I have a friend who was in the Australian army for several years – and of Bootcamps, he said it’s not about making you fit – it’s the army. They already assume you’re fit, because you passed the entrance requirements. It’s actually about team-building. You’ll push through those last few push-ups, because you don’t want to be the one who lets your team down.
And that makes perfect sense. It’s actually about something other than simple fitness. You train to learn to cope with stress, and knowing that they cannot accurately simulate the conditions of war, they train you to be able to function in high-stress environments in the best ways they can. But it’s not just random yelling or abuse, it serves a purpose. And I think, these days at least, it’s much less questionable than the training you see in An Officer and a Gentleman. And as you go, they evaluate everyone – they want to know if you are an army kind of person. This hard-line approach may work well for an individual, or for small groups or teams, but you can’t expect what works for a minority of people in a specific environment to work for everyone, ‘for life’. And you can’t expect people who have not chosen this career to willingly submit to these sorts of power/obedience games, simply for the notion of improved health and fitness. And it also should be obvious, if you want to improve your fitness in any capacity – strength, endurance, mobility, coordination or skills development – that this approach is not required. Can you imagine yelling at someone in an attempt to improve their coordination? There are many paths to the same destination, and many paths to your destination. You can take the road you like, and train in a way that is appropriate to you and your desires.
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This will be somewhat technical, so feel free to take your time. If you experience knee or lower back pain when you climb stairs, the following information could be very helpful for you. The purpose of this post is to break down the technique of stair-climbing in order to promote harmonious and efficient movement patterns, built on a foundation of good leverage. In terms of what moves your body from one step to the next, there are two main actions performed in stair climbing: hip extension (where you pull the thigh back and down, away from your torso) and knee extension (where you straighten the leg at the knee joint). Of course, when you move the other leg forwards to the next step, you are flexing at the knee and the hip, but the actions that actually move your body up the staircase are extension and extension. You straighten the knee, and straighten the hip, and this moves your body through space. It is easy not to think in these terms, because as we move forward we think of the leg that is moving forward, but of course it is the leg that remains on the ground that propels our body forwards and in this case upwards, and it is in the action of this leg that we see either efficient or inefficient movement patterns expressed.
There’s a difference between testing and training. Simply put, training is what you do to develop your strength and athleticism, and testing is what you do if you want to find out where you’re at. In terms of processes, well one is a process and the other isn’t. That’s fairly simple. So training could be thought of as the process of development. If you are fairly strong, you can use chin-ups as a tool, an exercise, for your training. But if you aren’t very strong, chin-ups won’t be a useful tool for training, though they may be a useful tool for testing your strength. It comes down to this: one does not develop by simply attempting a test one cannot do, over and over. Development requires a process. Many coaches and personal trainers – I don’t think it’s a particularly sophisticated approach – treat most or all training sessions as if they’re testing sessions. High intensity, challenging exercises, performed to failure or near-failure, week-in, week-out. I want to grant the benefit of the doubt and say that there is some degree of applicability to this method, but I really don’t know if that’s true. The difficulty is finding the sweet spot, which has led many people to favour training cycles. For a couple of weeks or maybe a month, you’ll perform relatively easy exercises, you’ll get used to the coordination, to moving efficiently and safely. Then for a month you might increase the load, and really start to challenge yourself. And then over the next month or two, you’ll increase the load even more, and shoot for a few one- or three-repetition-maxes. Which is, to say, you’re lifting the most weight you can possibly lift, for the designated number of repetitions. It becomes the test at the end of the training cycle, if you will. Then you take some time off, and rest well. I wrote about putting this idea of beauty (as something out there, something you can qualify for, as something, anything that is not within you already) putting this idea of beauty to rest; putting this idea of needing to qualify to rest. Accepting yourself as you are. If you want to ‘work on’ something, work on discovering your own true character – not on serving the status-quo’s exploitative agenda. But what then? How do you motivate yourself to care for yourself, to exercise and all that stuff, when you’re over pandering to their demands? If