On Sunday I conducted a well-attended course at Loughborough University.  Both before and after the session I got to talk to Dr. Matt Pain.  One thing that came up was the use of the head in various ways to support a given task, particularly the asymmetrical tonic reflex (or fencing reflex) whose functional and dynamic application can be seen together with other primitive reflexes in many sports, including boxing, wrestling and Muay Thai.  While Matt and I were talking, I knew that I’d read about this particular reflex and I recalled a specific reference in a book involving judo. 

When I got home, I was able to find the actual reference I recalled, which is included within the second of these two links.  They are Part 1, and Part 2. Good memory, eh?

Primitive reflexes, including the asymmetrical tonic reflex, play a hidden role in athletic performance.  During the years after the infamous ‘fall of Gallagher’ when I researched the role of the head in movement, I was also researching the Fujian systems.  I began to see the implications within the forms for the exploitation of these reflexes in fighting.  For example, within the kata Samchien I could see evidence of the Moro (or startle) reflex as well as the tonic labyrinthine reflex.  However, in the Fujian forms the head didn’t appear to be active in initiating movement, and that’s something I introduced to my own forms practice.  I also found implied evidence in the kata of Okinawa and Japan; however in these cases the reflex patterns had turned into a pose without any understanding of their internal dynamics.  You can also see these reflexes depicted within Hindu/Buddhist painting, sculpture and dance, including depictions of the dieties as fierce protectors of temples. 

Primitive reflexes begin their development during the fetal stage and are nature’s way of providing the building blocks upon which more complex actions depend.  In the fetal stages and as newborns, motor control is undeveloped.  The sensory and motor pathways associated with these primitive reflexes originate in the brainstem and are in the main strengthened by random head movements. No matter where the head moves, there is a specific corresponding response in the spine, pelvis and limbs.  Without these inboard reflexes inherited through natural selection, the young organism would have no chance of survival.

There is a sequential order of development in the first years of life.  If one or more of the primitive reflexes are absent, this has serious clinical repercussions for the motor development of the individual.  As the higher centres of the brain mature, these pre-programmed responses are gradually inhibited in favour of stronger, more specialized sensorimotor pathways within the midbrain, referred to as postural reflexes.  The latter allow us to successfully interact with the world about us, and if the primitive reflexes persist through this stage, there are also adverse consequences for the motor development of the individual.  Both primitive and postural reflexes play key roles in motor function, and individual variations in the integration of the primitive reflexes within the CNS account for relative ‘talent’ (or its lack) in athletic skill. 

Though the primitive reflexes are inhibited, they are never erased, and under certain conditions they re-emerge.  Tadashi Fukuda noticed that these reflexes often come into play during goal-oriented and purpose-driven tasks requiring of exceptional physical power and coordination, and it was even noted that within non-athletes under certain circumstances these reflex patterns came to the fore. 

What does this mean for you as a martial artist?  In a nutshell, you have primitive reflexes that can enhance your performance, but that doesn’t mean that every time you move your head, these primitive reflexes come into play.  They don’t. They can be inhibited by higher control centres within the brain.  And indeed, in some forms of training, they are actually ironed out. 

However, if you are aware of these primitive and postural reflexes, you can actually set about enhancing your performance.  The first step lies in recognizing the patterns when you see them.  Because primitive reflexes are integrated into functional behaviour over a period of many years, they can be difficult to spot within the seamlessness of athletic performance. 

Through my research into kinesiology and my own athletic experiences I’ve known of these primitive and postural reflexes for over thirty years.  I’ve always tried to address them in my personal training, and I believe I’ve had some success with this.  In fact, some aspects of my performance are directly attributable to knowledge of the primitive and postural reflexes.  However, attempting to impart this knowledge to others has been more challenging.

One pitfall of pursuing academic understanding of this phenomenon is the fact that having an abstract knowledge of it is insufficient.  You need to have real-life representations of the reflex patterns in action.  That’s another reason to watch the fight.  Read about the patterns, and then look at top athletes and take in a holistic sense of how those patterns are manifesting.  Watch enough, and you’ll start to see them all over the place. 

Matt told me how he was trying to explain a movement within a karate form in terms of the asymmetric tonic neck reflex, which seemed obvious and clear to him as a sports scientist.  He described his frustration at the inability of the karate practitioners to ‘get it.’  I know about this!  But even the most receptive student, even a top athlete, can have trouble translating this academic information into practical use.  This is because the point about a reflex is that it’s unconscious.  It can’t be controlled; you have to more or less trick the system into producing the reflex response. 

