Couple of e-mails seem to suggest that some of my description was a little hard for people to visualize and be sure they were doing the same thing that I was talking about when they went to try it out.

The thing to say that the head isn’t moving as the result of the body moving, as in whiplash.  It’s the complete opposite.  The head is initiating the action and giving direction to the forces generated by this initiation. 

The head activates the spine through bending, extending, flexing or twisting, and the spine responds in the same manner.  Because the spine is the major axis through which and about which movement takes place, its operation is central to anything that the limbs are going to have to do. 

And the whole process is done very rapidly.  It’s like a bullet.  It’s very sudden. 

The head, by changing its position, not only activates the spine, but also shifts the mass of the body in a direction to support the dynamics of the shot.  To make the latter effect possible, the head must point in a direction that facilitates the angle and position needed for the movement (particularly with regard to the posting of the axis about which--or through which--the movement is going to take place). 

There’s a problem with many people in understanding what’s termed the ‘double hip’.  The easiest way to understand it is to take a pen and hold it firmly at one end between your thumb and forefinger.  Now, with your other hand, pull back the free end of the pen, creating an equal and opposite pressure in the holding hand, and let it go.  The tighter you hold the one end of the pen, and the faster you pull back and release the other, the more explosive the release.  Usually when you see examples of the double hip being demonstrated in a martial art context, the interconnection of the body is very loose, and the movement is sloppy.  You’re not going to be able to perform that long, disconnected process in the context of a fight.  The natural double hip is a very rapid, tight loading and release.  It’s visible in lots of striking and throwing sports.

All joints can work this way.  You can take the pen as representative of an elbow, hip, spine.  When you pull and release the free end, you are dynamically loading against tension. 

Understand the concept, and then try to apply it with regards to the joints and the limbs. 

For example, if you hold the pen vertically and fix it at the bottom with one hand, and pull back and release the top with the other, you’ve got an analogue of the spine and head.  The tailbone is being held in position by the core muscles.  You can also twist and flex the top of the pen to simulate the twisting and flexing of head.

I wanted to go into more detail about the pen, and I also wanted to describe how you can see the principle of connectivity and the double-loading of muscle using an elastic band, but Trish is refusing to work with me on putting it into words even though I’m standing here with my rubber band, as many people have seen me do, demonstrating.

Tommy P, about the ‘acceleration’.  The way I train it at Primal, I’m trying to get the guy to understand that you carry the impression of the last thing you did (the intensity, the dynamics, the explosiveness, the biomechanics all wrapped up in a holistic neural package) into your next effort.  So it’s like climbing a flight of stairs.  You’ve reached a landing, which is the impression of your maximal effort.  Now you’re going to go up the next flight.  You don’t go back to the bottom.  The CNS is learning to work off progressive impressions of successful results.  You’re trying to train it to keep recruiting more motor units, keep increasing the rate of firing, in a specific way. 

This past weekend I did a private for Andy Dunne at his home, plus my usual Primal session at the new venue in Lea Hall.  The lessons were very productive, in that Andy and his son, Stephen, Rob Dick, Rory Kilpatrick and Dan Smith all demonstrated that they finally understand what I mean when I talk about using the head to initiate and lead movement so as to enhance the generation of maximal force in minimal time. 

A lot of people understand the idea of the head leading the action, but what they don’t get is how the head initiates the action through the activation of the spine vertically, horizontally, and through various planes in between. 

Rory didn’t quite get it until I said, ‘Imagine I threw a ball to you so you could head it.  Ten to one, if you wanted to head that ball with any force, you’d momentarily pull the head away from the ball so as to reconnect with it.  You’d intuitively know that this would give you a greater advantage in the development of force than if you just moved the head towards the ball without pre-loading.’ 

In the same way that the head determines the direction of the force to be developed, so does it also initiate the development of those forces. For example, if you wanted to strike down, you could simply drop the head in the direction you intended to hit.  This will lead the drop of the body and therefore increase the momentum going into the strike.  But to increase momentum even more, if you momentarily lift the head (float, if you like) in the direction opposite to that of the intended release prior to dropping the head, you’ll get an even greater development of force. It’s critical that this momentary ‘lift’ is directly coupled to the ‘drop’, so that the interval of time between the lift and the drop is almost imperceptible.  It’s in this way that the eccentric loading of the muscles will facilitate the maximal generation of force, and in this case, the utilisation of gravity as well.

This principle of changing direction (up, down, forward, back, left, and right through a variety of planes including the diagonals) is key in learning to develop explosive power.  Before you go up, you go down.  Before you go left, you go right.  And I’ve already discussed the idea of eccentric loading. Namely, the faster a muscle fibre is stretched, the greater the serial elastic component of the muscle invoked, and also the spindles embedded within it will be activated so as to cause a greater contractile force in the muscle in which the stretch originates.  The latter occurs through the myotatic reflex. 

