I have written in recent articles about the wrong reasons to train such as obtaining superhero muscles, because you have eaten too much, to fit into certain beachwear etc. All pretty superficial reasons and sadly all too familiar in our culture.

So what about the right reasons to train? Which buttons should you be pressing? Below are the key areas that if neglected, will have a detrimental effect on your short and long term health?

Good training or lifestyle should address:

1. Endurance. Your overall systems ability to endure. Not just cardio vascularly and muscularly but energetically and will power. This doesn’t mean running marathons or even running daily or weekly. But if you need to do it, you should be able to, without physically or mentally giving in. Conscious and competent breathing is a huge help here.
2. Strength. I wrote a recent article on this. You should have basic 1:1 strength. A pull up, push up, deep squat (bum on heels, feet flat), sit up and leg raise should be smoothly doable. If you can’t you are either too heavy, too weak or both. 🙁
3. Resistance to injury. If your training leaves you regularly damaged you need to take a closer look. This will take its toll. Outside of competitive sport your training needs to be sustainable for life. Good training should build your resilience.
4. Relaxation. You should feel better, refreshed and rejuvenated after training. Not depleted, anxious or stressed. There is no need to push it to the max every time.
5. Movement variety. Your training should have lots of variety in its movement: forwards, backwards, pushing, pulling, twisting, turning, compressing, extending, jumping, landing, throwing, catching. All natural movements. I will enlarge on this in a coming blog.
6. Adaptability, body intelligence. It should make you more ready for the real and potential rigours of life. Your body move naturally, smoothly and intuitively. It should flow smoothly over and around obstacles. If you can bench press your body weight but pull a muscle during a sharp unexpected movement, there is something wrong.
7. Cardio function. The heart rate should get used to going up and down. Not constantly low, but not constantly up high either. In a session try to have regular periods of raising it and then regular periods of consciously recovering it. Your heart rate variability is important.
8. Mobility. You should look to maintain and even improve your levels of mobility and fluidity as you age. Don’t settle for decline. This is largely a matter of relaxation.
9. Balance. Critical to almost every endeavour, in every sense.
10. Stimulation and fun. Why do it otherwise? Your whole body should smile during exercise, from the heart to the mouth and thank you for it. Training is not punishment for your body or spirit it is an enabler.

I am sure there are others, you may agree or disagree, let me know your thoughts.

So what types of training incorporate all these I hear you ask? Tough one.
Here are some good ones that hit most of the points:

• Dance – most types.
• Systema
• Many other Martial Arts
• Contact sports e.g. Rugby
• Many adventure pursuits e.g. climbing, hiking and scrambling, bushcraft,
• and the number one:

Play. with children or grandchildren. Outdoors preferably. Run, hide and seek, tag, off ground tag, play fighting, ‘rassling’ anything goes!

There are of course others, thats just off the top of my head.

With respect and best wishes,

Matt.

P.S There are still a couple of spaces left on the Breathing Masterclass on 21-22 Jan. Click here for more information or to book.

A house represents everything that we want on earth; permanent, rooted, here for eternity.  A camp represents what we really are: just passing through. – Author unknown.
Occasional training in an outdoor environment can breathe life into all of your senses, heightening and elevating them to give you great skill and health gains.

We are all familiar with the five senses – sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. For a long time internal senses were not really recognized as a sense. Extra Sensory Perception or ESP was number six. We now recognize a sense of balance, proprioception and direction as additions to the five senses. Paranormal senses now come way down the list at number nine.

Mobilty
Balance good, Karate good, everything good. Balance bad, better to pack up, go home. – Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid.

Balance is crucial to mobility and mobility is one of the key strategic advantages in combat, whether as an Army or an individual. Improvements in your sense of balance, proprioception and direction are critical to your mobility.

There are three key ways to improve the senses:

1. To remove a sense and make yourself more reliant upon the others e.g. blindfolding yourself;
2. To add fear;
3. To work in an unfamiliar environment and obstacles.