In my classes I devote a lot of attention to the head.  Often the performer is unaware of the way his head (and the reflexes associated with it) may be inhibiting his performance, or at least, not contributing everything that it could be.  I am always trying to draw attention to the way the changing position of the head relative to the action will improve the quality and power of the action. 

In my training of an individual, the tips I will give often involve small changes in the use of the head at a critical point in the performance of a skill.  There is no one size fits all.  This is an area of instruction where the coach has to have a deep understanding of how the head works in relation to the body, in the context of the skill, and within the situation; i.e., the fight.  It’s one thing to be aware of the importance of the head as an initiator of movement but quite another to understand how it exactly does that to support a given action. 

In fighting, the head can also play a crucial role in setting up your opponent on the feet or the ground through its direct or indirect manipulation.  And in a defensive sense, you need to be aware of how your head movement can be used against you.  Reflexes are a double-edged sword.  The better you understand them, the better able to exploit them to get an edge. 

_____________________

Additional reading:

Biomechanics of Sport and Exercise
Biomechanics of Sport
More on the tonic neck reflex
Neonatal neurology
Primitive reflexes in child development
Motor control and learning

 Now of animals which change their position some move with the
whole body at once, for example jumping animals, others move one
part first and then the other, for example walking (and running)
animals. In both these changes the moving creature always changes
its position by pressing against what lies below it. Accordingly if
what is below gives way too quickly for that which is moving upon it
to lean against it, or if it affords no resistance at all to what is
moving, the latter can of itself effect no movement upon it. For an
animal which jumps makes its jump both by leaning against its own
upper part and also against what is beneath its feet; for at the
joints the parts do in a sense lean upon one another, and in general
that which pushes down leans upon what is pushed down. That is why
athletes jump further with weights in their hands than without, and
runners run faster if they swing their arms; there is in extending the
arms a kind of leaning against the hands and wrists. In all cases then
that which moves makes its change of position by the use of at least
two parts of the body; one part so to speak squeezes, the other is
squeezed; for the part that is still is squeezed as it has to carry
the weight, the part that is lifted strains against that which carries
the weight. It follows then that nothing without parts can move itself
in this way, for it has not in it the distinction of the part which is
passive and that which is active.

--The Gait of Animals, Aristotle

If you look at the photographs in this link, you’ll see examples of the natural throwing pattern as adapted for baseball pitching.  You can see that the legs, pelvis, trunk and shoulders are engaged so as to produce a dynamic stretch of the serape muscles running diagonally from the shoulder to the hip.  It’s the muscles involved in this group that are responsible for the development of the internal forces that transfer momentum to the arms or legs in throwing or kicking.

http://www.sportsci.com/topics2/presentations/Throwing_Doc_Presentation_ISBS99/mthrow.htm

http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/strength-training-improving-your-trunk-strength-will-improve-your-throwing-and-striking-40845

http://www.femaleathletesfirst.com/article.aspx?navid=9&articleid=13&animation=off

http://functionalpathtraining.blogspot.com/2005/09/more-core-serape-effect.html

The reason why I put Rufus up recently is that there is a strong similarity between the way he stretches the slingshot from both ends simultaneously, and the way that somebody throwing a ball double-stretches the serape muscles.  This is the shoulder-hip separation referred to in the first article.

This double-stretching not only engages the serial elastic component of muscle, but also the muscle spindles embedded within the muscle.  The faster you can initiate this stretch, the more powerful the contractual force that is developed as a consequence. 

So the trick is, how do you get this double stretch effect? 

In pitching you see a very exaggerated example of the front leg stepping forward while the rear shoulder pulls back.  In fighting, naturally this principle has to be adapted to the time frame and tactical situation required, so the movement won’t look obvious as it does with the pitchers.  However, in some form the double-stretch when present will enhance the force development of your shot. I used to tell Richard La Plante when he asked me how I got my power that I’d simply refined the process of throwing a stone.

I’ve been talking about the serape muscles and the importance of their engagement across the diagonal of the torso for thirty years, although I think I was mispronouncing the word 'serape' on the videos made in the late 1990s.  There’s nothing new in the concept; it’s been around since 1922 in Logan and McKinley’s Kinesiology.  I picked up the idea in the kinesiology books I bought in the early 1970s.   

Have a look at the photos and at Rufus.  Don’t get caught up in the detail, but get a feel for the separation and double stretch; i.e., stretching from both ends simultaneously and engaging as many muscle groups as you can in the kinetic chain.  No passengers.

By the end of the 1980s, after 20 years of research into kinesiology I had a pretty good layman’s handle on how our emotions, thoughts and sensations (extero, intero, proprioceptive, vestibular) are translated into movement through the integrative action of the CNS. As a result of this understanding I developed a heightened sense of the processes involved in performing a decisive act. I realised that when I perform any such action, I first form a holistic impression of needed response which consists of 1) a visual impression of the effect I need to cause, 2)a kinesthetic sensation of the physical act, 3) a sense of those generative forces by which the action can be carried out and 4) an emotional charge. 

