Terribly inflexible

Man my flexibility is lousy. To try to remedy this problem, I’ve started rereading Thomas Kurz’ excellent book, Stretching Scientifically. I can’t understand Chapter 1 which is all theory, but so far I can digest part of Chapter 2. Basically his first instruction is to do dynamic (not ballistic) stretches first thing in the morning, every single day. Luckily, there aren’t many of them, and they’re all easy to do very quickly. I started yesterday, as did my older son. So far so good. I feel better already. I plan to try these for a month before trying to understand and correctly add other stretches.

If done correctly, they’re supposed to reset my nervous system so that it will allow my body to go to its current maximum range of motion quicker and start increasing that rom. Something he said that I had forgotten or never digested was to stop if I get fatigued and the rom starts to decrease. The “memory” of my system would then get set at the lower rom due to greater frequency of these signals to the system, making it harder to override that and make improvements. I’m sure I’ve been doing that, interfering with potential progress. D’oh. The good news is he says that flexibility is one area where anyone of any age and condition can make great improvements very rapidly if done correctly.

A quick search shows that there are many more examples out there. Here is one interesting series with some other stretches I’ll have to add.

Xingyiquan and yiquan questions

After trying xingyiquan basics with a spear (actually a broom), I can finally see that the five elements make so much sense as spear techniques. No wonder that in its heyday, xingyiquan must have been the best art for soldiers. The learning efficiency from spear down to other weapons and finally down to empty hands seems amazing. However, once those assumptions were gone, it’s hard to say. The empty hand techniques seem a bit confusing compared to the spear ones, and not as simple as they should be in hindsight, in the cold vacuum of modern theories. It makes me wonder about yiquan incorporating Western boxing and whether it not only wanted to de-emphasize forms, but also whether it rejected assumptions about traditional weapons. If the spear was seen as obsolete, a weapon of a bygone era, while some other empty hand techniques from contexts that assume NO weapons were seen as more technically efficient, this evolution (or devolution) makes sense. Part of me is more interested in the more modern art of yiquan as a result, though part of me is much more interested in xingyiquan. If improvised weapons are key to self defense as some say, and as the character Jason Bourne demonstrates, FMA is perhaps the most important and efficient learning path due to the skill transfer from traditional weapons, and the same could be said of xingyiquan. Except that xingyiquan overlaps with my other neijia interests directly. Plus the elegance and simplicity of the five elements under multiple conditions is just darn impressive.

Eddie Bravo innovations and questions

After reading all these names for different guard types I don’t yet understand, I surfed over to read about Eddie Bravo on where else, Wikipedia. Some of his suggestions, according to this article:

• Always practice only no gi grappling.
• Incorporate the rubber guard.
• Drilling (kata) is as important as rolling (sparring).

A clip from the article:

Bravo explained (at the San Carlos seminar, September 2006) that he is surprised that MMA fighters still rely too much on “hand control” (trying to grab and hold the opponent’s hands) to protect themselves from punches while holding their opponent in guard, and on throwing unsuccessful traditional triangle chokes. Hand control is criticized for two reasons: it is relatively easy to break a hand-grip under the best of circumstances, and in an actual MMA match sweat makes it even more difficult to get and hold a grip.

It’s easy to see the validity of Bravo’s ideas even as a beginner and casual mma spectator. For every genius who gets gnp’ed for several rounds before pulling off a nice submission, there are many more people who just get gnp’ed. Also it’s interesting to consider the assumptions of specific training. In mma, there is usually no gi worn, so why wouldn’t competitors cut to the chase and train with that assumption? For everyone else, there are different clothing assumptions. Also, I would say that throw/takedown assumptions need to be changed, but then I see that the ADCC rules already give 4 points for a clean takedown (ending with guard passed) which seems to be an adjustment away from the bjj rules. Someone somewhere is reengineering things for that hand control problem in some different way. I wonder what it is. Not that it matters now as I can’t even do guard 101. Still, I want to learn about it later.

Egan Inoue: Racquetball and BJJ world champion

Holy Moly. I was impressed that Josh Waitzkin could hold national chess championships and world PH championships and now aims for world BJJ championships. Egan Inoue has won multiple world racquetball championships followed up by multiple world BJJ championships. He also won mma world championships, though I can’t find with what organization. His younger brother was heavyweight champ in Shooto and competing in mma when he called Egan to stand in for him for a match, leading to his next sports career. Geez.

