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:
- To remove a sense and make yourself more reliant upon the others e.g. blindfolding yourself;
- To add fear;
- 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.