One of the most interesting things about this heightened awareness was that it extended to my observation of others engaged in physical activity. When observing someone performing an action, I became able to sense, within myself, the impression of their movement. And this occurred not only in tandem with their performance, but sometimes before the action even took place. In other words, I became able to sense what the person was going to do before they did it.

On the surface of it, this sounds off the wall. For a long time I experienced this phenomenon without being able to provide a scientific reference. Back in the late 80s/early 90s I’d talk about it to my students in Horsham. I used to talk about Tyson and how I could pick up on the violent intent of the man and the forces he was generating, and using that impression as my representation, how I could translate it into my own performance. I’ve always been a good mimic, but this was a new level of empathy. At that time I would also talk about being able to predict a mistake that a student was about to make before he’d completed the action, and how I could pinpoint where in his performance the source of the problem lay. All of this is because I was able to connect with him on neural level. 

I mentioned this once in the presence of Mark Chen, who was studying for a doctorate in sports science, and his eyes lit up. He told me that he’d been reading a paper which gave examples of a similar phenomenon. Next time he came down, he gave me a copy. Within the text, there was an example of a crowd watching a boxing match and how they were mimicking the fighter they were supporting and going through the emotional contours of hitting and being hit, as if they were actually fighting. There was also an example of a piano teacher being able to predict, before the student played the note, that he was going to make a mistake. The article talked about the way that the same neuro-chemical and motor networks were being influenced in the observer as were being used by the performer.      

It would seem to me that in evolutionary terms, the ability to imitate would be an important tool: monkey see, monkey do. Taken further, the ability to pick up on nuances that might not be so obvious could give a survival advantage. For most of evolutionary history, there was no language. So you would need to transmit physical skills in a more direct way.

The truth is that talk can be very misleading. No amount of talk can replace what millions of years of evolution have provided. 

In martial arts we have a lot of talk, and most of it is worthless. But the real problem in the martial arts comes down to what the monkey sees. Often, that’s a load of bollocks, too. 

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to make a shallow imitation of bad movement, but it can be difficult for some to pick up on the essential underlying pattern that characterizes a really good performance.  This is because all successful performance derives from the adaptation of fundamental reflex/behavioural patterns that I'm always on about.  You need these to even get started.  So even if we lay aside all the bad examples of performance and assume that the example is a good one, in order for this ‘transmission’ of physical skill to work successfully at a deeper level than just superficial mimickry, it’s crucial that the learner has got a good grounding in fundamental natural movement. 

Nature has bequeathed a set of patterned responses that can be adapted and modified, but which are inherent in everyone at birth. As a child develops, the patterns will either be enhanced or dampened, depending upon whether they are used, and how. By the time most people come to martial arts in their teens or twenties, the patterns have atrophied to some extent. There are examples of natural athletes going into martial arts, but most people haven’t enhanced their fundamental patterns beyond the level needed to get by in modern life--which is not much.

Most of the martial arts are so motor-oriented in their pedagogical methods that rather than learning to move and beginning to re-activate some of these patterns, the student often overwrites the natural pattern with an inferior motor-oriented prescribed martial arts response. If the learner has only practiced in a stereotyped way, then even when he tries to imitate a good performer, he often ends up producing a version of the performance that is almost a parody. He doesn’t have the wiring for anything else.

This is where my philosophy of instruction is different to other martial arts teachers. I don’t want you to imitate me on a superficial level, but to empathise with my movement and that of other successful performers on a neural level. If you’ve got a good example to empathise with, then the innate reflex and behavioural patterns coupled with the phenomenon of mirror neurons will provide a significant advantage in any physical endeavour. 

On that level, you don’t need a teacher; you can learn to teach yourself by observation, analysis, and trial and error. That's what I did.  But there must be a strong grounding in fundamental movement to start with. If martial arts have taken you away from the fundamental patterns, then you have to first let go of the motor-oriented responses and get back to what you were born with. This process can be painful for some long-term martial artists who have been rewarded for producing motor-oriented patterns, but the result is worth it.

If you develop the facility of empathy, you will also be able to guard against one of the biggest downsides of imitation in athletics, which is this: all top athletes win with performances that are less than optimal. They all make some mistakes. If you imitate someone blindly, you may find yourself taking on board a bad habit which the athlete is actually trying to get rid of! But if you develop an internal sense of movement, then you’ll be able to pick up on what the athlete is doing wrong, and edit it out of the impression you choose to take from that person.

