Fundamentals Part II: Motivation

“True heroism, so far as it is possible to modern man, is displayed in inconspicuous activity, in the work that does not bring fame. It lacks the confirmation of public approval, even though well adapted to the needs of daily life... He rejects the lure of doing what all can do and what everyone will approve, and he is unperturbed by resistance and disapproval. With steady gait, he follows his chosen path. This path is a lonely one, for the dread of calumny and of arrogant disapproval compels most persons to do what will please the crowd. Few are equal to the task of following their own bent without obstinancy and without weakness, of turning a deaf ear to the illusions of the moment, of maintaining without fatigue or discouragement a resolution once formed.” - Karl Jaspers

Good evening, and thanks for tuning in to the second installment of our 'Foundations' series. We're currently in the process of laying down bricks and beams, a sturdy substructure in which to anchor your training and rise to achievement. Before I send you off packing with a simple formula, like “Train 5x5 high intensity sets at about 60-80% of your 1RM” or “Avoid vegetable oils, soy, and processed sugars, eat plenty of protein, animal fats, and rich plant fats like avocado, flax, coconut”, and thereby exclude and neglect the opposite side of the coin, I'm going to debate with you, harangue with you, laugh and cry and yell at you, until by sheer exertion you understand not only the 'how' but the 'why' of our approach. We're gonna take it as axiomatic in this series that every training regimen and life plan should be firmly rooted in a 'why'. Why? Bear with me; we'll get to that.

"Why?" 'Tis a question of Gods and Madmen!

You ever wonder why so many New Years resolutions go unfulfilled? Why all the overweight ladies at your office bicker over diet advice and update daily their progress (or lack thereof) in the fat-shedding department? Why countless kids are packed into gyms, trying to look Jersey Shore (or 50 Cent) and fail, despite the ridiculous amount of sweat they put into it? We mentioned some aspects briefly in the previous article; things like the 6-week motivation timer, cognitive dissonance, etc. But, oh, the rabbit hole goes deeper. A lot deeper, Alice. We can safely divide the prominent and persistent failure of fitness plans into two categories: 1) mechanism, i.e. lack of understanding of your instrument (in this case, your body), and 2) motivation, i.e. lack of a plan and/or lack of a goal. We'll cover mechanism and the outlooks that are vital both for designing and refining an effective regimen in the next instalment. Today, our topic is motivation. Why do we need to beat this horse? You'd think that people are just gifted with drive and consistency by virtue of their biological nature, right? Well, no. Or rather, people are born with a variety of awesome physiological and metabolic subroutines that will kick in and drag them towards their goals, if properly triggered: but you didn't think you'd just Hulk out from vague desire and a lot of work without structure, did you?

Back to the drawing board...

You need clearly defined goals. This may sound like a no-brainer, but believe me, it's not. In all the folks I've trained and trained with, you often see some pretty decent short-term performance-based goals, like “I'm gonna get to the point I can do 500 pushups a day across 10 sets” or “I'm gonna work on my submissions from guard so I can win the fight next month” or “I'm gonna perfect my power clean form or my heel kick.” And those are great. Guys (or girls) that make those sorts of goals and possess even a moderate bit of stick-to-itiveness often achieve them surprisingly quickly. The problem is that those goals are often accompanied by unstated expectations, or vague ideas, like getting 'ripped' or 'jacked', or 'being a complete fighter'. And that's not realistic. Maybe if you're fighting a guy whose bread and butter is collegiate wrestling and ground-and-pound and you already know you're more than a match for him standing up, then working on your guard submissions and takedown defense would, in fact, give you a hell of a chance of winning. But next time, when you go to fight a consummate boxer or a judo/jujtisu champ, you might not be in such an advantageous position. Why? Because you didn't focus on your goal hierarchy.

