CHAPTER THREE
HIGH-TENSION TECHNIQUES FOR INSTANT STRENGTH
• Tension. What force is made of
• “Raw strength” versus “technique”
• “Doesn’t dynamic tension act like a brake?”
• Accidental discharge of strength: A tip from firearms instructors
• Put your “rear-wheel drive” in high gear
• The “static stomp”: Using ground pressure to maximize power
• Fire your lats and keep your shoulders down: a secret of top karatekas and bench pressers
• “The corkscrew”: Another secret of the karate punch
• Bracing: Boost your strength up to 20% with an armwrestling tactic
• “Body hardening”—Tough love for teaching tension
• Beyond bracing: “Zipping up”
You have gone over the basics of the Naked Warrior program. Now for the nuts and bolts.
Tension. What force is made of
Spectacular levels of strength can be achieved by increasing the intensity of the muscular contraction.
“Why does correct bodyweight conditioning work so well?” asks gymnastics coach Christopher Sommer. “There are several [reasons], the first is contraction. Basically, the harder the contraction over a greater part of the body during an exercise, the more effective the exercise. For maximum improvement, training to failure is not necessary but maximum contraction is. One of the main advantages to these advanced bodyweight exercises is that they require a complete, full-body contraction. In fact, at advanced levels, they are so demanding that it is simply not possible to complete them any other way.”
Tension = Force. The tenser your muscles are, the more strength you will display and build. The Naked Warrior drills will teach you how to get stronger by contracting your muscles harder. Expect your strength to start growing from day 1.
Tension = Force. You can increase your strength beyond what you thought possible by contracting your muscles harder.
Over the centuries, martial artists—as well as gymnasts, lifters, and some other tough hombres—have quietly developed a number of highly effective techniques that greatly enhance strength by channeling the body’s scattered energy into the target muscles. These high-tension techniques (HTTs) will maximize your strength by forcing your muscles to contract harder. The Naked Warrior program has systematized them into a straightforward method of getting you strong—fast.
Systematic application of the martial arts high-tension techniques (HTTs) will dramatically increase your strength by maximizing muscular tension.
If you are an experienced martial artist, you will likely discover that you are already familiar with many of these techniques. The question is, then, why haven’t you been applying them to your strength training? Why don’t you teach them? And if you do, why does it take your students years just to start figuring these things out?
I don’t claim to have invented these power-generation techniques, but I will take the credit for organizing them into a logical system that can be taught in days, even hours.
“Pavel succinctly explained and applied in a few hours the same principles it took me 10 years to figure out practicing kung-fu” said Jeff Martone, a defensive tactics and physical training instructor for federal nuclear security teams. Jeff’s comment is typical of those I receive after my military and law enforcement courses, which feature the Naked Warrior principles of maximum tension/force generation. Tension is the Naked Warrior’s secret weapon.
“Raw strength” versus “technique”
“It’s all technique.” This is a typical ego saving comment by a bodybuilder who is rubbing his pumped up arm—his butt handed to him on the armwrestling table by a guy with pipes half his size. Sure, and so is the bench press.
It is, in fact! In a recent study, subjects increased their bicep strength 13 percent in three months by simply visualizing tensing their biceps hard but doing no exercise whatsoever. The only possible explanation for this strength gain is greater tension through increased “nerve force”.
Let’s have world bench press champion George Halbert set things straight: “The most important aspect one can learn to improve strength is to learn proper technique. There is a mode of thinking out there that I describe as ‘He’s not strong, he’s just got good technique.’ This is just confused thinking. . . . Have you ever heard anyone say ‘He is not a good shooter, he just has good technique’ or ‘He’s not really fast, he just has good technique’?”
Strength is a skill.
Admiring the performance of “dumb” muscles over focus and honed “nerve force” is just plain dumb. At our booth at the Arnold Schwarzenegger Fitness Expo, we posted a challenge to anyone who could do a strict military press of our 88-pound kettlebell, an awkward monster with a thick, smooth handle. We didn’t even require that the bell had to be cleaned to avoid hearing the “This is just technique,” bruised ego nonsense. All we wanted was a strict, knees-locked military press.
Strongmen and lifters had no problem putting up the bell, but 220 to 250 bodybuilders failed miserably. On the other hand, our senior Russian Kettlebell Challenge™ instructor Rob Lawrence can press the 88-pounder at 165 pounds of bodyweight and a height of 5 foot, 11 inches. Rob is an example of ‘smart muscle’. A wiry karateka, he practices his strength rather than works out. Another RKC, British kickboxer Nick Fraser, presses the same bell at a bodyweight of 154.
