San Do Kuen Martial Arts

In order to be effective in any martial art, a person must be fit.  Developing and maintaining fitness is a life-long endeavor for every serious martial artist.  This page discusses the various issues that affect fitness and influence training programs.

Technical Skill is Not Enough

Martial artists are motivated by their desire to improve their technique or form, and a great deal of their training time is spent on refining technique. People rely on the fact that refining technique is a good form of exercise, but that alone is just not enough. The problem is that the technique will always be expressed in terms of the human body and its limitations.

In all my years of training and teaching martial arts one thing has become glaringly obvious:  the most dramatic difference between average or mediocre practictioners and excellent ones is their level of physical conditioning – not the quality of their technique.  A martial artist will only ever be as effective as his body, so fitness must be a key consideration in all martial arts programs.  The San Do Kuen training system includes various fitness programs and approaches to exercise that support martial arts training.

Body Type

All humans have different body types and this has a effect on their natural level of conditioning and exercise habits.  Fitness programs need to be designed and executed according to the needs of the individual.  For example, men who are naturally large and strong tend to over-develop strength and neglect speed and flexibility training.    The large strong man does not need more weight training and larger muscles, he needs extra stretching, jump rope and BOSU balance training.

So many martial artists do not consider their own attributes when developing exercise habits.  This lack of planning leads to a lot of wasted or inefficient training sessions that (in the long term) will not equal better martial arts performance.

Rank

Another thing that affects fitness level is progress in rank. Unfortunately, it seems that as people achieve higher ranks and begin to teach they start to neglect their own conditioning and become distracted by their need to be instructing in every situation. There is a very obvious disconnect between the overweight instructor and the student who he scolds for not training regularly.  The student who becomes an instructor will eventually internalize that fitness is something for students and not for “masters.”  Therefore a master does not have to be fit, only know lots and lots of technique and be able to tell everyone else what to do.

Are masters really above exercise?  Does technique really work for someone who is obese, and lacks agility and flexibility?  The truth is that the master should have the highest level of conditioning and spend the most time on exercise.  As the body ages, it requires more work to maintain fitness and technique.

A student (or instructor’s) fitness should increase as his rank increases.

Focus of Training

Most martial arts exercise programs are based on the instructor’s experience.  More often than not, the instructor’s experience is limited to his own instructor’s experience and so on and so forth.  Not surprisingly, these programs are usually out-of-date and sometimes contraindicated (especially for certain students).  Martial arts training routines need to reflect modern exercise science and programming trends and also consider student characteristics and training goals.

• Forms or Fighting (What About Both!)

There is a growing divide between forms training (traditional martial arts) and fight training (MMA).  The traditional focus on forms training is great for developing endurance for continuous cardiovascular exercise, but doesn’t really develop explosive anaerobic power or joint stability for contact martial arts.  MMA training is almost unparalleled in its focus on explosive power, but does not usually incorporate regular continuous cardio work.  These two school of thought both limit students ability to achieve their peak conditioning. San Do Kuen fitness programming concentrates on the human body as a whole and does not compartmentalize the components or applications of fitness.

Functional Strength

Strength is strength – or is it?  In martial arts strength needs to be applied at speed, with timing, balance, core stability.  Strength for fighting techniques also needs to be developed in several planes of motion which (during training) can shift very quickly.  This is a difficult type of strength to develop.  The Three Way Fist System looks at strength from a functional perspective – we want to develop strength that helps us perform better in the ring, on tests, and during hard training – not that helps us bench press a lot of weight plates.

• Strength is strength – or is it?

The man who can bench press 350 lbs thinks he is very strong, but his range of motion and lack of flexibility will actually decrease his striking effectiveness. The ability to lift heavy weight does not automatically translate into better striking power.

The man who has great muscular endurance for very high numbers of repetitions of crunches and biceps curls (for example). He might think that this “strength” important for his martial arts technique. Unfortunately, these exercises are open kinetic chain movements that isolate certain muscle groups which work in a single plane of motion. This type of strength work does not develop the closed-chain neuromuscular coordination that real-time martial arts movements require.

Martial Arts & The Kinetic Chain

The last variable in the achievement of peak physical conditioning is an understanding of the kinetic chain and planes of motion.

• Development of closed-chain kinetic power is the key to the effectiveness of every combative technique.

In martial arts training, no muscle group works in isolation – all parts of the muscular and skeletal system must work together to create closed chain, multi-planar movements. Very few fitness programs address the relationship between the kinetic chain demands of exercise progressions and martial arts technique.