What do I mean by that? I mean that your long-term goal was not clearly defined, and further, was merely an implicit assumption, i.e. 'be a great fighter.' Therefore your effective and realistic short-term goal of bettering one or two aspects of your game occurred in a vacuum, instead of being a stepping stone, or a node interlinked with your other skills that leads upward through the Mortal Kombat skill pillar to greatness. What you need is a road map. But what good is a map, or directions, or even GPS, if you don't have a destination? If I start driving right now, intending to go to Vegas, it'll take me a few days. But let's say I start driving without any clear idea of where I'm going; any thoughts on when I'll wind up at Caesar's Palace? Mathematically, if you assume all directions are equal, and say that some unit (let's say a mile) is the point of my decision, then instead of the 2,273 separate mile decisions I have to travel in a more-or-less straight line to the craps tables, I have to travel 5,166,529 mile decisions(the square of the distance) to reach Vegas if I'm going the random walk route (look up Brownian Motion if you're interested).

It's best not to leave road trips to chance.

What does this mean? It means that you've gotta figure out where you're going before you start out! Make your goals as clear and realistic as possible (Note when I say realistic, I mean what YOU think is possible, not what other people think is practical). Instead of saying “I want to be buff” say “I want an x inch chest, z percent body fat, the ability to bench or squat y” or “I want to win Mr. Universe”, instead of saying “I want to be a complete fighter”, make it specific, say, “I want to dominate through counterpunching and capitalizing on the mistakes of others, utilizing a defensive punching style, throws and sweeps, tactical head movement and sick takedown/clinch defense in order to dominate stronger, more physical opponents”. Make it a strategy. Visualize yourself where you want to be. Don't just think of success, think of the conditions that go along with success, what you will need to do to achieve it, and why. Ask yourself, “Why do I want this? What's in it for me?” Some of you won't be able to answer. For many, that's because the goals you dream of are only yours by proxy: what you really want is respect, acknowledgement, money, girls, social status, whatever. If that's the case, you need to go back to the drawing board, but DON'T stop training: rather, design your training as an exploration of yourself, as a gradual realization of what you are and what you can become, rather than as an end in itself. We'll discuss why in a moment. For others, probably very few, you won't be able to answer that question of why you want to be a fighter, or a pianist, or a writer, because it's such a primary awareness, an unreflected-upon part of your being. You're a mass of potentials, but you know that being capable of winning the belt or writing the great American novel isn't enough, you have to bring it into reality. That's top dog mentality; it's the reason why champions win, and top salespeople perform, and writers sell out print runs, and it's often mistaken for that great psychological crutch, talent. People think there's some sort of gap between them and the philosophers, or them and the celebrities, or them and the elite athletes. They chalk up the limbo of their lives to their lack of 'talent' or 'opportunity' instead of their lack of 'actually doing shit'. The only time talent matters, in terms of genetics, is when you're already on that elite level with the Anderson Silvas and the Usain Bolts. I'm not going to say a mere few thousand hours of well-planned work is going to make you the greatest boxer/chess player/actor that ever lived, but I am going to say that you can succeed in any one of those endeavors, despite average intelligence, average physicality, or average charisma, sheerly by a crapload of quality practice.

Iterate; reiterate; succeed.