Treat your strength training as a practice, rather than a workout.
Is it “all technique”? You bet! Does it undermine these gentlemen’s accomplishments? No, it elevates them. Are you more humiliated when a big guy kicks your butt or a small one?
In any endeavor, including strength training, mental focus delivers more than physical transformation. Just watch a wiry old karate master chop a pile of bricks in half—a feat that would send a young bodybuilder to the emergency room.
Rob Lawrence, RKC Sr., on the girevoy sport platform. Rob emphasizes exacting technique, mental concentration and the development of wiry strength. Photo courtesy PhiladelphiaKettlebellClub.net.
Low gear for brute force
Nine-hundred-pound deadlifter Mark Henry once said, “What makes a good powerlifter is a slow gear.” In other words, when you need to pull a car out of the ditch, you call a tow truck, not a Ferrari.
Explosive lifting is the rage these days, and there is no doubt that it’s great for many things. Just not for building brute grinding strength. Russian research is clear on this point. [If you want references, ping me on the dragondoor.com forum.]
To anticipate your question, no, such training will not make you slower in your martial arts and sports. The Sanchin kata does not hold back its practitioners, does it? Just understand that few sports are as narrowly focused on max strength as powerlifting. You will have to work on your explosiveness separately. Most sports require you to “drive in multiple gears.” This book focuses entirely on “low gear,” which gets little or no attention elsewhere.
An emphasis on speed compromises the tension. One of the most crucial skills in the performance of any strength athlete—be it a gymnast, a powerlifter, or an arm wrestler—is the ability to stay tight. “Stay tight!” is the shout you will hear more than any other at any power meet. And only the elite can stay tight while exploding like a bat out of hell. Even the Westside Barbell Club powerlifters, famous for their trademark explosive training, dedicate a special day in their schedule to ‘grinding’. So forget pyrotechnics displays until you master full-body tension and your strength starts impressing.
One of the most crucial strength skills is ‘staying tight’. The emphasis on speed compromises the tension.
Rob Lawrence, RKC Sr., made an insightful post on the dragondoor.com forum: “…The trick is to move as quickly as possible without sacrificing the level of tension necessary to sustain the load. If you want to whip your arm out in front of you, it should be as loose as possible; but if you want to push up a bench press, the speed will necessarily be limited by the amount of tension you need to maintain to support the barbell.
“Beginners should emphasize tension first! If you try to teach speed right off the bat, the trainee will confuse ‘moving fast’ with ‘making jerky movements.’ Two different things. That is why Power to the People! emphasizes tension above all. Once you have the requisite base of tension, that’s when you start trying to ramp up the speed. Sometimes someone stuns me by “getting it” (i.e. the mix of speed/tension) the first time they handle weights. The woman who came to my kettlebell class last night, for example, was pressing two 12kg bells with total authority (and speed) in her second KB class. Truly impressive.”
Eventually you can speed up—but only if you maintain max tension.
This doesn’t mean that you should do the exaggerated 10-second reps that are fashionable (I couldn’t have picked a more fitting word) in sissified health clubs, which are also known for pink dumbbells and boy bands. You shouldn’t purposefully slow down, just like you shouldn’t purposefully speed up. Focus on staying tight as a gymnast. Be cool as Steve McQueen, and the speed will take care of itself.
Don’t panic by gunning the rep. You own it. This is the confidence of real strength.
“Doesn’t dynamic tension act like a brake?”
The Naked Warrior approach insists that you tense all your muscles when exerting max force. This demand conjures up images of the Okinawan kata Sanchin, in which your own antagonistic muscles provide the resistance.
A natural reaction is: “That tension is going to make me weaker as I am fighting my own muscles, not stronger!”
Wrong. That may be true for dynamic efforts, such as punches and single-joint bodybuilding exercises such as leg curls or leg extensions. But multijoint strength drills, such as one-arm pushups and pistols play by a totally different set of rules.
The agonist/antagonist relationship is pretty straightforward in, say, leg curls or leg extensions. The quads work; the hams impede them. The hams contract; the quads hold them back. Learn to relax the hams, and the quads will get stronger. The proponents of so-called ‘muscle control’, which was popular at the dawn of weightlifting, tried to do just that. And then there are the compound strength exercises. Take a close look at a squat, barbell, or bodyweight—it makes no difference. Both the quadriceps and the hamstrings are working toward the common goal of standing up. The quads are extending the knees, and the hammies are extending the hips.
