The Subtle Power of Subtle Muscle Control Part II

“In war, there is no substitute for victory.”

• Gen Douglas MacArthur

There Are No Small Victories

This is a little long but necessary since it sets up other things that I'm going to present later on in this series. You might want to get some coffee. Just sayin...

I start this post off by telling a story based on a TV show that appeared as a miniseries in the early 1980s. Back in 1983 for those who remember, there was a two-part sci-fi television miniseries, called “V” or “The Visitors". The series was inspired by Sinclair Lewis' anti-fascist novel It Can't Happen Here (1935). It was your basic aliens arrive on Earth in a fleet of huge, saucer-shaped motherships, which hover over major cities across the world. wreaking havoc Sort of like a precursor to Independence Day.

At first, they appear as our friends promising to share their advanced technology with humanity, etc., so you already knew this was going to go south on us real fast. Because as time would pass they later turn out to be snakes in the grass, literally for their true appearance as we would find out underneath their masks, was that of reptiles. Basically, the Visitors were Nazis from space and even their uniforms and symbols were as you can see by their flag below were reminiscent of the Nazi SS uniforms and the Swastika so you already hated them from the start.

It was basically The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich only told from the perspective of an alien invasion. Now the original was a masterpiece the subsequent remake while visually appealing lacked the same intensity of the originally. This is because the one thing it did not have to draw on was the recent memory of those who suffered in the Nazi concentration camps as well as those who fought against them during WWII.

The one character, in the show that always stuck out for me, was Abraham Bernstein a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. He was played by the great character actor Leonardo Cimino, who in real life actually landed and fought at Normandy during the D-Day invasion. Anyway, Abraham Bernstein intuitively knew just by the behavior of the visitors and all their platitudes that they were not on the level. He could see this because he saw the same pattern develop in Germany leading up to the Jews being led off to the slaughter of the concentration camps which he made known to everyone from personal experience by showing people his concentration camp tattoo.

To me even as a college student, this was very powerful because it would later lead up to how they mustered the courage to resist and fight back against the visitors. You see unlike the invasion of France and the liberation of Europe there was no Allied Army to come to the rescue so it would all fall on the shoulders of average people to rise up and kick-that-ass.

One day after people finally woke up and realized that the Visitors were our enemy and they were only there to enslave the human race as well as use us as a source of food sort of like the Twilight Zone episode, To Serve Man.

Abraham saw that some kids were spray-painting some alien Nazi glyphs as I like to call them, on the side of a building defacing it. He then yelled at them and went over and took the spray paint away from them and said,

“What are you doing?”

But before they could answer, he then walked over to the building and sprayed the side with a huge “V” and he turned to the boys and said something like,

“Here’s what you need to paint, V for victory!”

You see Abraham Berstein understood the importance of not only having the right mindset but he understood something else.  Doing nothing was not an option and he knew how even small acts if started early enough have huge impacts down the line which in this case. Eventually became the battle cry and spark of the revolution against the oppressors.

While this may seem like a long-winded way to make this point here's the deal. When you train to fight for your life remember there is no substitute for victory. In all that you do this understanding must be at the forefront of why you do what you do in all that you do. Where even the smallest changes, the simplest of drills, the most base understanding of the thing whatever the thing is, will have huge impacts down the line to win the day and winning the damn fight! You need to train and feel this into the marrow of your bones. This is the importance of developing the proper level of subtle muscle control in all that you do. But there's something else and that is it does no good to train in this fashion if you do not train with the proper moral will in all that you do to crush the enemy from beginning to end. Nothing else matters if your mind and will are not in alignment. 

Removing the Layers

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, Sherlock Holmes

So…

What is it you want to do?

How do you wish to position yourself in the world, and where do you stand?

What is it you want to be able to do in the body as it relates to fighting?

These are important questions you need to ask yourself because if you are to get to that place you want to get, regardless of what you train. You need to develop a different thought process as to how you move your body for combat and it starts by how you want to position yourself as a Warrior.

