it appears that i have a distinct lack of strength and flexibility in my lower back and upper legs.
this is something i've suspected in the course of the sport of triathlon, but which only became confirmed during a recent kung fu class. i've suspected it because of the bouts of lower back and quad pains i've had while swimming and cycling, particularly in terms of sustained twisting (in swimming, while in freestyle) and contraction/expansion (in cycling, especially while pedaling under stress in the aero position) inherent in both sports. it's not something i've experienced in running, which i suspect is less stressful on those body parts.
it was confirmed in the kung fu class during a series of exercises called
tantui. i've done this before in class, but have not done them in awhile, and the last time i did them it was outside of formal class session and so i did not have the benefit of formal instruction. this time it was in class session and it was under closer instruction...meaning much stricter observation of form and technique. i had difficulties with this, and i could see that my difficulties were in my lower back (particularly the base of the spine, in turning, arching, or bending forward...more technically labeled torsion, concentric, and eccentric phases of motion) and the hip flexors/upper quads (again, in torsion, concentric, and eccentric phases of motion).
i mentioned this in a previous post (reference:
day 38: drills & review). as i said there, i consider my back and leg problems a bit odd, since my intuition is that these are heavily used body parts in triathlon, and that the most heavily used body parts would be the most well-developed.
i know, however, that there are counter-intuitive explanations substantiated by sports medicine arguing that sometimes the most heavily used body parts are the most
under-developed. this is because underdevelopment can be caused by bad habits, and bad habits can be produced by long, continued usage under conditions of fatigue--such as those experienced by heavily used body parts.
in dealing with these problems, it's become clear that the triathlon technique work i've been using to mitigate them is not working...or at least not as well as i would like or need. alone, it's just not enough. but i have found some benefits in the cross-training using the technique work of both triathlon and kung fu. in doing so, i've also perceived some ways in terms of how the 2 complement each other in producing those benefits. i'll organize this in terms of what i see myself applying from each side.
endurance sports
sports science has observed that an athlete can develop bad habits subconsciously over time, and completely unintentionally. this is because there may be weaknesses that the body will automatically compensate for without the athlete being consciously aware of them--in essence, the mind-body connection has an entire neural system that operates independent of a person's conscious state (this has to exist...there are just too many systemic activities for you to think about without a mind-body system that automatically processes them for you).
bad habits in terms of bad form are "bad" because:
- they contribute to repetitive use injuries. they tend to cause the body to move in ways it's not supposed to move. while the body can tolerate and recover from such actions over a limited amount of time, it can be overloaded if continued for an extended period of time. such an overload overwhelms the body's systems, and opens to door for the improper movements to produce tissue damage. as a result, repeating the same bad habits over and over again induces damage to the body.
- they rob the body of power by reducing efficiency. in effect, they serve as bottlenecks in the energy output process, wherein the energy a person is producing is diverted or wasted in movements that don't contribute to the intended motion. as a result, a person ends up expending more energy than otherwise necessary to accomplish a required goal, thereby reducing their performance.
- they reduce or prevent flexibility and strength. they allow deficiencies in strength and flexibility of certain body parts to be masked by "compensators" (i.e., other body parts). as a result, the under-developed body parts are never worked and never incited to grow, but instead allowed to remain or further become under-developed. this works for short periods of time, but require movements which the body was not meant to do, compounding the rise in repetitive use injuries and reduction of power efficiency.
this is partly why there is so much time spend on technique work--even for advanced athletes (
especially for advanced athletes), because the only way to ensure good habits and prevent bad ones is to exercise the neural pathways so that muscle memory is strengthened to follow proper motion. technique work is exercise that focuses less on conditioning and more on acclimating the body and mind to maintaining proper form in physical movements. in other words, they are training the body and mind so that the body moves in ways it was meant to move without conscious effort of the mind. this is, in essence, "good" habits in terms of "good" form.
some coaches i have had actually required a certain amount of technique work in every workout--and at various stages of the session (for warm-up, when you're fatigued, etc.), so that the mind-body connections were constantly stimulated and forced to adapt to changing conditions. for sports (including triathlon), technique work is crucial, and not something to be ignored. cheating on technique is perilous, particularly over long-distance races where even minute errors invariably sum up over extended periods of time to significant impacts on power production, energy consumption, and injury causation--all of which affect the only prime criteria that every athlete cares about: performance.