A dirty little secret of bodybuilding is that one of the best ways to build the biceps is with the powerlifting-style wide-grip bench press. Your bis may fight your tris in doing skull crushers, but they assist your triceps, deltoids, and pecs in the bench press or the one-arm pushup. In multijoint, high-resistance exercises, the antagonists often act as synergists, especially in experienced athletes. In other words, the “brakes” become “engines.”
In multijoint, high-resistance exercises, the “brakes” become “engines.” It is an elite skill that takes time to finesse.
So, the good news is that you can amplify your strength by drawing on the power of the muscles in a way that was traditionally thought to impede their movement. Now, for the bad news: This is an elite skill that takes time to develop and hone. Just like relaxing the antagonist muscles for striking, tensing them properly to enhance your pullup or pushup strength isn’t something you master overnight. You might fight yourself a little in the beginning, but this will pass with experience. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.
As old-timer Maxick wrote in Great Strength by Muscle Control, “...when a lifter pulled a barbell” —never mind the barbell, it applies to any type of resistance—”...his mind was concentrated on the barbell or weight and not on the muscles employed. His object was to get the weight aloft; to the muscles that were performing the task he paid no attention. The whole action was therefore controlled to a considerable extent by the weight; consequently a number of available groups of muscles were either left inoperative when they might have been usefully employed, or were brought into play unnecessarily, to the hampering of the lifting muscles.”
Mindless lifting is for losers.
The power of a fist
Hit the deck and give me 5 pushups, comrade! Only 5 but of a challenging variety—for instance, with your feet up or on one arm. When you are done with 5, you should be able to grind out another couple but no more than that. Please do pushups on your hands, not your fists, fins, or fingertips. That way, you will do a better job of driving the Naked Warrior principles of power generation home.
Note the difficulty of your first set. Rest briefly. Do another fiver but with one difference: On the way up, grip the deck hard with your fingertips. Don’t go up on your fingertips; just grip the floor so that your fingertips turn white. Do this only on the way up. Experiment with whether you get the best results by gripping all the way up or just at the sticking point.
You cannot help noticing that your arms suddenly received a jolt of extra energy, as if your tensing forearms sent some juice up into your triceps. That is exactly what has happened. Whenever a muscle contracts, it irradiates a ‘nerve force’ around it and increases the intensity of the neighboring muscles’ contractions.
Make a fist.
A tight fist. A white-knuckle fist!
Note that as you grip harder, the tension in your forearm overflows into your upper arm and even your shoulder and armpit.
You will increase your strength in any upper body exertion by strongly gripping the floor, the bar, etc. What is truly remarkable is that tightening your fists can enhance your leg strength, as well! Go into a full squat. Pause on the bottom for a second and then get up. Do a couple of reps to take note of the amount of effort it takes you to stand up. On your next squat, make white-knuckle fists at the moment you are about to get up. You will find that doing the squat has become easier! This technique will soon help you tackle the awesome one-legged squat, or pistol.
Your toes can do for your legs what your fingers can do for your arms. Grip the deck with your toes as you are coming out of a squat. You will increase the intensity of the contraction of your hips and power up with ease.
Make fists and grip the deck with your toes to strengthen your squats.
Accidental discharge of strength: A tip from firearms instructors
Your hands are “connected” through “muscle software”. One hand imitates the other. A sudden effort with one hand will cause a reflexive contraction of up 20 percent of that intensity in the muscles of the other.
This phenomenon of interlimb response puts fear into the hearts of firearms instructors the world over. They warn against placing your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot. If you keep your finger on the trigger, any movement with your other hand—for instance, turning on a flashlight or opening a door—could make your gun go off, due to this squeeze response.
What can land a cop in trouble can help you in your strength training.
Try this test: Squeeze your training partner’s hand as hard as possible.
Squeeze your training partner’s hand as hard as possible...
...and again, while making a hard fist with your free hand.
And once more, but this time, also make a hard fist with your free hand.
When you have reached the sticking point in a one-arm strength exercise for the upper body, such as the one-arm pushup, suddenly make a white-knuckle fist or tightly grip the surface or bar with your free hand. Doing so will fire up your strength and get you unstuck.
In one-arm upper body exercises, fire the gripping muscles of your free hand at the sticking point.
This strategy works well in the context of many punches in karate and other hard styles. The instant your reverse punch nails the target, make a hard fist with your nonstriking hand. You cannot help but notice the “power line” that connects your fists.
Power abs = A power body
“All my attention, all my training, all my thinking is centered on my abdomen.”
