reticulate’ them through the body connecting the power down to the feet.

We finished by working on ‘continuous movement from the waist’ to make the connected, light, framed and spiralling power become actualised into that essential Tai Chi motion that repels all boarders!

By pre framing everyone’s mind for the Summer, it means that as they are already moving in that direction and won’t feel too uncomfortable as we apply these ideas throughout the form!

Don’t forget that on the Instructors Course in April we’re working on the Jian and Dao with a deeper level of skill, so bring your wooden swords!

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.

“With all this work we do to improve, do you think there’s a time that we’ll start getting worse?”

We welcomed the break in between Tai Chi classes, apart from the physical break, it gave us the chance to discuss anything from the latest kung fu movies to the deepest Buddhist philosophy with Sifu.

Teresa had a stressful job in accounting, worked long hours and would come into class looking tired, sigh with effort at the beginning and end of the class but the years would slip away as she appeared get younger and always seemed to lose her ‘cloud’ whilst training.

“Why do you ask that?” queried Sifu.

“I was just wondering what it was all about, we come along here twice a week, work and study really hard to improve our technique, train every day at home and chances are that we will eventually get worse over a period of time as we age and then die…..  is it all worth the effort?”

“Aren’t we the cheerful one!” laughed Joseph.

“It’s alright for you”, moaned Teresa, “but I’m nearer the ‘getting worse’ part than you!”

“Do you think it’s a case of ‘good and bad’ then?” asked Sifu.

“Of course it is” answered Teresa, “the purpose of training is to get better, otherwise there’s no point.”

“That’s not why I train”, said Sifu.

“Then why are you always correcting our technique?” asked Joseph.

“To help you enjoy your training more” answered Sifu.

“But that means that you’re just putting us under more pressure to get better” complained Teresa.

“I’m not putting you under any pressure”, said Sifu, “the only person that can put you under pressure, is you!”

“But when you’re correcting me I can’t help but feel pressured and when I’m doing my own training I feel pressured to improve to please you.”

“And whose fault is that?” asked Sifu.

“I don’t know now!” bleated Teresa….

“I train because I enjoy it” said Sifu, “the pleasure of getting up in the morning and looking forward to the meditation, the qigong and the Tai Chi form training.  The sheer sensual pleasure of clearing the mind, making it more aware and focused, stretching the muscles and fascia and moving the body through our animalistic routines……  I love it!”

“But you must train to improve as well” asked Teresa.

“The better I get at it, the more I enjoy it” answered Sifu.  “The point is that it enhances my pleasure, it’s not WHY I train!  You are treating the learning process as a burden, if you’re not improving fast enough you feel guilty, you’re training to please me….. how daft is that?

Tai Chi is learned by osmosis, the knowledge gradually soaks in; the paradox is that the harder you try, the worse it gets.  You have to let the information hang in your mind so that the body can absorb it in it’s own time.  We learn the language of our body, we encourage it to function better.  The learning process is a part of the whole sensory experience, as it improves it becomes more pleasurable.

The point of Tai Chi is that you learn to de-stress, not put more pressure on to an already stressed mind and body.  Tai Chi is MY time.  I don’t do anything until I’m ready, I meditate, when I feel ready, I do my qigong, when my mind and body are ready, the form does me….  It’s said that Tai Chi is like a great river, when you are prepared; it sweeps you up and carries you along on the experience.

If you have the ambition to ‘improve’ – you won’t.  The ‘grand ultimate’ (the translation of the term ‘Tai Chi’) is lost at that point.  You are exhausting yourself further by pressurizing yourself instead of allowing your practice to nourish you.”

“But isn’t the purpose of life to become the best you can” asked Teresa?

“The purpose of life is to engage as fully as you can in every moment, the paradox is that more you can do this, the better you get at everything because you are fully engaged with whatever you are doing.  There is a difference between ‘wanting’ to be the best and actually ‘being’ the best.  Remember you are a human ‘being’ – the word ‘being’ is often forgotten!

Only you can make yourself happy, only you can make yourself unhappy, only you can put yourself under pressure, you don’t need to do this.  Tai Chi gives you a route out by a process of direct experience and learning by the most advanced process.  A happy person learns and experiences best, this is a simple decision that you can make and then form it into a daily habit.  Training and learning then becomes a pleasure and a part of the daily routine to look forward to.”

“But then what happens when my body starts to deteriorate and my training is not so easy?”

“It’s still enjoyable because improvement was not why you trained….”

“I think the penny has just dropped” smiled Teresa, “I’ve just been punishing myself with the tool for making myself happy…”

“Exactly..” said Sifu returning a big smile

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!

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!

In my shiatsu training I was told that one of the most powerful components of our treatments was the ability to bring our clients back to the ‘here and now’.  Having been a devotee of Zen and other eastern ways of thinking for the majority of my life the concept wasn’t alien to me, but it’s importance wasn’t truly understood really until I started delving into bodywork and my taiji studies.

I was on a course with the world renown shiatsu practitioner and teacher Saul Goodman who described the phenomenon of being ‘displaced in time’ by explaining that most of us have our energies shackled in the past or projected out into the future – both of which depletes us by drawing our resources away from the present moment.  Now it’s very easy to dismiss the idea as a ‘cute’ philosophical musing but through my treatments and teaching I have found the awareness of where our attention is focussed to have immense practical significance and when misplaced it can be one of the root causes of many of the modern illnesses of today such as depression, anxiety and stress.

