fluidly and circularily in all directions
Your elbow moves circularly? even though it’s a hinge joint?
You may want to get that checked out.
Oh, and everything you post is wrong.
whenever. But you stated that the joints contract…
Is your lifting making your muscle long or short? What is the benefit and weakness of each?
Does lifting reinforce the idea and train the mind to fight against the force? What is the benefit and weakness of this?
How much time do you need to put into your lifting? Is there a ceiling? A weight that you simply can’t advance beyond or can you train yourself to lift any weight?
What happens when you meet the guy who lifts more than you do?
How does lifting weight relate to fighting? Are you punching with your arm muscles? Or are you driving off the leg, using hip, rib, shoulder, etc.?
What is more important: can you hit or how hard you hit? How hard do you need to hit?
A professional fitness trainer is a professional who will encourage you to lift … a professional internal fighter will encourage you not to lift, so will many boxing coaches.
Do you want a body builders body or a boxer’s body? Or a wrestlers body? They are 3 different things.
it’s not uncommon for a boxer to lift weights. It was uncommon in the early days, but is not now.
Actually your joint can move even if the muscles directly around it aren’t moving.
Hinge joints like the elbow and knee don’t have the same range of motion like the ball in socket joints. They can only rotate (like as in a circle) in one plane of motion. However, all that’s required for Taiji is that you be able to connect one circle to the next and…
… you can move your knee in a circlular motion in coordination with the knee and hip joints…right?
If not, then you may want to have that checked out.
Oh, and everything you post is wrong.
What a stupid statement.
Will you settle for … “This one time, about 4 weeks ago, this 265lbs. weight lifting BJJ guy thought he was going to cream me … and I wound up smacking the be Jesus out of him … on video.”
He also thought the fight would go to the ground because he must of heard somewhere that that is the case 90% of the time.
I think that day was an eye opener for him … quite literally.
Link?
dsffdsada
neither. We are talking about strength training. You are essentially training your neuromuscular system to contract harder, increasing power output.
Does lifting reinforce the idea and train the mind to fight against the force? What is the benefit and weakness of this?
I see what you are getting at here, but those are unrelated instances. resisting against a weight will not train you to resist against the force or your opponent’s incoming weight. However, that is not always a bad thing.
How much time do you need to put into your lifting? Is there a ceiling? A weight that you simply can’t advance beyond or can you train yourself to lift any weight?
strength training is not time consuming at all. you train yourself to lift what you can. The current bench press record is over 1000 pounds though, so you can set high goals without problem.
What happens when you meet the guy who lifts more than you do?
what happens when you mee the guy with more skill than you? We addressed this one already.
How does lifting weight relate to fighting? Are you punching with your arm muscles? Or are you driving off the leg, using hip, rib, shoulder, etc.?
you lift with your body just as you punch with your body. strength training involves compound lifts, not isolation lifts like you are referring to.
What is more important: can you hit or how hard you hit? How hard do you need to hit?
if you are saying what I think you are, then it’s irrelevant. the person would have to be completely hyoooge in order for him to be so slow that he cannot hit you.
Books are people’s friends.
Books are people’s friends.
Only if you can read.
What I was getting at is that, for me (and I stress this throughout), it is more important to train getting into position. Or for us, the golden rule of close your door, open the other guy’s door AND THEN hit. It doesn’t take much power to deliver a serious blow … but can you land it? Even boxers have a terrible landing percentage. 30 % is considered good for them.
If I need to be more powerful than you to close my door or open your door than I can only fight the smaller guy, or the very old, or women. As soon as you are more powerful I am done.
I am not saying that you can be a weakling slob and still fighting using “fantastic” technique. If you train and do a lot of two man sets you’ll become powerful and develop condition as a side benefit.
My caution is that if you rely on these as an advantage, what happens when the other guy has that advantage? What happens when you get older? Not 30 … I’m talking 50 … 60 years old. Can you still compete with the strong, young athlete?
It’s been my experience that at that point many start talking about insurance, retiring, etc. But at 40 and 50 you might be out of the ring, but still very much a part of this occasionally violent world.
I was beat by an older man about 4 years ago and this became very clear. I had every advantage on him but he beat me soundly. That woke me up.
Taijiquan is weight training, in that, taijiquan trains you how to carry your weight. I guess you could strap weights onto your body as you practise, I wouldn’t recommend that for a beginner…it’s hard enough trying to get aligned!