—Mas Oyama
Tensing your abs will amplify the intensity of the contraction of any muscle in your body.
Martial arts masters have instinctively understood this phenomenon for centuries, and you are about experience it yourself. But don’t rush to hit the deck and apply it to pushups. Chances are, you don’t even know how to contract your abs properly.
The “crunch generation” has been brainwashed into sucking in their waspy waists when working their abs. Big sissies. You are supposed to have your core tight and full of compressed energy. You are supposed to feel anchored in your lower abdomen. What do you feel in your belly when you suck it in? Like a weak, disconnected beauty queen. Go get a manicure.
You need to understand several things. First, a muscle contracts in a straight line, not in a curve. So your abs should draw your sternum and pubic bone together in a straight line, not a semicircle. Second, for boring, geeky reasons that I will leave out, when you suck in your stomach, your intra-abdominal pressure (or ‘Ki’ or ‘Chi’, if you insist) drops off. The bottom line is this: Flat abs are strong abs.
Flat abs are strong abs; a sucked in stomach is weak.
You will not get stronger until you learn to contract your abdominals flat and strong. Doing the following ‘back-pressure crunch’ will teach you how. Assume the regular crunch position, your knees at 90 degrees and your feet flat on the floor. Now, instead of focusing on crunching up, put all your effort into pressing your lower back down hard. I picked up this tip from Aussie author Kit Laughlin, and it’s so good that it almost makes the crunch a worthwhile exercise in its own right.
When you press down on the area of your back that would be covered by a karate belt, a few cool things will happen. Your spine will naturally round. Both your trunk and your pelvis will come up just like the ends of a mattress curl when a big guy flops in the middle, and you will be unable to come up any higher than you are supposed to in doing a crunch. You just cannot sit up when your lower back is grounded.
This unusual maneuver is out of the jurisdiction of your hip flexors, which means more work for your dear abbies. Finally, the back-pressure crunch will make your abs contract in a straight line, as they are supposed to.
The back-pressure crunch works even better if you stick something like a rolled-up yoga mat under your back. You will work your abs through a longer range of motion, and you will find it easier to press down.
To sum up, don’t worry about crunching, rolling up, or sitting up. Just focus on pressing your lower back into the deck as hard as possible. Place your hands on your abs as you are crunching and note the sensation; you are supposed to be able to reproduce it in any context. Once you can, try the following strength test.
Shake hands with a partner, both of you squeezing as hard as possible. Have him note how hard your grip is. Rest briefly and repeat the test, your partner doing nothing different and you adding the ab flex into the mix.
Keep your abdominals short and flat; reproduce the sensation you experience while doing back-pressure crunches. One more time: When flexing your stomach, do not suck it in or stick it out. Brace it as you would for a punch (that can be arranged). You (or rather your sparring partner) will notice your greater hand strength.
Power to you!
Keep your abdominals short and flat.
When flexing your stomach, do not suck it in or stick it out.
Brace it as you would for a punch.
Put your “rear-wheel drive” in high gear
Experienced fighters are not impressed with large pipes. They know that real striking power is generated in the hips. One karate master even stated that makiwara punching is meant to strengthen the hips, rather than the knuckles. Boxing coach Steve Baccari, RKC, told me that Mike Tyson’s arms measure 16 inches in diameter and that Evander Holyfield’s are 15. Either would be large on a 160-pound, 5-feet, five-inch bodybuilder, but you have to agree that these numbers seem pretty average for a heavyweight.
Yet most people, even athletes, are preoccupied with their arms and don’t have a clue how to recruit their glutes, the strongest muscles in their bodies. You must acquire this skill because no strength exercise or martial arts technique will be effective without your knowing how to create high tension in your hip muscles.
Tensing the glutes amplifies any exertion
An effective image is pinching a coin with your cheeks. Silly but effective.
Back to our handgrip test. In addition to the contracting your abs, lock your glutes as you are crushing your friend’s hand. You will be stronger. I guarantee it.
A gymnast instantly gains 40 pounds of strength on his iron cross with the three techniques you have just learned
From The Power of Tension, by Brad Johnson. © 2002 by Brad Johnson. Reprinted by permission.
I recently reported the results of a crude experiment on the effects of tension techniques on strength performance. Since Pavel asked me to write an article, I decided to repeat the experiment with a better design and more precise measurements.
