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.

A lot of talk on extraordinary strength and feats of supernormal physical power tends to be theoretical or speculative.  But when I talk about supernormal power, I’m talking from my personal experience.  It’s something I’ve done and others have witnessed--or, in the case of breaking bones, been on the receiving end of.  And it’s something I’ve researched for nearly 40 years now. 

For example, I’ve punched through standing bricks, crushed engineering bricks lying flat on the ground without supports or spacers, torn tennis balls apart, crushed hazelnuts and walnuts between my fingers, turned over a car, torn the door off a taxi, back-lifted a horse that was stuck over a gate.  As a young man, just for fun, I once got hold of one of my mother’s hot water bottles and blew it up until it exploded.  Pieces of it were stuck to the walls and I had to feign innocence with regard to its sudden disappearance.

How did I do it?  Part of the answer lies in the state of mind I was in at the time.  Interestingly, the emotional component of my mindset was never consistent.  Sometimes I was in a highly aroused but composed and committed state of mind; other times I was in a violent, destructive rage, euphoric on drink, in a fuck-it mood, or (in the case of some fights I had) in a situation that I could see was a matter of life or death.  But the one thing these states of mind had in common was the clarity of the impression of the task to be performed and the clear kinesthetic sense of the explosive forces I needed to generate.  It was these explosive impressions that would determine everything about the physical act to be performed.

By ‘everything’ I mean the number of motor units activated for a given task and the frequency and synchrony of firing to the muscle fibres they innervated.  Producing a great contractile force in the muscle depends on recruiting a high number of high-threshold motor units (i.e., fast twitch and superfast twitch (high-fatiguable)) and improved rate coding (enhancing the rate at which motor units send an electrical signal to the muscle fibres they innervate) as well as the synchrony of this firing within a muscle group.  Other factors that come to bear on the production of explosive power include: intra- and intero- neuromuscular coordination, the overcoming of psychological and physiological inhibitions (the Golgi tendon reflex and Renshaw cells effect), and the prior strengthening the supportive musculoskeletal structure (particularly the tendons) to be able to sustain the force passing through it, because you’re only as strong as your weakest link.  If you address all of these aspects, as well as incorporate within the movement pattern the serial elastic component of muscle fibre and reflex behavioural patterns, you’re on your way to being able to produce the kind of extraordinary physical power which is the legacy of our species’ evolution through dealing with life or death situations over countless generations. 

 Like all animal species', our neurology and physiology are highly adaptable to many environmental demands.  Human beings are capable of extraordinary feats.  However, what I’m talking about here is specific to my life’s work of learning to access and understand (and thereby enhance) this phenomenon of recruiting extraordinary strength and explosive power.  It’s not to be confused with endurance, mental toughness, ability to take pain, or any of those other attributes that are essential to being a martial artist.  I’m talking here about the developing and releasing of extreme force, sometimes (as in the case of breaking) within a time frame measured in fractions of a second.

People are happy at achieving 80-85% of their maximal effort.  Me, I’m only happy in the 90% plus zone.  I regularly force myself to work in a zone of recruitment that is characteristic of a life or death situation.  I may be alone in the gym, but in my mind I’m supercharged, and everything I’m doing is for real.  I do this because it is only within this state of mind and body that you can produce that extra explosive effort that could make the difference between life and death. 

Too many martial artists train safe.  They may present an illusion that they’re in this ‘place’ of super power, but they’re nowhere near it.  Most of them have never been there.  They are inhibited--psychologically, physiologically, and physically--from going to the edge, let alone throwing themselves over it. 

 On Self-protection.com http://selfprotection.lightbb.com/q-a-with-nick-hughes-f8/steve-morris-is-answering-your-question-on-his-blog-t6383-45.htm Nick Hughes talked about Tom Slaven’s research into this area. He writes: ‘His findings were, (in layman's terms) that your brain tells you you cannot go beyond a certain limit (like a redline in a car) but, when some bigger danger/threat/problem arises the body will override the safety level and perform amazing stuff. Of course there is a price to pay, just as there is when you thrash a car.’

The whole purpose of training is to teach your body to ‘go there’ and beyond and adapt, and do it again and again.  Any elite athlete has to do that.  We’re not a car; we’re not a mechanism.  We’re a self-repairing biological organism and we wouldn’t have got where we are in an evolutionary sense if our bodies weren’t capable of adapting to extreme physical stress.  The modern world doesn’t test us the way that the primordial environment would have done, but we can see in the performances of elite athletes how much we are capable of with the right training. 

This type of high-intensity training has been shown to activate growth hormones, and so, far from having a destructive effect on the body, it may very well do the opposite.  For me personally, I believe it may well be contributing to my ability (which many have observed) to hold back the years and continue to perform at a high level even at the age of nearly 65.  I think if I’d have taken the soft-option route and acted my age, then I’d be looking more like a lot of my contemporaries look and moving more like they move (or don’t).

And here’s another point.  Evolution has provided us with this system, but there is no guarantee it will kick in when it is needed.  Sometimes it does, but many times it doesn’t.  You can’t work on faith that this ‘special place’ will be there for you when you need it.  That’s why you have to train it.  I’ve been there many times, but I still train it.  I don’t assume it will take over for me.  I’d rather stack the deck in my favour.

To me, the training of this facility for the production of extreme power is the crux of what martial arts is about.  There are so many people talking about the martial arts being extraordinary, but there’s nothing really extraordinary about martial artists.  Many of them are physically inept. 

The key to being able to perform at this higher level is to raise the intensity and frequency of your training.  Training at VERY intense, explosive tempos forces the neuromuscular system to adapt.  Training is more a neuromuscular thing rather than about hypertrophic muscles.  It’s about forcing the CNS to adapt to what an emergency situation is, and not what you want it to be.  By working at these superhigh levels, you force your CNS to change. 