When you train you need to do so as of your life is literally on the line, because someday it very well may be.

Like a great sculptor, it is not so much that they carve out and shape the image as much as they remove what is not essential to reveal the overall form, the true form of what the image can become. Or in the case of people what we yearn to become.

Every skill, every thought, every sub-skill, even the smallest movements no matter how slight, must be trained and honed through this thought process this understanding and integrated into all that you do. 

There is nothing else…

If you are to achieve the level of subtle muscle control that transcends technique, physical ability, and/or physical limitations. You need to remove that which is impossible (i.e., taking stock of your own physical limitations) and peel back the superfluous layers. Such as but not limited to, excessive movement, mental adhesions that hold you back in the form self-created mental limitations, and false assumptions of how things work that have a negative and negating effect on your development. To arrive at that place where whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth. Because it is these layers that are obstacles within your development.

Creating Space

• Creating Space– a method of moving your body in such as way where you are already out of the way of their strikes or have created space for yourself to evade/enter or space for them to enter into. For the purpose of crushing them by leading them to their death.

Creating Space is nothing more than a skill or technique to create the space that you need to end the fight pronto. In order to Create Space, there are some things you need to know.

First of all, you have to understand that it starts internally, not just in how you think about moving but also how you actually move in the body at the subtlest level of movement. You must also develop control over your body so that there is no movement where to the best of your ability there is no purpose (i.e., removing excessive movement). This is important because as you learn to Create Space you need to also control the amount of space you create in order to prevent your opponent from having enough time to recover. You see when you Create Space you also take space from them as well as create it for you. Thus there is an inverse relationship to being able to Create Space. Think of Creating Space as stealing time from them and adding it to your balance sheet.

Additionally, you must develop what we call in Warrior Flow anticipatory movement meaning the thing you do before you do the thing you're going to do. The ability to position your body internally as you move to have enough time to create the space you need.

A couple of other key points to creating space are:

The closer you are to a person the more space you need to be able to create or you have to learn how to move sooner and that this moving sooner is as much a mental thing as a physical thing.

As the late great singer Kenny Rogers says in the song The Gambler, “You've got to know when to hold 'em... Know when to fold 'em..."  You have to learn when to move and when not to move, when to speed up or slow down, how to change the tempo, use force, lighten force or at times come to a complete stop where all motion in your body instantly ceases or changes direction and turns on a dime. In other words, there is a timing not only to creating space but you need to develop the patience in order to make it work for you because it is not just moving for the sake of moving. It is a choice that you trained to.

At the end of the day what you’re trying to develop is a level of what we call in Warrior Flow "Dynamic Coordination" (integration) where you move dynamically where every part of your body down even to the most minute movements are unitized working off of each other.

This cannot happen unless all of the other concepts are working with each other. The truth is it is not possible to separate any of them. It is not possible to move any part of your body without other parts of the body responding canceling out certain things in order to accomplish what you want.

This is why you must strive for 100% control even down to the micro or ideomotor movement level where you control everything and are constantly polishing your movement.

Our Bodies Always Seek Harmony and Equilibrium

To reiterate it is generally not possible to move or control one part of your body without affecting by other parts. Meaning you cannot just move your arm or your hand without other parts working on some level to counter that movement. It just does not work that way. I'll even go out on a limb and say it’s not even possible to do so without affecting others parts or activating them to work with, stabilize and counter the motions all at the same time. This is what we learn when trying to make robots move as humans do where there have to be some countervailing forces or else there is no control or equilibrium control. Trust me having seen some of the robots the military has been developing when I was still on active duty you can see this in action often with hilarious results.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

• Albert Einstein

This is where you have to use your imagination which by the way is not what you think but how you think. Understand that this thing we call our imagination is not some willy-nilly thing where it just comes out of the ether but it is situated between our perceptions and our understanding of things. We see the world it as it is but also as our perceptions and our understanding allow etc... So we can’t always see the world around us even though it is hidden in plain sight because you also need to be able to see it with your mind as well. We can see things we already know and don't see things we don't know.