What determines what we usually call 'talent' is your telos, your raison d'etre. Did I lose you? Don't worry. Telos is an Aristotelian word that just means 'end', as in purpose or goal. Raison d'etre is French philosophy talk for 'the meaning of life' or 'the purpose of existence'. When you unclutter your mind, dump out all the pride and envy and need for approval and other social nonsense, what remains? If you had a bajillion dollars and you could do anything for the rest of your life, what would you do? That's your talent. A lot of people don't like that question; they find it disingenuous. The fact of the world we live in is that success is due to what you can provide to the life-order of fulfilling human needs (i.e. the economy), in terms of quantity and quality, according to supply and demand. How much do people want what you have to offer, and how rare is it that someone is offering it? Thus is your value determined. Hence why Floyd Mayweather is the most highly paid athlete in the world, why NFL stars make more than teachers, why hedge fund managers make more than farmers, and other blank facts of ''social reality' or social injustice', depending on who you talk to. Hence also why PhDs in Medieval History or Victorian Literature are eking out  paltry existences on welfare, and young bright History or Sociology majors and even Lawyers are fussing about at Zucotti Park. The truth is, despite the fact that this teacher may have a God-given calling, the kids love her, and her curriculum impacts lives, she's only gonna get paid as much as any other teacher with the same seniority. And the kid with a very expensive spurious degree can't find a job, because, well, he's not qualified for anything, at least not anything that people value. So you can't always trust the valuations of society at large or of your small social group, for that matter, but it's the best system we have; how do you judge, other than on appearances? That's how human desire and human needs work. But, thankfully, there's another dimension to this whole situation: externalities aren't everything. I'll give you an example. Some researchers took some elementary children, and divided them into two groups. The first group got to play with markers; the second group got rewarded with a toy for playing with markers. A week later they brought them back, and had both groups free-play with markers a second time, with no rewards. And guess what? The second group, the rewarded group, quickly lost interest. They didn't view drawing as a fun activity, because they now saw it only as instrumental to an extrinsic reward. The instrumentality had cheapened it.

Pretty crazy, right? But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Let's take a lady who's danced for her whole life, loves dancing, dances because it 'makes her feel free'. She decides to open a studio, and finds that after several months of teaching dance for money, she hates her job as much as she had hated her day job at the bank. The intrinsic reward has been eclipsed by the extrinsic and the activity is cheapened. How about artsy kids who end up in a high-performance art school environment, and begin to lose their emotional touch, hate their work, and eventually drop out? It's disgustingly common in art and literature studies. How about taking a walk? If you're taking a stroll, with the intrinsic purpose of walking, it's highly enjoyable, even on a frosty day, hearing the snow crunch and taking in the sights. But that same route taken instrumentally, in order to get somewhere, and you'll be cursing Heaven and wishing for a bus. Why is this the case? Because in the first scenario, walking is it's own purpose, it's fun all by itself. In the second, getting somewhere is the purpose. Likewise, if you want to make money, you don't care how you do it (within reason); money is the purpose, not enjoying your daily drudge.

Origami is it's own reward.

So how do we apply this to our fitness regimen, or any other plan? Remember Alec Baldwin's speech in Glengarry Glen Ross? “We're gonna add a little something to the Sales competition this month. First prize, as you all know, is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is, you're fired.” Notice this: the top seller doesn't need a Cadillac to motivate him; that's why he's the top seller. He's the best because he lives, breathes, eats, thinks, and dreams of being the best. The Cadillac is there to provoke the other salesmen, to inspire them through jealousy. So, my friends, you've got to find your telos, you're raison d'etre. Put the millionaire question another way: if you had to work at McDonald's the rest of your life, what would you wake up early, and stay up late, doing and perfecting? Would you write books? Would you train your body? Maybe both? Good. Think about it long, long and hard. Find your goal, elucidate it, make it as clear as ice sculpture, as clear as crystal, as clear as the purest glass. Make it specific, strategic, realistic, but dare to go beyond the normal understanding of Man:


“The only limitation on human potential is the human mind.”

• Dave Tate

"Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also."