The strength exercise that I used was the Iron Cross. I stood on a bathroom scale while pushing down on the rings to measure the amount of my own bodyweight that I could lift off the scale with a variety of tension conditions. I rested my hands on the rings and extended my locked arms to an angle approximately 20 degrees above the perfect Iron Cross position (a slight Y instead of a T shape). This angle increased the leverage disadvantage of the exercise and I was fairly certain that I would not be able to lift my body completely off the scale. I used four tension conditions:
(1) pushing down on the rings as hard as I could without any of the following three tension techniques,
(2) squeezing the rings as hard as I could,
(3) tensing my abdominal muscles,
(4) tensing my glutes.
I repeated all four of these conditions six times. I always started with condition number one and then varied the order of the remaining three conditions. For example, the first sequence was 1, 2, 3, 4 and the second sequence was 1, 3, 4, 2. Each sequence, I would add one tension technique at a time so that I could measure their cumulative effects. On the first sequence I measured strength:
(1) with no tension technique,
(2) with hand squeeze,
(3) with hand squeeze + ab squeeze,
(4) with hand squeeze + ab squeeze + glute squeeze.
All sequences were done in that manner. I decided to measure six sequences so that I performed each possible order of the three tension techniques. This allowed me to calculate the individual as well as the cumulative strength contributions of the three tension techniques and gave me more data to visually examine for patterns.
In each condition, I pressed down on the rings as hard as I could. I attempted to utilize only the prescribed tension technique(s). This was challenging because I was accustomed to utilizing all of them together. I pressed down for approximately three seconds and watched the needle on the scale. Although the needle was shaking (a range of 4 to 6 pounds), it was pretty easy to find the center point. I recorded the weight and rested for one minute before the next condition. I observed my scores on the first and last condition of each sequence to make sure that my performance was not affected by fatigue. These scores were almost identical throughout the experiment.
Now for the good stuff! The average strength increase from the use of the 3 tension techniques combined was 40.33 pounds. The average cumulative strength increases for the separate conditions were: hand squeeze—8.5 pounds, ab squeeze—20.33 pounds, and glute squeeze—11.17 pounds. There were two sequences where each of the tension techniques was the first and, therefore, the only one used. The average strength increase for each condition when it was the only technique utilized was: hand squeeze—10 pounds, ab squeeze—30 pounds, and glute squeeze—13.5 pounds.
In conclusion, I knew that the tension techniques increased strength but I was surprised by the size of the increase. I imagine that the strength increases of the individual and combined tension techniques vary depending upon the selected exercise and the athlete. I realize that I committed all kinds of experimental errors but the results were more than enough to convince me of the POWER OF TENSION!!!
I hope that this report of the experiment was clear. If not, I would be glad to answer any questions about it on the dragondoor.com forum.
COMRADE, PAY ATTENTION TO EVERY PERFORMANCE TIP IN THIS BOOK! READ, PRACTICE, THEN READ AND PRACTICE SOME MORE. THE FINE POINTS OF POWER GENERATION ARE MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE INDIVIDUAL EXERCISES. IF YOU SKIP THE HIGH TENSION TECHNIQUES AND GO DIRECTLY TO THE CALS YOU ARE NOT PRACTICING THE NAKED WARRIOR MOVES BUT WASTING YOUR TIME. IF YOU HAVE ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER, YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS STRENGTH TRAINING.
The “static stomp”: Using ground pressure to maximize power
Karate great Masatoshi Nakayama used to say, “Motive power comes from the powerful thrust of the supporting leg; the principle is the same as that of the jet engine. . . . The vital core of the movement is the reaction between the supporting leg and the floor. The greater this reaction is, the faster the body advances.”
Focus on applying maximum pressure to the deck with your foot when doing the pistol and with your palm when doing the one-arm pushup. Push straight though the platform, as Olympic weightlifters like to say. Imagine that you are stomping down. Yes, a “static stomp!” For a number of reasons—physical, psychological, and physiological—doing so will translate into a more powerful contraction of your pushing muscles.
Go ahead. Stand on one foot and press it harder and harder into the deck. Assume the top position of the one-arm pushup and do the same with your hand. Feel the steady build-up of tension? If you try the same from the bottom, you will spring right up.
APPLY MAX PRESSURE TO THE FLOOR WITH YOUR PALM OR FOOT. PUSH STRAIGHT THROUGH THE DECK. STRIVE FOR THE SENSATION OF MAXIMUM PRESSURE WITH “A STATIC STOMP”.
“Stomp” with the whole surface of your palm or the sole of your foot with the emphasis on the heel. The heel of the foot and the heel of the palm. The heel of the palm is the spot at the base of the palm below the little finger. It is the spot used in palm strikes. Applying pressure to this spot structurally aligns the arm to be very strong and fires up the triceps and lat.