Our imagination will pick out a bit of what we know and will fill out the rest of the picture. (This, by the way, is how deception works in combat where we allow people's minds to pick out a bit of information to fill in what we want them to believe or focus on as if it is real in order to crush them. Because when they are making a mistake why interrupt them?)

You see a skill is not just one skill but actually many smaller related skills that are integrated into the whole. When you develop a skill as long as you start with the proper framework or technique the body will begin to fill in the gaps in information. This is where our imagination comes in as a guide to help us fill in those gaps as we train where we extend ourselves and discover what is the art of the possible.  Now if you are able to deconstruct the skill (i.e., break it down into its smaller components) and practice getting good at those skills as well as polish and refine the movements and the integration of those sub-skills with each other then you improve the overall structure or movement. 

This is a skill that we actually teach people how to do in Warrior Flow to help improve their practice and make it more meaningful and productive.  By teaching people how to focus on developing the sub-skills (by the way, we have a whole modality of training on how this is done) I've found that this drastically cuts down on the amount of time it takes in order to develop and integrate the overall skills they are working on. 

So... and this is the part I want you to get for it plays a crucial role in how you learn to develop the subtle muscle control you desire. When we train our bodies from a little bit we spread out and fill in the gaps in what we know. In other words, we make leaps in thought and the more connections you make the faster you can make those leaps. 

Think of it like this if you've ever had to cross a rope bridge, then you know where I'm going with this. Where the more space between the planks the greater the leap to the next plank you have to make and the more difficult the journey. However, the more planks you have the less space you will have between planks the easier it is to cross and the more confident you are crossing the bridge.

As an aside,  I remember when I was a 1st Lieutenant and we were training with the ROK Marines doing their Commando Course in Pohang, South Korea. They had this one bridge you had to go out on in order to rappel off of the bridge. This thing was like the bridge in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I shit you not! Every time someone jumped off this thing bounced and swayed side to side. the best part was how you had to be careful how you stepped so you didn't end up going over the side. So even though we were snapped in with our safety line I can tell you no one was looking forward to hanging 150' feet in the air from a bridge that moved up and down like bouncing on a trampoline. 

Anyway...

Like I said before there is a pattern to human movement and we’re always looking for patterns and even in our own movement or what is called The Law of Similarity where like produces like, like causes like, etc. where it's all part of the same thing. Our brains are always looking for patterns to latch onto "always"!

So one thing attaches to another and builds on another and another and so on. Before you know it you have 50 movements you never had before that seem to come out of nowhere, where each thing rested upon the previous experience of what came before. So as you develop the skill to create space what you will find is there is an almost infinite number of ways you can create space at various ranges. It is only limited by your imagination but you need through training, to develop your imagination.

 But… at the end of the day, it’s all about perception...

All truth is built on the previous truth. We see the world, not as it is but as our perceptions allow. Imagination and knowledge are complementary and work with and off of each other and cannot be separated. How you think shapes what you do which is why imagination is more important than knowledge. Any knowledge we have comes from something we previously imagined or thought.

Imagination usually happens under conditions of uncertainty this is why when you train as you are presented with more situations or impressions if trained within the right context. You will begin to recognize things sooner and sooner where the solutions seem to just come to you out of the void. The reason I stress the right context is because there is also a way to fuck this up (as I've seen too many times) if not presented correctly.  It is when things are not presented correctly where "magical thinking"  is created. I don't need to get into this too much because we see this sort of thing in the martial arts all of the time.

Oh yeah, one more point I want to make on this while it's fresh in my mind. Our imagination on a personal level makes reality and words while they do not always reflect the true reality of a thing make things what they are in a certain sense or an accepted reality, thus the importance of properly naming the thing for what is.