• Marcus Aurelius

So, are we getting there? Forget about money, forget about fame, forget about chicks (or guys), forget about spiting your enemies, as fun as it is. You're just blurring the picture. Let your plan follow your goal; don't lose the race from lack of a finish line. Remember, too, that what you're doing is creating yourself. Just like a sculptor takes a block of marble and cuts away the extraneous parts to reveal the statue within, you're taking your only possession, your threefold unity, body, mind, and spirit, as your instrument and your marble; taking a welter of partial drives and latent strengths and half-baked possibilities and cutting them, shaping them, pulling them taut, to create a God, a Superman. You're forging your identity, not just your persona; you're becoming the true fulfillment of your being, not just a mask you wear to bring home the bacon. If you lie, you will fail; Nature doesn't tolerate duplicity and deception. In the existential world, ruthless self-honesty is a prerequisite. If you're not there, don't fake it; don't break your form or suck in your stomach or invent an explanation, drop the weight down and hit it patiently, steadily, work in the darkness so that you can earn the light. Don't worry about making a million dollars (unless that is your goal), or being vindicated to all those folks who called you meathead, loser, nerd, self-absorbed, said your head was in the clouds; don't worry about recognition or female attention. Even when you're in an air conditioned gym training on cutting-edge equipment, remember you carry the spiritual desert around inside you. Another thing Aurelius said, when they wanted him to become emperor of Rome, “All I want is the philosopher's toga and the philosopher's wooden bed.” Cut away the unnecessary, and you'll be left with your own perfection. But don't measure yourself against your ultimate goal; as you progress, the clearer your vision will get, and the more distinctly your flaws will appear to your reflection. Focus on meeting your short-term goals, and then turning those into intermediate goals; focus on one step at a time, one rep at a time, and before you know it you'll be a Master.

Make your ancestors proud.

It's time to wrap up by talking about your goal hierarchy. Once you have your long-term goal, your ultimate end, figure out what areas you need to build on, what steps you need to take to get there. Those are your intermediate goals. Then, based on those, make your short-term goals for a time frame of a few days to a few weeks, to avoid becoming fatigued or overwhelmed; when you're at work, you wait and watch for the next break, not for the end of the day, nor, God forbid, for the end of your employment, or you'd quickly drown in a situation that seems too big to handle. Break it up into manageable pieces, that lead from one stepping-stone to the next, and you can achieve big things. More advice: Keep a journal. Judge your progress. Digest what you've learned in nightly journalling and contemplation; hold on to the ground you've gained. It's amazing how such a simple feedback mechanism can have such a drastic impact on your results, simply through accountability.

One thing we haven't talked about is faith. I know that's a four-letter word nowadays, but you won't get anywhere without it. No, I'm not asking you to accept Lord Jesus as your personal savior or take refuge in the Three Jewels. I am asking you to believe and to dedicate yourself, because no one's going to believe for you. There isn't any easy advice on how to have faith: the first step is to do what we talked about above, and formulate a clear goal, a clear idea of yourself. Beyond that, your mind will constantly be bombarded by doubts internally, and criticism externally: people don't want you to succeed, for reasons of their own, and your mind probably doesn't want to admit that you're capable of excelling simply through practice, and lose the crutch it's been using to justify mediocrity for decades. Address your doubts head on, as they come up; you'll gain nothing by pushing them down and denying them. Let them have their place, acknowledge them, reiterate your plan, and let them go. Trust that the cream always rises, every dog has his day, and if fame and fortune doesn't attend your breaking of the barriers to human excellence, then fuck it: you'll still be everything you've become, and if humanity doesn't want to stand up and recognize it, it's their loss. Working out your potential will make the best you can be, and being the best is its own reward.


Regards,

Donny

Fundamentals Part I: Breathing

It's the first day of master class. It's the beginning of our journey together. Before we get into the meat of the matter, the specifics of the training (i.e. the contingent propositions), first we've gotta lay the foundation.
As an aside, it's interesting to note our use of the word found: the date a business began is said to be the date it was founded. A building used for casting metal (especially in the case of bells) is known as a foundry. Metaphorically, we use the word foundation to conceptually indicate the basic and essential parts of a structure: the substructure that must be laid for the structure to be built. What relates these different meanings? Our word foundation derives, through the Old French (presumably from the Norman conquest) from the Latin fundere- to melt, cast, or pour out- and the Latin fundare- to lay the bottom of something. Here we use the word in both its senses: as the first step that begins the journey of a thousand miles, and as the outpouring of primal energy that eventually solidifies into an intelligent and complete fitness program. But enough dickering around about the meaning behind it; let's turn to the foundation itself.