As an instructor, I come in at the level of heightened empathetic perception that I talked about in the opening of this article. Like the piano teacher in Mark Chen’s scientific journal, I can sense what you’re doing wrong because when I watch you move, I’m doing it with you internally. That’s how I teach, one-on-one.

In writing about this, I want to make you aware of how this phenomenon of empathy works in learning a physical skill. This is a personal experience of it. I’m talking about how I’ve got to where I am. Some people reading this won’t be able to get out of their left brain enough to even try to sense the things I’m talking about. But for those who want to, I’m giving you all the information I can and I want to encourage you to explore it.  

Here are some more links about mirror neurons. Have a read. There’s way more information than I can provide--here are a few links to get you started.

http://www.brainconnection.com/content/181_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.html
http://scienceandreason.blogspot.com/2006/02/mirror-neurons.html
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1
 

Of all the human faculties I consider to be the most important to a fighter (though often taken for granted if not totally ignored) is the ability to instantly interpret sensory information and process it to produce either a plan of action or a tactical physical response.  This processing takes place primarily on a sensory and unconscious level. 

Even in ordinary life, to function I must be able to form an internal representation of the situation based on what I’m seeing, hearing, and touching, such that I’m able to grasp its implications and develop my responses on an automatic level.   Fighting requires specific extensions and enhancements of both sensory and processing faculties that can only be acquired through experience or through training designed to bring them out.  In the same way that the CNS of a racing driver, for example, is trained through practice and competitive experience to be able to perform in a specialized way that is beyond the ability of the average person, so can the fighter’s CNS be enhanced in ways specific to the demands he faces.

I must emphasize that the best way to train a fighter’s CNS is to give him experience of the fight.  However, as with many other sports, when we’re looking for that competitive edge, we need to break down the faculties required of the athlete and perhaps train some of them outside the context of the fight, or through fight drilling that addresses the enhancements we’re seeking to produce. 

When seeking to train specific faculties for the fighter, we must first identify what they are.  In this post, I’ll be concentrating on visual skills, which include visual anticipation and reaction, visual concentration on target, dynamic visual acuity, eye tracking, scanning, eye dominance, fusion flexibility, peripheral vision, depth perception, eye/head/body/limb coordination, visualisation, and visual memory. 

I’ve been interested in visual training since my experience with watching speeded-up Betamax movies in the 1970s, which showed me that I could improve my dynamic visual acuity simply by watching.  Now I have a number of drills and training methods that I personally use, but before I go into those, I’d like to offer you a sort of primer on this topic.  So I’m going to put up some links and some clips which reflect some of what is going on in sport in general with regard to visual training. 

I’d like to emphasize that these clips are not necessarily representative of what I’m doing.  Fighting is its own game.  What I’m providing is an opportunity for you to get up to speed a little bit with some of the concepts that I’m talking about.  Then in a future post, I’ll be offering you some tips.

Links to provide an overview of the subject

http://www.sportsci.org/news/ferret/visionreview/visionreview.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.bridgeman.html

http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/0157.htm

http://www.fitnessvenues.com/uk/sports-vision-training

http://www.aoa.org/x5337.xml

http://www.dynamicedge.ca/football.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ozmlwFhTmTcC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=visually+tracking+a+bullet&source=web&ots=7qRIsoBAxy&sig=uPzgbZvSZIkjqkCdEVznU_h1r_8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result

A selection of clips (you can easily find many others)

It might take me a day or two to reply to comments, but it's worth checking the posts because I've put up a couple of substantial replies on the comments sections of recent entries.

Yesterday at Primal I took the idea of the repetitive drill we’ve been talking about on this blog and instead of simply repeating the general skill pattern and then pausing for the big shots, I got the guys to focus on various components contributing to the action.

For example, I’d make them do the drill just concentrating raising their aggression level throughout.  Or, they’d focus just on the vocalisation of the intensity of the tempo.  Or, they’d concentrate on a leading component, say the clavicle and scapula for a right cross.  Or, they’d concentrate on the reverse side of that action, the left body action for the right shot. 

If I was telling them to concentrate on the head motion for the shot, in the next frame I’d get them to work on the tailbone action of that shot.  So that in time they come to appreciate how all the components work together. 

In this way, the guy isn’t reliant on me standing there and saying, ‘Use your tailbone,’ or ‘You’re not aggressive enough.’  He gets his own sense of these components and then he can emphasize them at will, and if he’s letting any of the parts down, he’ll be able to sense that and make an adjustment.

Within that, I’d also get them to reduce the time of the stretch cycle; i.e., the interval of time between eccentric and concentric phases of a move.  By reducing this time, we get a bigger bang.

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.