just to show you how much importance is given to technique in triathlon, you can reference the following selection of introductory sites:
swimming:cycling:running:triathlon:kung fukung fu is similar to endurance sports in the concerns over power generation and energy efficiency. i think that most kung fu practitioners are familiar with these subjects, as they are some of the fundamental components of kung fu. the difference, obviously, is in purpose, with endurance sports directing power and energy towards propulsion and kung fu directing it towards inflicting damage on an opponent (arguments can be made for health, but i put this more in the realm of medicine).
as a result, kung fu has as great an emphasis on proper form and technique work as sports, with the same belief that it is as important for advanced practitioners in kung fu as it is for advanced athletes in sports. i perceive the same amount of attention being given in kung fu for proper form and regular technique work, with the same goal of acclimating students to developing good habits, wherein the body moves in ways it was meant to move without conscious effort of the mind. apart from the need to prevent self-injury, promote power generation, and preserve flexibility and strength, there's also the understanding that there is no time to consciously think about actions within the chaos of a fight.
part of the technique work in kung fu is performing exercises which promote good form. while this can be done in the process of learning a particular kung fu style, some schools hold to a philosophy of foundational exercises that teach fundamental movements considered to be good habits crucial for development in any style. my school is one of these. it follows a curriculum held by the Wutan Hall, which uses for its foundational exercises something called
tantui.
i wrote a previous post covering tantui (reference:
cosi fan tantui), which has an explanation and video examples of tantui. tantui is part of an old (to some, some of the oldest) Chinese styles of kung fu commonly referred to as long fist (or chang quan). in Wutan, long fist is considered very important in terms of technique work. from what i've seen, in terms of technique work it is considered as important to kung fu as technique work is considered important to sports.
you can compare the level of importance by referencing the following introductory websites:
cross-training between endurance sports and kung fuas different as the 2 sides are in terms of the exercises done for technique work, i've been finding them complementary, particularly for my lower back and hip flexors/upper quads. the combination of the 2 seems to be producing a higher level of both flexibility and strength--both of which are desireable and necessary in athletics--than was occurring with just triathlon-specific technique exercises alone.
as similar as they are in terms of emphasizing technique work, endurance sports and kung fu are different in terms of the content of the technique work. this is may appear self-evident simply from the differing natures of the 2 subjects, but the substance of the difference is what makes the each area's manner of technique work complementary.
the approaches as different
while similar in purpose of eliminating bad habits and bad form and then encouraging good habits and good form, endurance sports and kung fu are different in their approaches in a way that is indicative of the differences in each side's underlying perspectives.
endurance sports utilizes technique work that is narrow in focus. as is hinted at by the general introductory links above, endurance sports--like so much of Western sports--follows sports science methodologies borrowed from Western science. this entails analysis within which a complex phenomenon is broken down into discrete, identifiable, and recognizably basic steps. to borrow a term from quantum physics, this means "quantizing" subjects, so that they are seen as a combination of many fundamental components.
from a sports perspective, the belief is that this makes it easier to identify problems and easier to fix them by correcting each one individually, since doing so allows full concentration and dedication of resources to a specific point of weakness. applied sequentially to a larger problem, the theory is that fixing fundamental quanta individually will equal fixing them collectively, with the collective being the equivalent (or at least, a near approximation) of the larger problem.
this is why sports technique work features a wide range of prescriptive exercises, each one dedicated to developing one particular aspect of an identified problem. in particular, there are exercises for each permutation of possible combinations of factors involving strengthening the concentric or eccentric phases of contraction, for the muscles or connective tissue during such phases of contraction, for different speeds and different ranges, and for specific sports purposes.
in contrast to endurance sports, kung fu adopts a more holistic approach. while still matching sports methodologies of targeting specific problems, kung fu responds to those problems not by quantizing them into elementary components and then applying prescriptive exercises matching each of those components, but rather by applying larger-scale integrative activities that deal with a problem as a whole.