Here at Exertive Dynamics we believe in a very simple, but often neglected, principle of human psychology and physiology: gene expression. We believe wholesale in the idea that human beings are built preprogrammed with a variety of useful physical states, a legacy from our evolutionary past, that allow us to deal with various situations in efficient ways. Whether it's a heightened adrenal/cortisol state that allows us to achieve maximal speed and strength when facing a predator or solving a math problem; or a diurnal variation that allows us to minimize physical strength, alpha brain activity, stress, and anti-inflammatory responses in the interest of quality rest and muscle growth; we think that taking advantage of these genetic (or epigenetic) states is the most intelligent and efficient application to achieve the desired ends of any regimen, fitness or otherwise. Work smart, not hard. Quality over quantity; the value is not in repetition, but in repeating restrained, focused, thought-out movements without variation until perfection is achieved. But the question persists: in what way can we activate these desirable states, and avoid the less desirable ones?

Ancient traditions have the answer. Remember, an athletic or religious practice wouldn't survive for thousands of years unless there was some sort of reason behind it. But does that mean we should swallow the claims of yogis and philosophers wholesale? Absolutely not. Luckily, empirical science has come to the rescue: there are plenty of verifiable studies that demonstrate the benefits of various practices of more or less rigorous nature. We naturally prefer practices that have well-documented, statistically significant results. But somewhere along the way, we tend to fuck it up. We turn important contextual observations into dogma, we create iron-clad, anchored systems, and then we eventually fall into a despondency when the emotional high and safety of our psychic prop wears off, and we either turn into the guy at the bar lamenting the difficulties of doing x, y, or z , or we over-respond and become even more dogmatic and couched in our own presumptions. Why do you think gyms try to get you to sign a contract? Because they know most people will quit after six weeks. Why do you think professional athletes and writers can persist for twenty or thirty years, become world-renowned, and still do things wrong? You guessed it. One of those wonderful pre-programmed states, intended to bolster our fortitude and faith but often turned against us, is our resistance to change and our ability to easily resolve dissonance, either by utterly abandoning our position or by over-asserting what we already believed.

This leads into an entire interesting foray into the fields of biology, genetics, systems theory, and why neoteny (the persistence of juvenile traits into adulthood) may be the reason behind human awesomeness in comparison to our larger, stronger, bigger-brained, more apish cousins like Homo Sapiens Neanderthal. Luckily (or perhaps unfortunately) for you, we're not going to go into that here; I just don't have the space, and I've been blathering about enough, albeit related, peripheral insight into of this whole 'foundation' thing.
So what's the first step, in constructing a happy, fit, mentally-stable reality? What's the most basic and foundational physical ability with which to start mastering your body and environment? Let's go back to philosophy and religion for a clue. Did you know that the Greek word pneuma (as in pneumonia and pneumatic) means both spirit and breath? And further, the Greek word soul (yes, people, spirit and soul are different) psyche, ALSO comes from a root meaning to blow, to cool, to breathe? And in case you think this is some sort of crazy Mediterranean anachronism, it's the same in Latin, where spirit is spiritus, and soul is anima. And it's not just in Indo-European languages. In fact, it's the same in every language of which I'm aware: the word spirit means breath, and if there's a word for soul, that often means breath too.

Obviously, we westerners disdain breathing correctly as we disdain pooping correctly: the niceties of existence are ignored as infantile by our now oh-so-rational minds. But in certain disciplines, it can't be disdained. In weightlifting, for example, especially Olympic lifting and Powerlifting, if you want to execute the movement correctly, correct breathing (inhaling on eccentric, exhaling on concentric contraction) is absolutely baseline and essential. Same goes for swimmers, boxers, track and field athletes, and even snipers, as I'm sure the Call Of Duty generation can attest. But is that all there is to it? A few minutes practice timing the breath, understanding the expansion of the chest cavity in relation to your sport, and maybe some abdominal breathing? The answer is a resounding hell no.