Removing a sense.
Training at night in a field or forest effectively begins to remove your sense of sight. Immediately your other senses will go into overdrive. The more you use them, the better they get. You notice immediately that hearing and smell become much more acute. Your sense of balance too will naturally start to improve. If you don’t believe me try standing on one leg, then close your eyes and do it see how much harder it is. This training will make you more sure-footed and your centre of gravity will naturally drop.
Your senses of proprioception and direction will also improve. You will become much more aware of what is in your proximity and your reaction to it much more acute. You will orientate yourself using your senses of smell and hearing. Your proprioceptive abilities will heighten and your intuition will start coming into play.

Adding fear
Fear is perhaps the biggest inhibitor to effective balance and therefore movement. Imagine walking along a scaffold plank lying on the floor. Easy. Then do the same thing with the plank spanning two buildings 20 stories high. Many would become paralysed with fear. They will stop breathing, tense up, feel sick and dizzy and weak. The only change is fear. Fear locks you up and when you are tense not just your balance but all of your senses diminish rapidly. We manage this through breathing techniques and experience. Night training and fun drills in unfamiliar terrain are a great way to practice improving these skills. Learning skills to overcome fears and anxieties is perhaps the most transferable skill in Systema training.

Changing the terrain
Your ability to perform movements in a well lit, flat, warm obstacle free training hall will change when you go outside on a hill, with rabbit holes, logs, trees, branches, rain, mud, stones etc.  These changes will increase your arousal level on conscious and unconscious levels. When you can learn to breathe and relax into training in these environments your balance and stability will reach much deeper and more real world application levels.

A further benefit is the fact that training outside will increase your health and sense of well-being exponentially. In an earlier article I talked about how just spending 3 hours in the forest has been proven to:

• Lift your mood
• Decrease your levels of the stress hormone cortizol by 12.5%
• Decrease sympathetic (fight-flight high stress) nerve activity by 7%
• Decrease blood pressure by 1.4%
• Decrease heart rate by 5.8%
• Increase the bodies production of cancer killing or ‘K’ cells by 40%
• And the levels remain elevated for up to 30 days afterwards.
• You can read the full article here

Oh and the ESP stuff. That’s real too. The British Army has countless reports at its Jungle Warfare Training School in Brunei of local guides who were able to ‘sense’ an ambush ahead and warn the patrol commanders. There were no other obvious signs apart from a ‘sense’ that something was wrong on the track ahead.  These guides had spent their lives in their environment utilizing all of their senses because their lives depended on it. When there was a change to that environment they felt it through all of thier senses.

The more relaxed, observant, creative and clear thinking  you can be in any environment or situation, the more effective you will be.

At the end it comes back to simplicity. The art of doing the simple things well. Being able to do the things we took for granted as children such as breathing, walking, standing, climbing, crawling, going to ground and getting back up, smoothly, safely with ease and without tension.

Come and find out how much outdoor training can benefit every aspect of your training and life, and just how restful, relaxing and fun it can be.

Devon Camp 27-29 June
Devon has oversubscribed this year so I have cleared it with the farm to increase the numbers. I therefore have some spare spaces. We have 34 coming at the moment and this can now go up to 40. This means that there are now 6 spaces available.

Sweden Camp 01-07 September.
There are 3 spaces left for the Sweden Camp this year. If you are interested please book ASAP to secure your space.

Legends of Systema – 04-05 October
To see the founder of Systema Mikhail Ryabko and Black Belt Magazines instructor of the year Vladimir Vasiliev together in the UK in October, click here.

With respect and best wishes,

Matt.

Family Classes – the most fun I have all week.

The family class has rapidly become my busiest and most enjoyable class of the week. I only started it to give my two daughters the chance to train in Systema. But it might just have been the best thing that I have done in sharing Systema and growing my club.

I thought it would be a good idea to have a class where mums and dads could enjoy the session alongside their children. I wasn’t wrong. I now have a very busy class on the Saturday morning sessions. They cater for children from the age of four to their parents and even grandparents in their 60’s. Everyone trains together and classes are great for people of all ages.

Before we start the children are already naturally warming up before the class playing tag, rolling, tumbling and spinning themselves around on the mat.
We then sit in a big circle, (no hierarchy of grades or rank in Systema) welcome everyone and I present today’s topic.

