Takes a lot of muscle to "not use muscle"!

[JusticeZero]

Yesterday I got my one student back onto the floor. (The flagstone actually, as their SO wanted to watch the class and our usual training space doesn't allow for that.) They've been out for three weeks with midterms and the like. And apparently they haven't been training outside of class with the things I suggested! They did train some, but it was with some kicks. Easy flashy stuff, not the important stuff like stance.

So after some review, i'm trying to show how to deal with an attacker to turn it into a throw. Problems appeared! The body of the lesson was that you can ward off an incoming force with the fence created by the blocking arm, then lightly hook with the wrist and twist to turn it into a throw. Not much physical strength involved! Just yielding and using the attackers' force to power a change of stance!

Except that to do this you need to have this relaxed stance that can withstand a forward force and not be bowled over, so that you can control how, exactly to fall and deflect the force. That's a question of posture, not strength.

They.. didn't have the strength to hold the posture properly, yesterday. As they tried, the posture deranged in ways that needed more and more physical strength to maintain, and suddenly they had to muscle their way through the movement, too.

Very disheartening. But it makes it apparent that i'm going to have to push a lot of physical strength building exercises just to give them enough physical strength again that they can regain the ability to not use muscle to deal with things.

It's a losing game to train a small-ish woman to try to get strong enough to outmuscle all attackers. It just isn't going to happen; attackers are going to go out of their way to attack someone well below their weight class, and i'm not about to try to get her to build enough strength to outmuscle people twice her size. With proper form, she can toss me around with some of those movements without using much strength, and I have twice her mass. Without proper form, it turns into strength versus strength for everything. This has served as a demonstration that that strength training isn't just to move other people. And hopefully also has explained why I suggest the out of class training that I do.

[sensei8]

Transitional movements and the like shouldn't be forced/muscled. And you're absolutely correct...muscling causes tension and tension prohibits free movements; transitions suffer.

And when one moves this way and is meet with resistance, the natural instinct is to fight against said resistance, thus using the resistance for ones success. Pushing hand drills are all about "Working" with the resistance so that hidden opens are revealed.

To be relaxed until tensions is required; but that tension must be controlled.

Great topic Justice!!

[Harkon72]

Relax and listen to your body!

[Chunmonchek]

Muscles work by contraction. Simply, all you have to do is to use only the muscles absolutely necessary for the action. In other words, inhibit (not fire) the antagonistic muscles. Therein lies the rub...how that's done.

[JusticeZero]

In this case it was an issue that 'not using muscle' meant using body alignment and posture - and the strength needed to maintain that structure was lacking. But tensing up is a disaster also, yes.

[bushido_man96]

Quite the conundrum there. That's why, as you know, good basic strength is important. I was dabbling with some of the body positions you tend to use, Justice, and found that it requires a strength that I don't have right now. Its also like bringing guys in to TKD that have strong legs, but don't know how to kick properly yet, and have to learn how to do that activity properly.

My question is, what kind of drilling will you do to improve the necessary strength?

[barrypardue]

Great topic. They need to do more practice