In one-arm pushups also keep your legs rigid and push the balls of your feet through the floor. Everything in your body is interrelated and isolation is a myth. Try it; it works.
Everything in your body is interrelated and isolation is a myth.
Downstairs, the heel pressure will recruit your powerful rear-wheel drive. The application does not have to be static; weightlifters use it during jerks for instance.
Tense your lats and keep your shoulders down: a secret of top karatekas and bench pressers
Shrugging your shoulder and/or letting it move forward will destroy your shoulder and your power alike—whether you are punching, benching, or doing pushups. You are in effect ‘disconnecting’ your arm from your powerful torso muscles.
Masatoshi Nakayama used to say, “The shoulders must always be kept low. . . . If the shoulders rise, . . . the muscles in the side of the body will soften, and power cannot be concentrated.” The master was speaking about the punch, but the one-arm pushup is no different. “Hips, chest, shoulder, arm, wrist and fist—all must be firmly linked together, and all muscles must function fully. But if the shoulder is raised when punching, or leads the movement of the body, the muscles around the armpit will not contract properly, no matter how much arm muscles are contracted. Then the impact will probably cause the fist to rebound from the target.”
Shrugging your shoulder or moving it forward is ‘disconnecting’ your arm from your powerful torso muscles.
Note the proper shoulder alignment for the one-arm pushup. If you are standing up, it would be described as “down and back.”
Many top powerlifters keep their shoulder pressed down into the bench and toward their feet. As a result, they put up heavier poundages and suffer fewer shoulder injuries. This is no different when you are pushing your bodyweight.
Although it seems natural to keep your energy on the top of your shoulder and to push with it, doing so is a recipe for weakness and injury. “Throughout the punch [and the one-arm pushup], minimize tension on the outside of the arm and over the shoulder to maintain a smooth arch [of energy transmission]—tensing the latissimus dorsi and serratus anterior muscles (along the ribs)—to transfer stress,” insists Lester Ingber, doctor of physics and karate sensei. In other words, push from your armpit, rather than your shoulder. “Keep tensions under the arm and avoid stiff shoulders that can disconnect the block from it source of speed and mass, the body,” suggests Ingber.
Push from your armpit, rather than your shoulder.
While it may seem counterintuitive to you right now, once you master this concept of armpit power, you will wonder how you ever did without it. It’s going to pay off big in your one-arm pushups, punches, and bench presses, if you do them.
“The corkscrew”: Another secret of the karate punch
“The twisting motion [of a karate punch] contributes to setting a true course,” explained the late Nakayama. “The principle is the same as that of rifling in a gun barrel. Without the rifling, the bullet would tumble end over end and veer from its course. Because of the rifling, the bullet spins and travels a true course... Twisting the forearm concentrates power and amplifies it. This is true because the twisting causes an instantaneous tensing of all the muscles involved in the technique.”
A threaded firearm is superior to a flat-barreled one.
Rotation, or spiral tension, increases the stability and power of almost any action.
This is the essence of the corkscrew principle. Gripping the rifle while isometrically twisting both hands in opposite directions—the right clockwise and the left counterclockwise—made a dramatic difference for bayonet fighting in the U.S. Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. The Marines’ thrusts became more powerful and much harder to deflect. The same is true for strength exercises. Following is a sequence of drills to teach you how it’s done.
Hold a stick in front of you, as you would hold a bar for the bench press.
By now, you should know better than to shrug your shoulders defensively or slip them forward.
Squeeze the stick hard and pretend that you are trying to break it over your knee.
You should feel tension in your armpits, your lats, and your pecs. Your elbows will move somewhat in toward your body, and your shoulders will move away from your ears. Top bench pressers flare their lats to drive the bar off their chest. The corkscrew technique is a shortcut to mastering this difficult skill.
If no stick is available, hold your arms in front of you and twist them from inside out as far as possible.
Imagine that you are screwing your arms into your shoulder sockets. You should feel tension from your armpits spiraling toward your fists.
Corkscrew from the inside out: the right arm clockwise and the left arm counterclockwise.
Note that where a karate punch twists from the outside in, a pushup (or a bench press or a palm strike) twists from the inside out. That is, the right arm moves clockwise and the left arm moves counterclockwise. Your shoulders will retract into their sockets and perform more strongly with this external rotation.
Test the corkscrew power in repeating the handshake test.