Yoga, that all-embracing religious and physical regimen, has a nice little discipline called pranayama. Depending on how you interpret that, it either means “manipulation of the spirit (prana)” or “stopping/controlling the breath (prana)”. In my personal opinion, it probably means both: these ancient yogis and siddhus, abandoning successful careers to have their learned debates in the forest, were good at nothing if not developing double entendres and playing with words. And, luckily for us, the New Age bent of the past couple decades means that there's some decent research on the effects of various pranayama exercises.

For one, some Indian doctors had a theory that the Diurnal cycle of hunting/rest probably correlated to the left nostril/right nostril cycle, which in turn probably correlated to right brain/left brain predominance (ever notice how one nostril or sinus is a lot more clear than the other, and this switches slowly over the course of about 8 hours?). That's a fascinating theory, obviously, but it's far from proven. But what the kind Indian doctors DID do was an experiment at a yoga camp, where they established that kids who did alternate nostril or single nostril exercises over the course of a few weeks had improved grip strength compared to control(which was kids who just did breath awareness or mudra, hand gestures). That's nice, you say, but a relatively informal grip-strength experiment with Indian kids is hardly conclusive proof. But American researchers duplicated the results with a fairly large sample of 25-40 year old males. In addition to this, pranayama has been shown to have an effect on everything from anxiety to metabolic syndrome to cancer, and in particular applications for athletes: Raju et al. (1994) found that “The results in both phases showed that the subjects who practised pranayama could achieve higher work rates with reduced oxygen consumption per unit work and without increase in blood lactate levels.“ Tell me you wouldn't want that for YOUR workout? Also, and most interestingly for us hormonally-compromised western couch potatoes, breath exercises have been shown to mediate the balance of the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (resting and rebuilding) systems, and in addition, to decrease overall cortisol (stress-hormone) levels, while improving cortisol responses to specific stimuli, such as a math problem. Now if that doesn't tweak your American get-rich-quick/get-a-beach-body-with-these-7-simple-foods appetite, I don't know what will. You can improve mental concentration, physical performance, and even do things like Wim Hof that defy science (for 'science', read: conventional wisdom), all from a measly twenty or thirty minutes a day of practice. But be forewarned: pranayama is not the laid-back, introspective mindfulness meditation you may be used to; even though it includes very little body movement, it feels like a hard session of yoga or a medium intensity workout more than anything else. That's right, a breath workout. Is it any wonder that people can use their breath to modulate their hormones, increase blood oxygenation, improve performance, and help protect against disease?

Maybe I should take a little space to explain WHY I think this works. Have you ever heard that whole bear-in-the-woods analogy? No, not the one about where the bear does his business. The example- I believe it's given to us by Stephen Jay Gould (if I'm wrong, correct me in the comments below)- of behavioral responses to fear. You're walking through the forest, whistling a tune, and all of a sudden you see a big-ass brown bear, furry and mangy, muscles rippling, eyeing you down. You immediately turn and run, if your instincts have anything to do with it. The question is, are you afraid, and so you run, or do you run, and then become afraid? Modern empirical evidence tends to suggest the latter. Well, that sounds like some scholastic quibbling, says the reader. Who gives a flying fornication about a difference in microseconds between bodily response and emotional state? Ho-hum. But the theory is much more applicable to real life, and pervasive in its various applications, then you might think. How do you think a few dropouts turned Internet Porn into the hegemonic monster it is today? That's right: your brain can't tell what's real; a physiological response is to a physiological state, which is in itself a response to a stimuli. In other words, you see naked chick, you start breathing heavy, blood goes to your, um, nether regions, et cetera. This creates a feedback loop that turns your mild arousal into full-on adrenaline, horny caveman debauchery; and before you know it, you've worn out your God-given alpha-male sex sensitivity and you're watching donkeys and women do terrible things. But that's another topic for another time.

