It’s often said that the most important thing in self defence is the mind. Mokuso (meditation) is often skirted over in martial arts training, seen as just something to clear the mind before training and calm you down again after training.
But meditation is a method of developing the mind which has martial applications as well as being for self development and health. It allows better connection between the conscious and sub conscious minds, enabling better instincts and intuition to develop. This can carry into all areas of you life, but having a improved intuition has obvious applications for self defence.
Unfortunately it’s usually only done for a few minutes at the beginning and end of the class. It teaches us to quieten the conscious mind and, more importantly, to observe the conscious mind. If we can then introduce this practice of observing our conscious mind into our daily life, we become a lot more aware of all our negative thoughts and how we react to things on autopilot without actually thinking about it. This observation and awareness can over time weaken these automatic responses, allowing us to make better decisions and overcome knee-jerk automatic responses, which might not actually be in our best interests. This can apply in any area of our life, not just self defence!
Whilst many of are stuck at home in self isolation, this is a great time to practice meditations a bit more deeply.
Category: Ideas For Training From Home
Ideas For Training At Home (Part 6 - Breathing: Isolating The Diaphragm)
Diaphragmatic breathing is something I’ve covered in detail before, but it seemed a good time to revisit it with a lot of people self isolating and training from home at the moment. Correct breathing is very central to keeping you relaxed (hence fast) and generating high levels of impact. Some of this video may go against conventional wisdom, but give it a try and you’ll see it really works.
Ideas For Training At Home (Part 5 - Turning The Hip/Waist More Efficiently)
In most styles of martial art, many techniques involve turning the hips/waist one way or the other in order to transfer the body weight into the striking limb. This in turn adds power and speed to the technique being performed.
In this video we look at enhancing that hip/waste turn by maximising the way we use the legs.
Ideas For Training At Home (Part 4 - Learning To Engage Your Fascial System)
Part 4 of ideas for training from home. This looks at a simple modification to your technique for more efficiently engaging the fascial system in the arms to make them faster and more powerful. After you’ve seen this, you’ll realise what’s been there all along in plain sight; yet most people never realised!
Please leave your comments and feedback below.
Ideas For Training At Home (Part 3 - Improve Punch Speed)
Right, this one is a short one. It’s a very simple exercise aimed at teaching you to remain very relaxed as you shoot your arm out without any tension or stiffness.
Please leave your comments below and let me know what you think.
Ideas For Training At Home (Part 2 - Improve Kicking)
Part 2 of ideas for training at home, to help people who are self isolating or in an area that is currently locked-down. This one looks at how you can use furniture to help improve your kicking technique, by forcing you to raise your knee and retract it properly as you kick.
Please leave your comments below and let me know if you found it useful.
Ideas For Training At Home (Part 1 - Home Security)
With so many people across the world on lock-down or self isolation because of the Corona Virus, I thought this would be a good time to share some training from home ideas.
So here’s the first for you looking at home security (as so many of us will be spending a lot more time there).