Then hit the deck and give me a couple of regular two-arm pushups. Grip the ground hard with your fingertips, making sure that your hands stay put, and apply the same inside-out corkscrew tension to the ground that you applied to the stick.
Do you feel an invisible force spiraling down from your armpit and lifting you up without any effort?
Once more: Your hands should not move; the spiral occurs in your shoulders.
Your hands should not move; the spiral occurs in your shoulders.
Your fingers should grip the deck hard, but keep your hands stationary. The pushups will become very easy. Your body should feel like it’s rising on springs. You should feel a distinct spiral of ‘energy’ moving from your armpits to your hands.
Bracing: Boost your strength up to 20% with an armwrestling tactic
A decent armwrestler loads all his muscles with high-strung tension before the ref yells ‘Go!’ A top armwrestler will load even before he grips up with his or her opponent. And an amateur who waits for the referee’s command to pull before turning on his biceps finds himself pinned without knowing what has hit him.
According to the father of plyometrics, Russian sports scientist Yuri Verkhoshansky, isometrically tensing your muscles before a dynamic contraction can improve your performance by up to 20 percent. You are about to experience what that means.
Pre-tensing your muscles before starting to move can improve your performance by up to 20 percent.
Do 5 hard pushups, totally relaxing on the deck between reps. Notice how you have to tense up somewhat before pushing up each time? Do another 5, this time making a point of maximally tensing your whole body before pushing up. You should find that you have much more strength.
Attempt a one-arm pushup or another challenging pushup from the position of lying relaxed on the deck. Most likely, you will fail. Now brace your whole body before starting the pushup and successfully complete the attempt.
Loading tension into the muscles before an exertion increases their power. You must learn to brace against resistance the same way you brace against a strike.
The key is to brace yourself before the resistance is upon you; otherwise, it will be too late. Houdini could take anyone’s punch if he was prepared for it. He died when he got struck without warning.
Dead-start exercises, such as the one just described, are great for teaching yourself higher tension, especially in your weak links. Because they eliminate the helpful bounce, dead starts greatly challenge the muscles and strengthen them for normal pushups and the like.
So, be sure to include plenty of dead starts in your regimen, once you are strong enough to do them. To do a one-arm pushup, relax completely while lying down on the floor; then tense up and go. Relax at the bottom of a pistol before powering back up. Enjoy the pain!
“Body hardening”— Tough love for teaching tension
Here is how to acquire the bracing skill the quick and hard way.
The U.S. Marine Corps Martial Arts Program has been practicing “body hardening”, or controlled striking of fleshy parts of the body to accustom the Marines’ bodies to the rigors of contact fighting. The Soviet Spetsnaz did the same thing. You can occasionally see on American television footage of Russian commandos breaking incoming two-by-fours by flexing their traps and taking full-force kicks in the gut. We also applied such drills to teach the body the tightness necessary to lift heavy and safe.
Assume a position where you lack tension—starting with the braced position such as the top of the pushup or the squat is best.
Have a partner pound your muscles with his fists, the ridges of his hands, and his feet. It is not a bad idea to start with the regular two-arm pushup. These strikes should not be of the knockout variety. They shouldn’t even hurt or leave bruises if you tighten up on impact. It goes without saying that you should not hit the spine, the bones, the head, and other vulnerable areas.
Your partner should work over your whole musculature—from your calves to your neck. He should give special emphasis to the muscles that you have a real hard time flexing. For instance, if you have a hard time standing upright on one leg because your hip abductors, the muscles outside the thigh, are not firing, then a few careful kicks to the outside of the butt cheek—not to the bony part of the leg—should take care of it.
if you have a hard time standing upright on one leg because your hip abductors, the muscles outside the thigh, are not firing.
In the one-arm pushup, the area that needs extra attention is the armpit (that is, the pecs and the lats) and the abs.
In the one-legged squat variation, the obliques, the glutes, and all the muscles around the thigh should get some tough love.
So, get a buddy to give you this treatment—he will be delighted—and you will have this tension thing figured out in no time flat.
Taking controlled strikes to your muscles will teach you to tense them harder.
Beyond bracing: “Zipping up”
A state-of-the-art form of bracing, called “zipping up,” will take your pretensing skills to a new level. This technique is somewhat advanced, as it requires good body awareness. If you don’t get it at first, revisit it in a few months.
Practice the technique in the braced position: at the top of a one-arm pushup or one-legged squat.
Pull up your kneecaps by tensing your quads. Now focus on pulling your quad up even higher into your groin, as you would window shutters.