The point here is that the various physiological states you enter into, which reflect large changes in hormone profile, muscle tone, heartbeat, brain activity, and what have you, almost always involve a change in, you guessed it, rate and depth of breathing. So by manipulating the breath you can replicate various stimuli, and make your hormones do situational things that are normally barred to you. You see this all the time with powerlifters, since your muscles (and CNS) have governors, feedback loop mechanisms that keep you from lifting too much. The well-known bilateral deficit and lowering strength (that you're 40% stronger on the eccentric, or lowering, part of the movement) are examples of this; if you're not familiar with them, hey, Google's your friend. The mechanism that's localized in your muscles is called the Golgi Tendon Organ or GTO (not to be confused with the Golgi bodies, or with the car, for that matter), and it's basically a chain of neurons that receives impulses from your muscle fibers and sends a signal back through the system that enforces muscle relaxation before you can lift heavy enough to damage your tendons. Ever wonder why soccer moms can pick up cars when their kids are trapped under them, but couldn't bench 80 pounds on a good day? That's because we're all a lot stronger than our bodies let us be, except when the governors are overriden, by a sort of Presidential veto. You see guys at powerlifting meets psyche themselves up, breathing deeply, yelling, flexing, and doing a whole bunch of positive thinking, in order to lift ridiculous weights that their bodies don't want to lift, for fear of damaging our tender homo sapiens ligaments and bones. You see the same thing with karate and kung fu guys, don't you? Bruce Lee demonstrated this in his films, and Sonny Chiba took it to a high art in Street Fighter. Generations of inspired kids have been doing the trademark crazy-eyed slow exhale “oooooooooh” ever since.

But is this oriental nonsense, or is it something we can employ to gain a greater competitive advantage and 'overclock' our body's performance? I had anticipated this. “Donny,” you say, “This is all well and good. I [lift weights/do MMA/do ballet/dance/prance/play competitive table tennis]; I'm not looking for a massive religious excursion, or to repeat 16 Wahay Gurus or Hail Marys, and I don't care about kiai or PK, the hidden potentials of man, or allegories about bears; I just want to perform better. K?” I hear you. So, without further ado, I'll present a couple basic exercises. A couple are practice exercises; they're to develop long term benefits like we talked about earlier. One, which I call katsu (the Zen yell), is a foundation for the dynamic tension and isometrics we'll describe later, which are at the heart of our program, and add extreme value in terms of volume, breaking strength plateaus, blood oxygenation, and CNS development, as well as being an effective and simple way to increase your punching power, lifting power, or manly hip thrusts. So even if you decide you don't want to bother with the pranayama stuff, that one is a necessity. If you decide you DO want to practice pranayama, there's plenty of great resources on the web; I will tell you that I personally do several Kriyas daily, including the great Sodarshan, increasing parameters (usually time) on a regular basis, as you would in a strength program.






Abdominal Breathing-
You should breathe abdominally as much as possible. Not only is it a more deep and satisfying breath, but it in itself will diminish your resting cortisol and make you feel much calmer and in control. The way to do this is simple: let your stomach, preferably the lower part right above your pelvis, puff out when you breathe, rather than your chest.



Alternate Nostril Breathing-
This is a super basic way to start pranayama, and carries with it some of the best benefits (reference that whole hunter/gatherer diurnal cycle theory). There is another idea, only briefly mentioned earlier, that breathing through a certain nostril will activate a certain hemisphere of the brain (in case you didn't know, the left-hemisphere controls the right side of your body, and the right-hemisphere controls the left side; therefore, you want to breathe with your left nostril to activate your right brain and vice versa). Read online if you want to know the characteristics that differentiate between the two halves. To do the exercises, first decide if you want to focus on one nostril, the other nostril, or do the complete movement and involve both. In the first two cases, simply assume a comfortable position, press the opposite nostril with your thumb or pinky, and begin breathing deeply and abdominally. In the later case, you want to breath in first through the right (pinky over left), then out through the left (thumb over right), then in through the left, then out through the right, then repeat. Do this for about 20 minutes a day, or whatever portion of your 20-30 minute pranayama session you damn well feel like.