That should be a basic of all fighting, and should not be hindered at all by weight training.
Are you actually serious? I’d like to see how this happens. And let’s take the effect of gravity out of the equation.
I don’t think we are on the same page here. Nobody is saying you can throw someone in a weight room and produce a fighter, but strength is a valuable attribute. It is a poor excuse to not build strength because you are going to age.
On a side note here, in edmonton there reportedly was a 72 year old man, Don Ramos, who clean and jerked 103kgs and snatched 72 kgs at the world masters.
I agree with your definition if flexibility as “the ability of a joint to move through its full ROM”. I have yet to see that strength training will hinder this capacity.
However I disagree with your latter part of the definition ‘In concert with all the other joints in the body’, this not flexibility but skill.
True. However, the point of Taiji is to avoid this reception and channel it through the body and into the ground. Force against force is a big no, no in Taiji. If you tighten up as you receive force then you are not doing Taiji anymore.
Sure, in physiology recieving force is called eccentric contraction. There is no way to get around the principles of physiology. You can, in fact, specifically train eccentric strength, and you may wish to look into this.
What relevance does “strength” ie ability to lift objects around over a long time period…have to martial arts? Answer:none.
That is your own definition, and IMO is highly inaccurate. I highly suggest you look into the available literature. As for what relevance it has to martial arts, ask yourself this: would you fare better in a fight now, or after you have been on a starvation diet and lost nearly all your muscle mass? Strength has the same relevance to martial arts as it does other athletic activities: sprinting, throwing, jumping, baseball, football… You will find that all high level athletes without exception will have used strength training to become stronger, faster, and more explosive.
And, I view weight training, and plyometrics as part of the same thing: athletic training. The bottom line is to train your weaknesses.
For arts that use “natural” strength then yes (like one that I practice, ie Taiji). There is a start and a stop. You want to be able to stop and then explode off when you start again. However, for Taiji, there is no real beginning and no end. Each move flows into the next. This is dependent on joint mobility or it will not work. You will get “hung up” on some point of tension and your Taiji becomes worthless.
I don’t see how increasing strength will interfere with having one move flow into the next, having no real beginning and no end, etc. You are not doing Taiji with weights, you are improving your strength, and hence there will be no change in your movement patterns in your art.
I agree with your definition if flexibility as “the ability of a joint to move through its full ROM”. I have yet to see that strength training will hinder this capacity.
When will you see it?
However I disagree with your latter part of the definition ‘In concert with all the other joints in the body’, this not flexibility but skill.
It might not have been clear that I wasn’t part of the def but thats why I put it in parentheses.
Sure, in physiology recieving force is called eccentric contraction. There is no way to get around the principles of physiology. You can, in fact, specifically train eccentric strength, and you may wish to look into this.
Eccentric contraction:
As the load on the muscle increases, it finally reaches a point where the external force on the muscle is greater than the force that the muscle can generate. Thus even though the muscle may be fully activated, it is forced to lengthen due to the high external load. This is referred to as an eccentric contraction (please remember that contraction in this context does not necessarily imply shortening). There are two main features to note regarding eccentric contractions. First, the absolute tensions achieved are very high relative to the muscle’s maximum tetanic tension generating capacity (you can set down a much heavier object than you can lift). Second, the absolute tension is relatively independent of lengthening velocity. This suggests that skeletal muscles are very resistant to lengthening. The basic mechanics of eccentric contractions are still a source of debate since the cross-bridge theory that so nicely describes concentric contractions is not as successful in describing eccentric contractions.
Eccentric contractions are currently a very popular area of study for three main reasons: First, much of a muscle’s normal activity occurs while it is actively lengthening, so that eccentric contractions are physiologically common (Goslow et al. 1973; Hoffer et al. 1989) Second, muscle injury and soreness are selectively associated with eccentric contraction (Figure 2, Fridén et al. 1984; Evans et al. 1985; Fridén and Lieber, 1992). Finally, muscle strengthening may be greatest using exercises that involve eccentric contractions. Therefore, there are some very fundamental structure-function questions that can be addressed using the eccentric contraction model and eccentric contractions have very important applications therapeutically to strengthen muscle.