This is in my view is the importance of discussing these things in training among students as well as instructors because the ability to talk things out and mentally figure them out is how we do this. This is also what brings about clarity and consistency in learning and teaching and understanding. As Col Jack Sparks my old Regimental commander used to say, "Words have meaning".

The word is the thing and our reasoning and rationale are steeped our imagination where we take the experience(s) whatever it is that we named and put a whole reality behind it. If what we say or the words we use don't mean what we say they mean and we cannot come to a common understanding of what they mean then nothing we say means anything. Please keep this in mind as you train because I can tell you from personal observation that more people have retarded their development in the martial arts due to a lack of understanding of what things are and their meaning (i.e., how the universe works).  

How to Practice

When Creating Space the Subtle Muscle Control required is nothing more than using your muscles in an efficient manner. It is not just muscular relaxation as some think although it plays a role. Because it is a huge part of the subtle muscle control required when moving to strike from one point to another or while avoiding a strike while delivering one all at the same time. 

As I've said it is the ability to be hard and soft all at the same time and everything in between. It is the ability to slip through the smallest space possible or elongate your body when you need to. It is the ability to be solid as a rock, liquid or vapor all at the same time by isolating various parts of your body through subtle muscle control.

When practicing to develop greater Subtle Muscle Control you must learn to let your mind become free-flowing when moving whether doing Warrior Flow, washing the body or polishing the sphere exercises.  While focusing on total freedom of movement, remaining relaxed allowing your Perceptual Awareness to drive your motion.  You need to feel your body from an internal standpoint (interoception) first while moving to ensure efficient movement and fluidness like the wind.

Additionally, when training I encourage you not to create any self-imposed limitations in your mind and just concentrate on the concepts and nothing else, as a result, the concepts being timeless will allow you to improve.

Basic Creating Space Drill 

1. Concave Your Body Drill - Start off by concaving your body to the extreme to every possible angle maintaining Equilibrium Control all throughout controlling your body as you twist and turn in every direction once you have developed a good feel for this add the following steps.
2. Touch Turn Drill - If you have a training partner have them touch on one side of the body lightly generally the shoulder since it has a lot of structure then turn and move your body with the slightest pressure in the opposite direction of the pressure creating greater Subtle Muscle Control and Dynamic Coordination. since in order to use force against your body you have to on some level cooperate with their actions by either resisting, pushing back or pulling away too fast. This will help you develop the ability to turn without allowing someone to exert force against you with the proper timing so that you do not create more space than what is necessary to negate the effects of the push. If you don't have a training partner you can do this with yourself. 
3. Concaving Turning Drill - Do the same as the previous drill but now concave your body to the extreme almost to the point you feel you are going to fall and turn at the same time. This will teach you where the upper or outer limits of your ability to control your body are so that you lean not to allow yourself to reach the point where you can not move your body. You never want to allow yourself to get to the point where you cannot move your body freely. Feel this when your practice in all of your joints where your movement to the best of your ability is smooth and graceful or as graceful as possible. Now, will it feel this way as you move at high speed? No, but it will help you develop greater control over your body whereby moving in this fashion you fill in as many of the gaps in your movement and coordination as possible. 

Key point: try at first to not move your feet when you do these drills. Remember the intent of the drill is to develop this ability in your body to create space where you want when you want to, and if you move your feet before you practice this step you will never learn what the upper limits of what your abilities are. Eventually, once you gain some proficiency at this you can then practice this while moving even at various speeds stepping in all directions with or without a partner (though easier with a partner). From slow to ultra-fast to develop the proper timing. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP!

Creating Space Bag Drill

So if you've ever seen Above the Law or Marked for Death,  this exercise is sort of like Steven Segal's stuff of getting out of the way and decapitating people.

Well, that's it for now in my next post I'm going to get into how to Take Space. 

Thanks.