Judoka perspective on guard positions

This thread has a judoka’s perspective on bjj guard positions and uses. Talks about open guard, rubber guard, and spider guard. I don’t yet understand these distinctions. Kuzushi using the legs from a bottom position is something I am finding through experimentation, though. Will have to go back to read and better understand the thread later. In the meantime the Wikipedia Guard article is fairly helpful.

Slightly back weighted

I am increasingly aware that my standing posture is slightly weighted toward the back. I can feel it, I’ve seen it in the mirror, my friends have helped me correct it a bit. Now, the Wii Fit is making it even more clear by drawing two lines, one vertical, one horizontal, then showing a red dot and little lines where my center of balance sits. Not really too bad as it’s just barely left and just barely back. It tells me I have good balance. But now that I keep seeing this graph, I’ve been paying more and more attention and sure enough I can tell if I stand how I normally want to, my weight is just a tiny bit too far back toward my heels. A minute adjustment puts it more over the bubbling wells. However, even with the very small adjustment, the more correct balance feels a little weird to me right now. It will take more than a few weeks to correct. In the meantime I’ll still try to work on the more internal aspects of standing but I want to get the biomechanics down perfectly. This is all only static, not dynamic, but I feel that simple static standing should be pretty easy to do well. I’ve also found my single leg standing balance is not as good as I want it but I’m not overly concerned about that at the moment.

Dean Kamen’s version of the bionic arm

Segway inventor Dean Kamen was asked by the US government to work on a bionic arm that would weigh no more than a regular human arm and could be used to pick up a grape without crushing it and pick up a raisin without dropping it. The video does not go into any detail but the arm appears to work via signals from the brain as well as send tactile feedback to the brain. He calls it the “Luke arm” after Luke Skywalker’s arm from Star Wars.

What does that mean for improved human performance? It seems it’d be possible to improve it, as in The Bionic Man and The Bionic Woman 70’s TV shows (”we can rebuild him…. stronger than before… etc.). Already, amputee athlete, the “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius, is seen by some folks as having an advantage over other athletes in running since his calves can’t tire and his blades absorb shock better than a human ankle.

What about interfacing the arm (and through it, the brain) to computers? From an earlier article
that covers these projects including Kamen’s involvement:

Kuniholm is all for augmenting the natural abilities of his missing hand. When a visitor commented that the Proto 2 hand’s lack of side-to-side motion in the wrist might make it difficult to operate a computer mouse, Kuniholm replied, “Why do I need a mouse? Why can’t I plug my arm right into a USB port?”

Whoa. The soldiers’ injuries are terrible but an age of cyborgs is apparently rapidly arriving. Beyond that, the military’s dream is human limb regeneration. Technology’s accelerating pace is unbelievable. Kamen’s quote in the video on the Yahoo! page on how quickly humans can adopt it and that this rate is not accelerating is very interesting. Kamen has also been working on a device that purifies water while generating power and an organization to encourage kids to study science by organizing fun sporting event-like competitions. The former would seem especially helpful for the water crisis and sustainability issues, and the latter for all kinds of problems.

The Bill Moyers qigong episode

Here is a clip from the old Bill Moyers episode:

Best essay on qigong and internal merging with external

This blog post is the best essay I’ve found on qigong and how neijia, from a qigong-centric point of view, should merge internal with external. It is really about prana and yoga, but to me that’s a very meaningless distinction. Indeed, that it’s not explicitly about qigong or taijiquan or neijia actually gives it more meaning for these specific contexts. I’ve pointed to it before, but I want to quote it some.

Think back to that first (or recent) practice session when moving into a pose was a mechanical exercise in willpower. Often enough, for me, the first one or two Sun A sequences of each practice feel this way.

But then something happens, though it happens gradually enough that I usually don’t notice it until it’s pretty far along: Instead of formulating the pose in my brain and then manipulating my various body parts into position, I find the pose begins to generate itself without the mechanistic effort of my brain’s control. I don’t mean to suggest that my mind is absent – it’s there and engaged and choosing poses and depth and alignment and the like – but the energy that creates the pose is no longer something applied, but rather something that begins to flow through the pose itself. It’s hard to find the right words for this.

The best way I can think of to describe it is that the energy and the pose aren’t really separated. Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t as though everything turns into energy and lightness and ease. Many yoga poses remain at or beyond the borders of my capabilities. Some are incredibly difficult, requiring all the strength and endurance and flexibility I can muster. But the energy of the pose is internal to it – not external.

