Rec and Sports

The Truth About Achieving Real Strength Through the Discipline of the Martial Arts!

My first introduction to the importance of strength was through the old comic book ads. Charles Atlas, the bully kicking sand in your face, and the need to lift big hunks of iron. Why, lift enough iron and you suddenly could do the bully to the bad guy, win the girl, and life would be grand.

Then, as life proceeded, I found out that many people considered weight lifters a bit empty in the head. Weight lifters were the new bullies of the world, they were the ones kicking all the sand. And, heck, they even started taking drugs to make themselves bigger and badder.

The truth of weight lifting is, of course, not entirely as I have portrayed it here in my youthful and naive observations. It is true that you have to lift weights; you have use muscles or, well, it is rumored that you will lose them. But, there are alternatives to lifting immense hunks of dead weight that are much more efficient, much less dangerous, and, in this writers opinion, much more fun.

I began my practice of the martial arts in the sixties, and I was unaware that what I was doing was lifting weights. I was, through the martial arts, lifting the weight of my body, and throwing it around in a manner that simple weight lifting could never duplicate. The competence of motion, the ranges of motion, it was something that in my few brushes with weight lifting I had never experienced.

A few decades into my practice, already realizing an enduring health and physical conditioning that was far beyond my oxygen tank toting, walker using compatriots, I heard of body calisthenics. These were simple exercises that brought home the theories I had been practicing without realizing it through the martial arts. Furthermore, I wasn’t experiencing health problems, the muscle to flab syndrome, injuries to muscles and joints that unreal stress can achieve.

Interestingly enough, I had started doing the martial art known as Tai Chi some years previous, and had discovered what I called Suspended Strength. When you hold a limb up for a while, moving it slowly, this is suspended weight, and this practice increases strength without increasing bulk, which is good if you want to develop physical, and mental, attributes specific to the martial arts. So, to coin a nifty sounding phrase, I was doing Extreme Suspended Weight Body Calisthenics.

The truth of this whole matter of weight lifting and body motion, however, eluded me until I encountered an injury. I suffered a separated shoulder, and I was forced to slow down and rehabilitation my body, and I started doing light Yoga postures. Here was something slower than Tai Chi Chuan, and the result was that I suspended strength even longer, and I began doing something that moved me into ever higher realms of fitness and martial arts ability. I realized that true strength is increased more by the channeling of awareness through the body than any amount of weight one might lift.

This is the key to the whole mess, you know, for the body is a device in which, in most people, energy is stopped, blocked, not flowing, even no matter how much weight they lift. By doing yoga, and realizing that the increase of awareness was unblocking energy flows, I began to experience the wellness and true strength that the body is capable of. Karate and Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Yoga, life is made whole by the increase of awareness, and I recommend this sequence of practice to all who wish to find true strength through the martial arts disciplines.

Al Case has dissected martial arts for 4O+ years. If you want to sample a little of his strength through a free ebook, go to Monster Martial Arts.