Recruitment patterns at high intensities are completely dissimilar to those formed by training at lower intensities.  This is well-understood in sports science.  The only way you get this high recruitment pattern needed to serve you in a real emergency, is by practicing under the same conditions. 

Training at lower intensities is OK for forming a familiarity with a skill set, but for that skill to work under pressure it has to be pressure-tested in the gym, at VERY high intensities. 

To train like that, you have to be supercharged.  You’re high.  You feel like you’re already exploding inside. 

When I look at most people training, including a number of top flight MMA fighters, they look like they’re half-asleep.  They’re nowhere near that zone.  If you watch Buakaw training, he’s there.  You can see it. 

But having said that, once you are familiar with how to recruit this explosive effort, there are ways of training it that are less obvious than going full-out in the gym.  Once you are familiar with this supercharged feeling of the CNS and you have got a kinesthetic sense of those explosive generative forces you’ve got to produce, then you could work at a slower or even static rate.  But—and this is a big but—the slow or static appearance of your movement is not reflective of what’s going on inside. 

I don’t actually know anyone who has made this connection apart from myself, although I guess there will be lots of ‘masters’ claiming they do it now that I’ve explained it.  It’s a refinement on training explosiveness that only works if you have the explosiveness in the first place. 

If you took dynamic tension or isometrics, if you’re doing them as I do them, then you can facilitate the recruitment of maximum motor units and increase the rate and efficiency of their firing.  You’re training motor units to translate this mental image of explosion, but you’re checking the force from coming out at full speed.  In the case of isometrics, you’re using a wall or the ground to explode against, and in the case of dynamic tension (as in Sanchin) you’re using the agonist/antagonist system to check the explosion.  As when I lifted the horse off a gate, I wasn’t going to be able to explosively move the horse, but inside my head I was exploding.  I was trying to recruit everything I had, and I wasn’t doing it in a long, drawn-out effort.  In my mind, it was a single, explosive effort—no second chances.  That was the only way I was going to recruit maximum motor units and increase their rate of firing to a level where the horse moved.

Here’s the thing about isometrics—or anything where the odds are against you moving the load—most people, because they know that the wall can’t move, they will cut back on their effort.  They won’t go for it full out, because they know they can’t succeed.  So they end up recruiting at a lower threshold, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You’ve got to go for that 99% of what is humanly possible, you’ve got to have a mental impression of complete commitment.  And this is the edge that most people cannot cross.  Lots of times they don’t even know it’s there.  For most people, there’s another 15% in them that they don’t know they have. 

Once you have experienced and become familiar with this high-threshold level of recruitment, you can in fact work on it anywhere.  Even lying in bed. 

As an aside, if I was going to do Tai Chi, this is the way I’d do it; and I suspect, this is the way it was originally done.

The other opportunity to build this neuromuscular connection involving the explosive impression is when you’re tired.  When there’s nothing left of you, that’s the time to see if you can raise the energy purely through mental effort. 

I sometimes do this at Primal.  Early in the session, I’ll run the guys into an energy deficit.  I call it emptying the tank.  The only thing they’ve now got is pure willpower.  Mind over matter.  To help them, when they’re on the bags, pads, or in sparring, I’ll stand next to a guy and re-energize him through my example.  I’ll transmit the impression of this high-energy state of supercharge, so that now the guy can find that in himself.  And I’ll see him pick up and suddenly he’s performing at a higher level again.  That’s when he realizes that it’s the mind over the body, not the other way round. 

And we’re back to what I always used to say to Terry O’Neill, and I can never repeat it too many times.  It’s the neural impulses to the muscle fibre that are far more important than any hypertrophy of the muscle itself.   The amount of motor units you recruit as well as their rate of firing is what determines explosive strength, not the size of your muscles.  There are a lot of really big guys out there who have no idea how to produce this explosion. 

Nick Hughes in the same post mentions his brother sticking a knife in a toaster and flying across the room.  I used to tell a similar story to practically everybody I trained, especially in Horsham.  It was something that happened to me when I was working as a rookie radio technician in Nairobi in around 1961 or 1962.  When working on a high-frequency transmitter (the size of a bungalow, in those days) I inadvertently touched a relay.  The shock sent me flying backwards through the air.  It was pretty obvious to me even then that it was the electrical impulses to my muscles that had done the business, but I didn’t then understand how the whole process worked.  I suppose in some sense, all my research goes back to trying to resolve what happened that day, and to try to be able to make it happen again, only under my own control. 

When I’m training guys at Primal, I make the atmosphere supercharged.  To get this high recruitment of motor units you have to be in an aroused state.  You have to look for ways in your training of raising your level of arousal.  Everything about what you’re doing has to have this quality of supercharged aggression--your posture, your facial expression, the glare in your eye, the vocalizations you make—because you’re working off a feedback system.  Just as smiling releases endorphins, so acting ‘up’ and aggressive kicks you into this aroused state of mind and allows you to do higher-intensity work.  You can’t be inhibited.  I find that the less inhibited psychologically that my guys become, then the more that everything follows, physically. 

Naturally, I’m there to provide the example.  When I do things, I’m almost suicidal in my attitude to the way I move.  I’m not worried about pulling a muscle, tearing a gut, breaking a bone, or having a heart attack—I’m not holding back.  I look at guys training, and they’re so anal.  At Primal, we encourage you to get out of that and really let go. 

This is one of my ‘secrets’.  I’m telling you explicitly how I do it and how you can do it.  All my research into kinesiology, biomechanics, sports physiology and psychology has enabled me to explain a phenomenon that is natural and which I’ve experienced.  Not only can I explain it, I can train it.  I can teach people to do it; the guys in Primal are starting to get it. 

It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible, either.