I am writing this blog because I want to help people not to make the same mistakes that me and many other martial artists have made, and which almost ended our martial arts careers. If I can help one person not to go through horror of thinking that he will never train again, then this will all be worth it.
I would like to make people who are training martial arts aware of this simple fact: If you are from an urban background, and you are in your twenties, then you are too old, too week, to deformed, too stuck in bad habits to be able to fallow the traditional training regimes without injuring yourself beyond repair. This doesn't mean that you can't practice and learn martial arts. This just means that you have to be very very careful how you do it, and you need to do a lot of preparatory work before you learn a single form. If you want to have a long martial arts career that is.
I would like to make people who are training martial arts aware of this simple fact: If you are from an urban background, and you are in your twenties, then you are too old, too week, to deformed, too stuck in bad habits to be able to fallow the traditional training regimes without injuring yourself beyond repair. This doesn't mean that you can't practice and learn martial arts. This just means that you have to be very very careful how you do it, and you need to do a lot of preparatory work before you learn a single form. If you want to have a long martial arts career that is.
Few days ago I saw a video in which a Chines bagua teacher is telling his class that they are all too old to train martial arts. The camera went around the room, and you could see that the average age of a student was early twenties. The teacher then proceeded to explain what he had meant:
The reason for starting young, is that as a kid, you can still stand and move in a natural way. You are not deformed by years of bad habits. This is when the fundamental practices are taught to reinforce this naturalness and openness. You are too old, so I would suggest you help yourself and give each other a massage before you start training, to align your bones and your joints... And then make sure that your body alignment is absolutely correct at all times, or you will injure yourself...and so on and so forth.
Here is the link to the video that I am talking about:
If you are not a kid, you need to start by straightening your muscles and undoing the damage caused by years of doing things unnaturally. You need to relearn how to stand, how to walk, how to move, how to breathe. You need to open joints, strengthen and stretch muscles and tendons, rebuild cartilage and ligaments, open chi channels. Traditional martial arts training regimes were originally designed to be taught to manual laborers, peasants and solders. These were people who were already supper fit, strong and supple. They were able to sit in a Wing Tsun fighting stance without injuring their knees, because their glut and thigh muscles we strong enough to support them. But people starting to train martial arts today are not those kind of people. They don't work in fields all day. They sit in offices working with computers all day. They can't open their qua without ripping their psoas muscles apart. Their sacral joints are completely stuck. They can't generate power from their stomach, because they don't know how to breathe from their stomachs. They will instead try to generate power from their lower back and injure their spine. Or worse they will try to twist their body to the side, without being able to open and close their qua, and will either rip their knee ligaments or worse their spinal discs. Very few people learning martial arts were first taught how to stabilize their knees, in order to keep them over their second toe at all times, before they were taught how to do stances or walk, or kick. Maybe they were told that they should do so, but were never told how to do it. As a consequence, many martial artists end up with bad knee injuries.
As the Chinese teacher had said, you need to undo the damage first. You need to bring you self to a level where your muscles (all your muscles), your ligaments and your bones are strong enough, and your joints are open enough. And then you start with martial arts training. From my experience in various martial arts, this is not done, and dangers of doing things wrong are not emphasized enough. This is why so many people have to stop training when they are in their thirties. They get knee and back injuries that basically make them crippled and unable to continue training.
In order to open the joints, stretch and strengthen muscles, tendons and ligaments, all martial arts have developed at least some basic opening and stretching exercises. The reversing of bad habits needs to be done gradually, slowly, all the time listening to your body and changing the direction, kind and intensity of the practice as appropriate. But a lot of times the muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones are so stuck, that no amount of stretching and relaxation can do any good. And trying to push the body to stretch and open will definitely lead to injury which will then bring you straight to physio table or if you are unlucky to operating table. So sometimes it will be necessary to look for help outside the martial arts circles. And believe me, it's better to look for help before you get injured then after you get injured. Maybe acupuncture or deep tissue massage, or osteopath session, will be needed to correct, open or realign parts of your body. All the above body works are designed to speed up the process of rebuilding, realigning and opening of the body. And if you can afford them, use them. Also deep tissue massage and other forms of muscle and tendon hand manipulation can be learned by everyone. Internal martial arts practice should always incorporate massage as a way to speed up martial practice progress. So if you have a chance to learn any massage technique, do so. It will only enhance your martial arts practice.
In order to strengthen and repair your body, you also need to take care of your nutrition. Eat good balanced food. Don't drink (too much), don't take drugs (too much). Make sure you have enough protein, minerals and vitamins in your diet. Bad nutrition means bad bones, ligaments and muscles. It means lack of energy, it means slow recovery after injuries and heavy training sessions, it means stiff joints and muscles. It means poor senses, reaction times and awareness. Make sure you take plenty of omega 3 acids and glucosamine. These food supplements will help the process of rebuilding the damaged cartilage and bones.
As part of this blog, I will post videos and descriptions of core exercise sets that can help people:
- build core body strength,
- open their joints
- strengthen their ligaments and tendons
- stabilize and at the same time open their hips, knees and ankles
- open their chi channels before their training so that they can energize their bodies
- close their chi channels after their training so that the chi they have generated does not escape and stay stored in the body
It will take time to make all the films and exercise descriptions. So be patient. Hopefully I will be able to post at least one set a week, but life is unpredictable.