Next do the same with the rest of your thigh muscles: the inner, the outer, and the hamstrings. It is as if you have grabbed your leg with both hands just above the knee, squeezed, and slowly pulled all the thigh muscles up into the groin. Imagine that you are pulling your thigh up into the hip socket as well.
Try to get that feeling of “zipping up” your muscles; it is very powerful. Your thigh muscles will feel very short, hard, and retracted into the hip joint.
Flex your glutes by ‘pinching a coin’ with your cheeks.
Work up your body. The waist. Shorten the muscles surrounding your waist—the abs, the obliques, the muscles around your ribs—remembering to keep them flat. If you have done it right your lower ribs will move in and your stomach will stay flat rather than suck in. Just zip all your torso muscles from your ribs down to your pelvis. Breathe shallow as your respiratory muscles get constricted; do not hold your breath.
Up until now the instructions applied to both the pushups and the squats. The following is just for the pushups.
The pecs and lats. Flex them so they pull your shoulders down, away from your ears. B.K.S. Iyengar, a master of Yoga, says, “the traps belong to the back, not the neck.” Then shorten your armpit muscles even further so they pull your shoulders into your body.
Pull your rigid arms into the shoulder sockets; retract them.
If you can figure out how, “screw your shoulders into their sockets” from inside out, right arm clockwise, left one counterclockwise.
Make the biceps and the triceps retreat into the deltoids. It is the same “rolling up of the shades” that you did with your thigh muscles.
Your forearms. “Gather up” your forearm muscles by your elbows, pull up your forearm bones into the elbows.
ZIP! You have achieved a very compact and powerful alignment. And if you have not—keep practicing.
The fine points, annoying as they seem, are the meat of the program and the only legit shortcut to strength.
As you get proficient, try zipping up in your dead start drills.
In the pushups especially focus on zipping up your stretched pecs and biceps.
It is harder to zip up a stretched muscle, but if it were easy everyone would be doing it.
In the pushups especially focus on zipping up your stretched pecs and biceps. Push up. You will pop up like a spring.
Work up to practicing zipping up in dead start exercises but don’t stop practicing at the lockout.
It is harder to zip up a stretched muscle, but if it were easy everyone would be doing it.
Wind up for power
Throw a series of karate punches, and observe how your body gets loaded for each successive punch. “Energy (compression) from compressed muscles can be reused to produce the beginning of another technique much the same as motion can be obtained from a compressed spring or sponge-ball,” states Lester Ingber, Ph.D., in his excellent book Karate Kinematics and Dynamics.
Strength training is no different. Once you have zipped up your muscles, it should be obvious that you have stored a tremendous amount of elastic energy. You will find it interesting that it can be reused even without a bounce. Here’s how.
Instead of going down by yielding to the gravity, actively pull yourself down while still staying braced and tight. In the pushup, pull with your lats and other back muscles; don’t forget the inside-out corkscrew on the way down. In the squat, pull with your hip flexors, the muscles on the tops of your thighs whose job it is to jackknife your body. Your zipped-up muscles should feel like stretched rubber bands.
Instead of yielding to the gravity, actively pull yourself down while still tight. Imagine that you are stretching your muscles like rubber bands.
Armed forces powerlifting champion Jack Reape suggests an excellent drill to teach you how to pull yourself into the squat on the dragondoor.com forum: “the reverse squat”. “Hold a pulldown rope around the back of your neck, then squat down and bend over. Good for your abs and great for your stabilizers.” It will work just as well with a bungee cord hooked to a pullup bar and the one-legged squat.
To drive the active negative concept home for the pushup, try the towel row explained in Chapter 8, the Q&A or a “reverse pushup” pullup. Lie on your back underneath a securely anchored bar, and grab the bar with a palms-over, shoulder-width grip. Make your body rigid and pull your chest to the bar; your feet should stay on the deck. Force your chest out and pull it toward the bar in a rowing motion. Notice what it feels like and try to recreate the same pulling sensation when you are lowering your body for a pushup. Pay attention to stretching your pecs; it will help your rebound big time.
“Internal martial artists figured out how to ‘load tension’ into their muscles by deliberately twisting their bodies like coiled springs,” explains John Du Cane, RKC, in his online Qigong Secrets newsletter, available at dragondoor.com. “This coiled position is either held for long periods or used as a preparation or transition for explosive action. Iron Shirt qigong uses this technique, as do forms like The 18 Buddha Hands and The Five Animal Frolics.” The Naked Warrior strength secrets have been out there all along.