The way this head movement is used is very subtle.  It’s perceptible if you know what you’re looking for, but it’s not terribly obvious.  Now, as in training any reflex/behavioural pattern, it always needs to be exaggerated somewhat in the beginning in order to get a handle on it.  But from my experience of teaching guys, even suggesting that this use of the head exists, tends to result in an overexaggeration in movement.  This isn’t what we want, because as a fighter you must always be tracking (through the vestibular system), and maintaining dynamic visual continuity with your opponent.  Any overexaggeration of the head movement will not only detract from your performance, but you’ll lose track of the target and make yourself more vulnerable to being hit yourself.

The different ways that the head supports movement (punches, kicks, knees, throws, etc) through the leading the direction were pretty obvious to the guys.  What they had the difficulty with, until this last session, had been the problem of understanding how the head pre-loads the move, particularly with regard to the round kick.

You can get an idea of how this is done if you go and watch Buakaw.  Now that you know what to look for, you’ve got a good chance of noticing the way the head can be used as an important factor in the initiation, development, and direction of the release of force.  

I sometimes say to guys, ‘Biomechanically speaking, there are a lot of balls to juggle within the framework of a skilled movement pattern.  But if you concentrate on using the head, you’ve only got to juggle one ball.’  The head orchestrates in a natural way these reflex and behavioural patterns that I’m always on about.

But...there’s always a but...this is the way the body’s been designed to work in nature.  That doesn’t mean the process completely takes care of itself.  For me as a natural athlete, I was using my head effectively and then just simply observed myself doing it and tried to pass it on.  Through research I’ve understood exactly what’s going on in that natural performance. 

Passing it on to someone else is another matter.  When I teach, it’s not enough just to say, ‘The head will lead the movement,’ and hope that the rest is going to take care of itself, because with many individuals, it ain’t gonna happen that way.

That’s why I have to explain to them how, skeletally, the parts of the body (head, spine, clavicle, scapula, ribs, pelvis, limbs) all work as levers to produce a mechanical advantage.  I will use a pen or pencil, or a stick, to illustrate how the various levers of the body work.  I even show a more natural illustration of what the ‘double hip’ is really all about—one that applies across the board in terms of athletic performance.  I then use an elastic band to illustrate how the muscles operate, particularly with regard to taking out the slack and double-stretching the band to get a more explosive release.

One way I’ve simplified the process of leverage is to get the guys to rapidly repeat a pattern.  Say a punch or a kick or a knee.  Through that rapid repetition, not only is the pattern reinforced, but you naturally involve the eccentric loading that I talked about before.  By reducing the time interval between the end of one move and the beginning of the next, you force that loading process to take place.  In this way the higher percentage of fast-and-super-fast twitch fibers are recruited, and their rate of firing is raised. 

You could use the repetitions tactically (so as to keep hitting the guy in the head, for example).  But the main reason I want guys to train the pattern in this way (high intensity, rapid repetition) is that I want to establish the preload as a given part of the shot, even though in context it may be fired as only a single blow.  You get in the habit of automatically preloading, and the more you do this, the less perceptible this preload becomes.  Eventually you start to preset the reflex response of the spindle so that the slightest stretch or no stretch at all will initiate the myotatic reflex. 

That lets you fire off a powerful blow, apparently out of nowhere. 

When the guys are working on the repetitions, I’m always asking them to raise the intensity as they’re performing.  Then I stop them, only momentarily, and then they have to produce two or three shots with the greatest force they can possibly muster. 

Now they’ve tricked the CNS into a high level of recruitment and firing.  It’s just like when I do dynamic tension or isometrics.  They then need to qualify that high level of recruitment in a specific way, intended to knock a guy out: this is the two or three final blows at the end of the series.  Those shots are the 'proof' of the higher level of CNS arousal and muscle recruitment.

So, say I’ve got them doing multiple repetitive round kicks.  In order to repeat those round kicks, they have to be in position, on the ball of their foot, using their arms, head, etc. in order to facilitate the repetition of this move.  When they’ve reached the peak, that’s when they pause and put two or three really big shots in.  These ‘big shots’ now become the new benchmark, upon which the next set of repetitions will be based. 

The neural impression is always being pushed up to a higher level. 

Mark Porter didn’t get it at first.  Then I had him run across the gym and at a given point, I told him to go faster.  Now he has a perception of accelerated speed, so I make him start at that point, and then tell him to go faster again.  That’s the principle I’m applying to bag work, padwork, or any work in the gym. 

I’m always trying to train the CNS to recruit more than what seems to have been available before.  That’s why my guys make such big progress. 

The principle I’ve laid out here seems obvious, but it’s not quite so easily applied or implemented.  You do need somebody like me both to act as an example, and to correct you as you go along.  So I feel confident spelling it all out on an open blog, because I know that you still need me in the equation to make this one work.  And boy, it works.

Going back to this past weekend, the best bit for me was seeing Andy’s son Stephen (who is about 16) pick up on this idea of using the head.  By the end of the session, his performance looked totally different.  And by the expression on his face, he knew it.