…

Once you’ve noticed the experience of “doing it wrong,” you can feel the difference. I put “doing it wrong” in quotation marks, because, of course, when it comes to yoga, the only “wrong” way is the “not paying attention” way. Anything that happens with full attention isn’t wrong. It may be counterproductive to a particular objective, but it will never be “wrong.” Anyway, once you come to notice the difference, you can start to move into alignment with those patterns of energy. Why would you care? As you align with the energies of your body, your moves become more fluid, your balance stabilizes, you allow prana to guide you more deeply into poses, strengthening and stretching. Once you become familiar with its flow, you can move with it, using it as a counterpoint to your own actions. A dance.

…

I like how he says it’s hard to put it in words but does such a good job of it. One of his last statements really captures everything concisely for me.

A river is not simply a channel through which water flows – it is the flowing water, itself.

Amazingly good essay. Not really a how-to, but a great description of what yoga or taijiquan form or even push hands or I suppose about anything should feel like. I think that is partly what the taijiquan classics mean when they talk about “no qi” or using “yi” or “shen”, not “qi”. A kind of wuwei or no-mind arrived at or maybe enhanced with this energy work. The internal should merge with the external. It’s impossible to understand until one gets some real, kinesthetic sense of what he’s talking about. He’s not talking about “whole body” or “neutralizing” or leverage. Using logic to wholly reject what he’s talking about will prevent any understanding. That is sort of using the left brain to try to understand (or really rationalize away) what the right brain can get in an instant without words getting in the way, transcending words. That is an example of what the Dao De Jing, Zen koans, and the so-popular partly due to Oprah, Eckart Tolle book mentioned in the post is describing or attempting to help one understand. Tolle talks a lot about uniting internal and external in a much broader sense. I think seangreenfrog is also getting at the spiritual, and that’s also what the taijiquan classics are getting at, in part. That is actually easier to “get” than harnessing “it” into a specific form or external thing, especially one idealistically based on the Dao.

Machida Ortiz

Who knows how long this one will be up:

http://www.mmaroot.com/lyoto-machida-vs-tito-ortiz-ufc-84-video/

Very entertaining due to Machida being so technically proficient and “unorthodox”. The double kicks, the smoothness. Suddenly appearing, suddenly disappearing. Excellent feints. Renders Ortiz’ clinch useless. Always “connected”. The old story about Yang Cheng Fu and the string comes to mind. That is the kind of mma match I want to watch. Ortiz is somewhat past his prime but still ok, just not technical enough on top of general athleticism. He looks much stronger but comes in with a tight guard and just gets constantly peppered from the outside. Even in the clinch, he looks stronger, but Machida just rolls him back (from his excellent sumo background?). This fight reminds me a lot of Cung Le vs. Frank Shamrock. A past great is totally outclassed by a superior striker. Is this what the future of mma looks like? What was good is giving way to great talent. Watch it as soon as you can.

A blurb from Wikipedia on Machida:

Lyoto Machida was born in the city of Salvador but soon moved to Belém which is his hometown. He is the third son of the Shotokan karate master Yoshizo Machida. Machida began training in karate at the age of four,^[2] earning his black-belt at the age of 13. He began training in Sumo at 12 and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at 15. He won a number of amateur karate tournaments, including 2001 Pan American Karate tournament.^[3] He was also runner up in the 2000 Brazilian Sumo Championships in the 115-kg division. In addition to his Sumo and Karate achievements, he has a college degree in Physical Education. Lyoto’s brother, Chinzo, is a Shotokan vice-champion (Australia 2006), losing only to #1 ranked Shotokan master Koji Ogata. Lyoto and Chinzo fought in a Karate Final 10 years ago in which Lyoto gave Chinzo a cheek scar that still exists today. His other brother, Kenzo Machida, is a TV journalist for one of Brazil’s biggest TV stations.

Lyoto is well-known for using a variety of Shotokan Karate techniques in his fights. Lyoto used a Karate leg sweep on B.J. Penn in the 2nd round of their fight. He uses a back kick in many fights (they can be seen in his bouts against Sam Greco, Sam Hoger, and Stephan Bonnar). Frank Trigg once said that he got dropped twice in row by Lyoto’s back kick in a sparring session they had.