We often use the expression “stop living in the past” but it is usually a lot easier said than done.  Certain personality types have a natural tendency to dwell on the things of the past – the traumas, the disappointments and even the successes.  The person locked into trauma and disappointment from the past is fairly easy to spot and the implications of this condition simple to understand, but what about the person of past success?  The image that always comes into my mind when thinking this sort of person is the old rock star who in their twilight years are still running round like a twenty year old – just that they now have a colostomy bag and they have to pick their groupies up from the nursing home.  As outwardly happy as these people may apear you always hear about many aged celebrities constantly having cosmetic surgery, divorcing people half their age and battling addiction.  Not truly the signs of a happy life when examined closely.

Displacement in the future comes in the form of obsessively worrying about bills, lack of a love life, career development and really overly worrying about anything that ‘could’ happen in the future.  This can create stress and anxiety as we spend our time worrying about things that have yet to come.

Being displaced in time draws our attention, our focus and our energy away from things that are unfolding in front of our very eyes and greatly skews our perception of the present.  Our problem is that most of us haven’t been given the tools or education to be able to sufficiently cope with these problems and for some the they become so bad that they have to turn to external agents such as alcohol, narcotics and anti-depressants to deal with them.   Yes there is zen, Buddhism, NLP, counselling and the like but as martial artists we actually have all the tools we need and also the strategies to use them - just some of us don't employ our skills outside of training.

Sparring is great place to see the effects of being ‘displaced in time’.  You can see people immediately acting out of synch with current time.  Some people when they spar have an anxiety of being hit so they will flinch, jump around and tense up at the slightest twitch of their partner.  They are often locked in the past and projected future at the same time with the memory of being punched in the mouth pulling them one way and the fear of it happening again pulling them the other – and as we all know the more we end up trying to avoid getting hit we usually end up on the receiving end even more.  As instructors the way we coach students through this is to break the situation down, provide the means to analyse it and help build the skills to handle it.  If you just keep throwing a student in head first you'll see that rather than resolving the anxiety and stress you’ll compound and exacerbate it… and the same is true in every day life as well!

One of the magical components of the martial arts is their ability to help the practitioner understand and expand their lives – to do this we only need to take the lessons we learn in the dojo, kwoon and gym and apply them in the real world.  For me that is the true meaning of ‘reality’ martial arts.

For those that don’t see me too often I thought I’d give you all an update as to what we’ve been working on lately….

The opening of the spine in both directions
To not only stretch the spine upwards, but to also feel like you have a weight attached to the coccyx, pulling it downwards to open the spaces between the vertebrae.  This goes along with the idea of ‘parking’ the spine and you cannot help but ‘loosen up’ through the ankles, knees and hips at the same time.  This also allows you to be more sensitive to gently pulling the PC muscle to create the ‘bowing’ of the spine and limbs.

Using the waist to change the hands.
The hands are always ‘driven’ by the waist.  We never ‘throw’ them. When changing the hand technique it must be ‘spiralled’ into change from the waist displacing the opponent at the same time, we have been paying particular attention to grasp sparrow’s tail (as ever), single whip, shoulder stoke, stork cools wings, cloud hands and fair lady plays at shuttles, but the idea is in all techniques.

Continuous movement from the waist.
The waist never stops and as it’s driving the hands they are always in continuous ‘driven’ movement.  As it’s sometimes difficult for the student to know when the waist and link to the hands has ceased, we have been working in pairs with one student watching the other and by observation and discussion have resolved any problems or anomalies.

Spatial energising of the skin.
Instead of identifying an individual opponent in the mind when performing the form, we have worked on the idea that the performer is being held by many people and pulled multi directionally so that he has to secure the drive from the feet, spiral in motion to displace them and keep peng and frame to maintain power in all directions.  This has the added benefit that the awareness and energy is bought to the surface of all the skin spatially as opposed to just towards one opponent.

That’s enough to kick the New Year off!!  I’ll let you know where we go from there.

Don’t forget the seminar this Sunday 17^th January is on meditation, the chakras, their relevance, and healing.  11am – 3pm at the Chatham honbu £20 for members, £30 for non members.

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.

Welcome to Martial Anatomy 101 where we will explore how this wonderful complex mixture of intricate parts we call ‘us’ actually works.  Under our skin we have a series of different structures that hold us together and allow us move about the world.  For simplicity’s sake we shall limit our exploration to the bits that hold us up and move us around which are our muscles, bones, ligaments, tendons and fascia that also create the means for us to animate ourselves. 

His entire bodyweight screwed around my knee and we both collapsed to the floor. When I looked down I could see my cartilage protruding about two inches outside of the inside of my knee joint, I slid to the wall on my backside and managed to push it back in place.

When we are young we are too foolish to look after our joints. When we are in our twenties, our fifties and sixties are too far away to worry about. We take all the knocks strains and tears and strap them up and continue training – we don’t listen to our body. The niggly pains are telling us to stop doing something, or to do something different – but do we listen?

Let me tell you my story….