We then roll out backwards and do the first breathing exercise to relax everyone. Everyone lies on their back and we go through some breathing and relaxation cycles. There is of course some fidgeting from the youngest, but very little. For me this is probably the most beneficial part of the class. This skill of knowing how to breathe in a way that relaxes them is a skill that will benefit them in stressful situations for the rest of their lives.

In Systema everything is everything. Every movement, drill or exercise that we do works on their physical, emotional and psychological development. It smooth’s out their movement and strengthens their bodies. It makes their nervous system more resilient and able to handle change, pressure and uncertainty. It acclimatises them to physical contact. So many people today are unused to physical contact. Even within their own family. I see this time and time again when new people join the class. In all ages I notice an initial uncertainty around contact when they have to place their hand on someone.

This is then followed by walking, running, crawling, forwards, backwards, falling, rolling, sometimes with eyes closed, balancing skills, coordination and a myriad of other movement skills. It is all done in a fun way and in a very short space of time every muscle in the body is woken up, used and developed.

We then do the four pillars of exercise. These are movements that we are born with. They are in our DNA. I have a 10-month-old baby boy and he has been doing these for several months. No-one taught him. They are just there. They are the push up, the sit up, the squat and the leg raise. All four are done naturally with the focus on breathing and relaxing the whole time.  The exercises take you through your body’s full range of motion and check your ability to support your body’s weight through that range. The children learn to move with smoothness and effortless ease removing tension through the exercises. Mums and Dads  start to turn back the clock on the restrictive tensions in their bodies, limited ranges of motion and their body’s inability to support its weight through that range of motion.

We then do some rolls showing children how to fall softly and safely. This is a fear that most carry their whole lives, which becomes more acute as you get older. Systema removes that fear through experience, physical and breath training and falling in a huge variety of ways.  Rolling is also fantastic conditioning training and works nearly all the muscles of the body. A baby builds a body for life from the ground up, by rolling and doing the four pillars. Systema does the same thing. It removes your fears of the ground and teaches you to once again move freely and easily in that realm.

Increasing their resilience. We then go onto the combat side of Systema. This is first and foremost about improving their resilience and removing fears in a fun way. All children get and give hits and kicks. They get grabbed, pinned, thrown, stood on, by one person, two people, with their eyes closed, in a crowd – every scenario you could possibly imagine. Most of the training is done slowly and in an experimental way to avoid injury and in order to learn. This is great fun. It also increases their physical and emotional resilience to any situation and their creative abilities expand exponentially.

Systema also teaches children to get comfortable with stresses and emotions of all kinds. The physical stress of movements, the stress of being in a class with adults and children, the stress of taking away a sense, such as sight, the stress of close physical contact. Emotionally they have to deal with anger, anxiety, pride, ego, self-pity, pressure, fear and other emotions. They are taught how to manage any kind of stress through simple breathing exercises that will stay with them for life. The adults too learn the value of these breathing techniques and start applying them in their lives straight away.

Being comfortable with getting things wrong. In Systema there are no set responses, so really nothing to get wrong. Think lion cubs. It is just play and experimentation. Their creativity flourishes in this environment. In his incredible TED talk Sir Ken Robinson speaks about creativity and the arts. That all children are born creative, and that this creativity is systematically educated out of them as they get older. The fear of getting things wrong stops them creating ‘new’ responses, ideas and movements. In Systema this isn’t just encouraged, it is the only way to do it. They have to engage their problem solving skills throughout the session. The response to situations is theirs. They continually seek to find appropriate, effective responses based on their strengths. We just ask them to make sure that they are breathing, moving, relaxed and keeping a good posture as they move. In short they learn to do something against anything.

Social skills development. After 45 minutes, the cubs (4-8 year olds) go off to play together in a raised area off to the side. So the children socialize and interact across the age range throughout the session. The adults and tigers stay on. Another 45 minutes goes by in a flash; going over similar ground, but just a little further in the skills’ development.

The session concludes with everyone coming back onto the mat and playing a game of bulldogs or tag but with a Systema twist, such as restrictions on movement.

Many of the adults start by bringing their children and end up joining the main evening classes, when they see the benefits it brings to them. Systema builds healthy, strong, calm, confident, stable, balanced, well-adjusted children. It is also some of the best fun I have all week.

With respect and best wishes,

Matt.