Breath stoppage-
Another important exercise is controlling breath stoppage, and speed of inhale and exhale. This is obviously going to improve blood oxygenation and diaphragm control, as well as probably helping out with you using greater lung volume for things like running. A simple kriya to do this is: Breathe in deeply (abdominally) for 5 seconds, hold the breath for 5 seconds, exhale for 5 seconds, and when your lungs are emptied, hold your 'breath' for 5 seconds before repeating. Do this for 10-20 minutes a day, or whatever portion of your session you want.



Katsu-
Now to the good stuff. Be forewarned that there isn't a lot of proof to this, despite it being so widespread in martial arts cinema; most people probably assume its an affectation, or even worse, nonsense like the Dim Mak (matter of fact, a more accurate term for this is Kiai, which I have avoided due to possibly conflation with the 'magic' Kiai that is demonstrably bullshit). So it isn't practiced in its pure form outside of karate practitioners, monks, asian healers, and some athletes (who just happen to have figured it out, like they figured out the very-similar weightlifting breath). Now, make no mistake, this is powerful. I can't stress that enough. It also taxes your CNS and boosts the shit out of your blood pressure, so if you have some sort of related condition, I'd have to advise avoiding it for the time being. But it also raises your strength immensely. When I first read about it as a teenager, in some backwater Karate forum, I practiced it for a few days, and didn't think much of it, except in a dynamic tension/adding a heavy challenge to Charles Atlas sort of way. And then, one day, I noticed a dent in the fiberglass body of my mom's car. After exerting myself heavily trying to push it out from the inside (i.e. from the inside of the trunk), I remembered my new breath technique, and thought, “Hey, what the hell. No one's watching.” I cleared my mind and lungs, breathed in deeply, and started the slow exhale as I pushed, and holy fuck, the dent popped right out. I was amazed, you can imagine; I thought for a second I'd gone Super Saiyjin. Don't laugh, I was a 90's kid. But in the years that have followed I've only become a more deep believer in the tradition, which seems to pop up everywhere from movies to screaming-therapy. Note: you don't actually have to yell, or make any “Hi-ya!” or “Kiai!” sound, but the exhale is itself pretty intense and noticeable, as the aforementioned Sonny Chiba performance. 

How to do it: There's a spot a 2-3 inches below your navel, and about 2 inches in. It's called hara or tanden in Japanese, and it's your center of balance in judo and aikido, and supposedly the generator for you're body's ki or mystical energy. I don't particularly believe in mystical energy, but I do believe in the tanden. What you want to do is inhale slowly and very deep, expanding that spot and relaxing your abdominal muscles. Next, exhale even more slowly (about twice as long as the inhale; this is important), while tightening your abdominal muscles, pushing the air out. If you do it right, you'll know: your lungs will be fully contracted, you'll squeeze the last bit of air out of your mouth, your blood pressure will shoot up and your muscles and veins will be flush and expanded. In order to make use of this, yell or no yell, practice timing it exactly with an exertive force, such as a punch, throw, or lift. After a little practice you'll see your performance jump right up the improvement curve in a way you didn't know was possible. No need to thank me.


That's it for Part One: Fundamentals- Breathing; stay tuned for next time, as we continue to lay the groundwork for a unique and thoroughly awesome approach to fitness and practical performance.

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Welcome.

This is the first post of a long and arduous project. Someone once compared audacious undertakings to bamboo: the seedlings can spend months underground, in the darkness, gathering their potential; but once they burst into the light, they can grow to astonishing heights in a short time.

We believe this to be true of our endeavor. We've taken the task of integrating a wide range of approaches, from pranayama, yoga, and traditional martial arts, to dynamic tension, physical culture, and powerlifting. And we've grounded it all in a solid foundation of Greek philosophy and existentialism: preferring the earliest, the most spare and direct, and closest to the original source. Our approach cannot be easily summed up, as it relies on so many great forbears from so many traditions: you simply have to watch, wait, and learn.

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Stay tuned for our regular posts; we will begin next time with some fundamental breathing exercises and principles, and then follow it up with a series of bodyweight exercises and a look at philosophy of intensity vs. the philosophy of volume.


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Donny Fraser
CEO & Chief Trainer