the underlying perspective is that a particular problem often has more than 1 cause, and that these various causes may not be readily identifiable or intuitively obvious on an individual basis. as a result, true resolution of a particular problem does not necessarily lie in quantizing it into discrete components, but rather by providing solutions with a systemic approach that deals with the entire body. the theory is that by applying a larger-scale, systemic solution, treatment will reach both identified and unidentified--as well as intuitive and counter-intuitive--sources of problems, generating better chances of resolving problems.
this is expressed in exercises like tantui, which while considered basic and fundamental in terms of teaching movements that form the groundwork of many kung fu styles, is still composed of a wide range of complex, inter-related movements. the nature of such exercises is to mitigate a problem by applying a holistic solution which treats its known and unknown causes.
and this, to me, is probably the major distinction between the 2 approaches to technique work. sports, following Western science methodologies, assumes that all problems can be accurately modeled, and that all causes of a particular problem can be identified. which is why it asserts a prescriptive model calling for quantized solutions targeting individually quantized causes, since this allows the efficiencies of "asymmetric" confrontation (which asserts that it resolution is faster when overwhelming effort is focused on each quanta in sequential order).
in contrast, kung fu, following traditional Eastern methodologies, assumes that problems are not always readily modeled, and that there is always a possibility of unaccounted causes for particular problems. from a traditional Eastern perspective, Western science's "asymmetric" treatments of quantized causes can become inefficient in dealing with unaccounted causes, since it then involves in a time-intensive resource-consuming sequential chase of one newly discovered cause after another. this is why traditional Eastern methodologies utilize more holistic approaches encompassing problems as an integrated whole, since it increases the chances of catching unknown causes and improves efficiency by treating them all at the same time.
approaches as complementaryi see these different approaches as being complementary.
to begin, in terms of dealing with the problems posed by bad habits of bad form, i'm finding that kung fu technique work--like tantui--works the body and mind in ways that typical endurance sports technique exercises do not. in particular, the kung fu exercises provide a very complex array of physical movements which do the following:
- it forces the body to move in unfamiliar ways, enticing development of new neural-motor connections to improve coordination
- it forces the body to utilize a wide range of body parts in synchronicity and in different combinations, providing systemic stimulation inducing more widespread growth or regeneration
i'm finding the result of this is development and growth (of body and mind, both individually and together) that was not occurring with the assortment of sports technique exercises i was used to applying.
this is not to discredit sports science--it is effective, and i have always had results with its methods. but i am asserting that kung fu provides an additional option for technique work that can help those already known and used by sports science.
in addition, adopting a different approach, i think it helps to understand just what the more holistic, broad-range kung fu exercises like tantui are doing in terms of the perspectives of sports science methodologies. that is, as much as kung fu exercises can be accepted as addressing problems in ways sports exercises can't, it would still help to learn and apply kung fu exercises like tantui if there was some understanding of just how and why they work on a quantized, constituent component level.
the temptation in kung fu is to think that because an exercise seems to solve some issue of repetitive motion injury, power generation, or energy efficiency, then that is enough and there is no further need to question why or how the exercise works to solve such issues. but understanding is important, because it identifies the connections between the exercises and the issues, and so indicates just what parts of the exercises is dealing with with what aspects of a given problem. this enables recognition of just what facets of the exercises are important for what kinds of problems, and so just what about them should be stressed and emphasized --as well as when they should be stressed and emphasized--in responding to specific problems. this would mean mean better development and improved applications of the exercises.
in essence, this asserts that the sports science method of quantization can provide kung fu with another way of learning and applying kung fu exercises (like tantui) that can supplement its traditional Eastern approaches.
i can summarize the above by describing the complementary nature this way: there seems to be a greater effect on addressing the problems of bad habits and bad form when Western-based sports science methodologies are combined with Easter-based kung fu ones. kung fu technique work (with its broad, complex physical movements) provides an additional alternative to accentuate endurance sports technique work (with its specific, fundamental training movements). however, endurance sports technique work, because of the manner in which it quantizes both problems and solutions into individual constituent components, can facilitate a better understanding of how and why kung fu exercises works to solve problems, and hence allow better learning of kung fu as a science as much as it is an art.
i don't think the technique work of each area is mutually exclusive. much like my experience with the rest of endurance sports and kung fu, i think there's a lot of potential in combining the 2--potential that can benefit participants of both sides.