you really are worthy now, as you are, then what’s the point of all that hard work? That’s a good point. It’s not worthwhile because some day it might make you beautiful. If that’s all you’re focussed on, you’ll miss the forest for the trees. If you’re constantly seeking this other thing, you’ll neglect – you won’t even be able to see – the real benefits that you’re getting right now. You’ll take them for granted, always looking for this other thing. Firstly – to touch on the horizontal pull-up in a little more detail: there are two main ways you can do this, and a bunch of variations. Method one: when you pull your body up to the bar, you aim to bring your nipples or lower ribs towards the bar – your hands are placed around shoulder width or a bit narrower, and this will place most of the emphasis on your lats and mid-back. All devoted and ethical martial artists I have known care about protecting that which is vulnerable, fragile, weak, valued or loved. The role of discipline is to enable you to protect that which requires protecting, and to develop and grow in a way that serves you and your best interests. It is not to enable you to police your own oppression – but that’s how we are encouraged to apply it these days. We are called weak, and only strong when we are capable of abusing ourselves in the name of health and progress. Our morality is questioned based on our eating and exercise practices, and assumptions are made about our character, based on our size, shape and weight. I have always felt conflicted about discipline. It’s a double-edged sword, it can harm or it can serve. It is useful, but in excess, or when misapplied, it can be extremely problematic. And as disciplined as I have been in my life, it never made me look the way I wanted. There are gaps in our assumptions.
Yep, that's my silhouette
I am announcing my new martial arts endeavour. After much, much pondering and a little bit of planning, I am opening my own wushu school: Song Mountain Wushu. Wushu is simply Chinese for martial arts, and I will be teaching kung fu and tai chi. Classes will be held in the dance studio above the gym where I work. This is probably more relevant to those of my readers who live in Melbourne. As probably comes as no surprise, I’m running body-postive classes. You often see martial arts advertised with some sort of weight-loss propaganda thrown in for good measure. It is important to me – in a culture that ‘encourages’ us to be thinner all the damn time – that we have safe spaces for training, where we are not constantly pressured to look different. And of course, the point of martial arts training is not to lose weight. The point depends on you, really – but commonly people train for skills and sporting excellence, for confidence, and to learn practical methods of self-defence. So I wrote about hamstring flexibility in the previous post, and how it relates to squatting deeply. In the pistol squat (pictured), which is essentially a full range of motion squat on one leg, with the other leg held straight out in front – check out how much more of an issue hamstring flexibility becomes. Look at that angle of the back. Even if you were sitting down and totally relaxed, it’s still a pretty significant hamstring stretch. We tend to think of the hamstrings as muscles that primarily work the knee, but they play a massive role in hip extension too, so when you squat down on both legs and the angle between the thigh and belly closes – that position mirrors exactly what you do when you reach forward to touch your toes. Only difference is, the knees are bent when you squat – so you don’t feel the hamstring stretch behind your knee where we are used to – but if you’ve been playing around with the squat and stretch techniques from my previous post, you might be getting familiar with the feeling of a bent-leg load-bearing (weight of your own torso) hamstring stretch. People often think the key to squatting deeply is calf and achilles flexibility - especially when they think of the pistol squat - but even though it might feel like that's your limiting factor, it's hamstring flexibility that usually holds you back.
Functional mobility is where strength and range of motion overlap. You’ll commonly see people who are strong, but immobile and who don’t move fluidly or with ease, and at the other end of the spectrum you’ll see people with seemingly great flexibility, but they might just have hyper-mobile or unstable joints. As such, functional mobility is defined not by range of motion or strength, but by both. If you can take your joints through a complete range of motion with stability, you’re mobile. And stability is all about strength and awareness. When I started squatting heavy and really building up my hamstrings, I found I could sink into the front splits much further. They say that weightlifting makes you tight, but because I increased my strength, I could stretch further without feeling vulnerable. Everything felt safer. It’s not about just stretching and increasing your flexibility in a passive sense – it’s about increasing your range of motion with strength and stability. If you’re very tight, you could develop a lot by learning to relax into a stretch, but probably what you want to focus on is being strong and stable in an extended, elongated or stretched-out position, rather than just trying to stretch further. |