That is your own definition, and IMO is highly inaccurate. I highly suggest you look into the available literature. As for what relevance it has to martial arts, ask yourself this: would you fare better in a fight now, or after you have been on a starvation diet and lost nearly all your muscle mass? Strength has the same relevance to martial arts as it does other athletic activities: sprinting, throwing, jumping, baseball, football… You will find that all high level athletes without exception will have used strength training to become stronger, faster, and more explosive.
My Taiji teacher can throw me around like a rag doll even though he is probably 6’0" 160-170lbs and I’m 6’7" and 245 lbs. I have way more muscle mass than he does. He’s rail skinny, almost anemic looking and yet he can generate huge amounts of force. When he is generating force and he asks you to feel the part of his body that would normally be generating the force it is almost totally relaxed.
So tell me. What’s creating the force? Because its certainly not muscle. Its something else. Its like torque from the inside out. Like a pulse of something from the inside. Its the joints working in unison from the ground up. No muscle or joint is working any harder than the other but they work in unison to create tremendous power.
In order to create this you have to be completely relaxed at each joint. Each joint must be able to “float” and rotate in all available planes of motion. When you can do this you can become increadibly soft (like an ocean wave) or increadibly turgid (like water being pumped through a fire hose.)
But weight training not gonna get you there. In fact, my teacher has specifically said that kind of thing is counter productive to Taiji because it tightens the joints and prevents on from learning to relax and ultimately is damaging to the body. Of course, he also says that about other “harder” styles of kung fu as well.
My teacher’s name is Harrison Moretz, Taoist Studies Institute, Seattle, WA he is a disciple of Feng Zhiqiang, one of the old school Chen Taiji folks. If you are ever in Seattle stop by for a friendly demonstration. It will blow all your conceptions about what “strength” is out the window.
And, I view weight training, and plyometrics as part of the same thing: athletic training. The bottom line is to train your weaknesses.
Plyometrics are definitely more applicable to harder styles of kung fu. Weight training istrength is kind of useless unless you are mostly looking for balance and tone.
I don’t see how increasing strength will interfere with having one move flow into the next, having no real beginning and no end, etc. You are not doing Taiji with weights, you are improving your strength, and hence there will be no change in your movement patterns in your art.
It interferes. For one, it sets up kinesthetic responses to dealing with incoming force that are all wrong, actually antithetical to Taiji. Secondly, it only allows the joint to work in a couple of planes of motion. Taiji does have its own “strength” training which involves heavy weapons and balls but the way these are used must still conform to the principle of distributing/issuing force evenly through out the entire structure and working the joints through the full ROM. If you are not learning to neutralize force but rather fight against then this is not as important. But this is one of the majore strategies in Taiji to set up a counter attack.
LOL i don’t see the relevance of what you write. Your references like goslow et al what ever that means is not even chinese. how can it apply to chinese martial arts. your body must be molded in a specific way to suit the style.
Like you would know anything about true training. try again clown.
Going to step up, son or keep spouting drivel?
In Boston,
Dale
The depth of your idiocy is astounding.
True Taiji the strength is in your ability to Listen to your opponents energy In taiji we try to relax all joints, tendons, and muscles.
When you work with weights your muscle Tears, this is part of the building process of the body it repairs itself (It also been known to make the heart bigger according to studies) but in taiji we are taught to preserve our bodys to make them healthy (DAO) this takes your bodys natural Defense to heal or repair. Balanced energy is what I try to maintain, not stagnate in the muscles I worked so hard to relax!
what is the use of training for strength In taiji?, people have a hard time just trying to relax, why would you want to compound the problem. Hard qigong is also not good while doing Taiji as it can make you less sensitive.
In taiji it is about feeling your opponents energy as well as your own.
we can learn the external first then we can learn the internall second. its easy to tighten the muscle or strengthen it.
But try to relax using only the muscles nessasary to support the bodys structure(postures),
If you go from head to toe, and relax each muscle eyes, ears, nose, all the way down to the feet, and pay attention you will notice that some of those muscles have returned to a tensioned state. so when you think of relax it isnt be lazy it means awareness
Try to work out on a strength training exercise and then try to relax deeply you can’t, your blood is pumping(Loss of awareness) then this does not just subside you end up sore, then you have to tend to your muscle ache(loss awareness again) then you have to worry about getting injured,plus the down time for that ( BIG loss of awareness), Then if you train say three times a week/Mon,wed,fri
when would you be able do your Taiji properly?
you would always have tension I dont want to spend a lifetime 10-20 years to master it.
you can do one but shouldn’t do both.
Just a thought 