What Parts Of The Body Benefit Most From Martial Arts?

You call it the bellies are bigger, I call it the shrinking belt I tell them you are not going die getting beaten up. You are going to die of a heart attack or a stroke or cholesterol

If you don't have a connection with your body how can you have discipline if you cannot discipline what you eat? If you go out and eat a McDonald's Big Mac, French fries, large coke and apple pie every day for lunch what discipline do you have? What self control have you really developed? If you feel I have mastered my body I am a master instructor, how did you master that big gut.

I have a little expression at my school were we always say we can handle ourselves. When I think about what it means to handle yourself, it basically means you can push yourself up of the floor, you can pull up your body weight over a bar or you can stand up and get down off the floor rapidly a bunch of different times. Can you literally handle yourself, forget handling yourself punching or kicking, but can you physically handle your own weight. And if your martial art hasn't taught you to be in your body enough to be able to run, jump, kick, roll, push-ups, sit up, pull-up, run to your kids and do all the monkey bars and everything without throwing your back out. I have taught classes to senior students and said we are going to start off with everybody doing 100 squats, 100 sit ups and 100 push ups and when you have it done you can take my class. Ninety percent of them walk right off the floor and not even attempt it.

: And I think, how could you have trained for 20 years and gotten to this point. All you have to do each year was add five push-ups to zero and you would be able to do 100 push-ups in 20 years. You aren't able to increase your push-ups by five push-ups a year, why? Because they haven't done it. They think that they got the belt and they can relax and may be they did when they were younger and they are done. But you should use your whole body in martial arts and you should use it aerobically, anaerobically. You should understand how it is composed, all of my instructors at my school are licensed massage therapists, they know every bone, and every muscle. They know respiratory, circulatory, endocrine and every other part of your body. They know it from the western and the eastern perspective. Western medicine and Chinese medicine is different, they learn both and they do that so that they become better practitioners and better teachers. If I tell you to punch harder and you look at me and say what does that mean? I say I don't know punch harder that does not work. But if I say I want you to drop your weight, shift your hips, torque your hips and keep these muscles relaxed until the moment of impact. Then I want you to test the strength up chest and your anterior deltoid and your triceps and lock down those abs, drive with that back leg which we call ground reaction force. You are going to understand what mechanically makes you a better puncher how to punch harder and how to develop power. You have to learn about your body and we really don't punch with the arm, you punch with your body and the fist gets in the way. You kick with your entire body and the foot is the tool with the delivery system.