A major focus of mine in both Movement Science and fighting/self-protection skills training is the concept of affordances. Below is an excerpt from the book that first introduced me to the concept, which contains a great introduction to the concept as it applies to fighting skills:
“The theory was put forth in the 1960s by an unorthodox psychologist names James Jerome Gibson at Cornell University. Gibson, who died in 1979, said animals and people view their environments not in terms of objectively defined shapes and volumes but in terms of their own behavioral potential. In other words, you immediately apprehend what you see in terms of how you think you can interact with that you see. You see affordances. Affordances make possible and facilitate certain actions. So, handles afford grasping. Stairs afford stepping. Knobs afford turning. Doors afford passage. Hammers afford smashing…
Martial artists see a different set of affordances than people untrained in hand-to-hand combat. Lapels and shoulder fabric are gripping points that afford all sorts of leverage. Elbows and wrists afford a variety of locks and twists. Highly trained martial artists see these affordances directly, as inherent parts of the concept of the body, just as an accomplished pianist sees not just individual keys but whole interrelated harmonic complexes brimming with possible melodies that can be extracted from it’s wholes, not as individual finger and hand movements (Blakeslee & Blakeslee, 2007).”
Blakeslee, S., & Blakeslee, M. (2007). The Body Has a Mind of it’s Own. New York: Random House, p. 106-108.
When considering upper body striking, martial artists tend to focus on the pectoral, triceps and deltoid muscle groups, and the glenohumeral (GH) joint, which is the most obvious shoulder joint. The GH joint consists of the humerus and the glenoid fossa of the scapula (the “socket” of the shoulder blade). Since this joint is essentially like a ball resting on a shallow dish, and not a deep socket like the hip joint, ligaments and the attached muscles provide most of the stability. There are also three other joints in the shoulder complex that play important roles in maintaining stability for the GH joint, with the scapulothoracic being most prone to abuse in combative training. This joint is formed by the fibrous connection of the scapula to the posterior torso wall, which allows the scapula to glide and rotate as the GH joint requires.
The serratus anterior and the trapezius provide the ability to adduct (pull close to the ribcage), retract, depress, and upwardly or downwardly rotate the scapulae. They maintain alignment of the glenoid fossa with the head of the humerus. A strong, reasonably flexible rotator cuff group is important, but the trapezius needs to be able to provide rotation and stabilization so that the GH joint stays centered and the rotator cuff isn’t impinged. The trapezius and serratus need to work synergistically with the GH joint movers. Striking in general requires the same coupling of scapular and humeral actions that has been reported for other overhand actions (Kibler, et. al., 2007) such as the tennis serve.
Specificity of training is the basis on which all modern physical training rests. Briefly, to produce a desired physiological adaptation, a training program must place sufficient stress on the physiological systems in question (Willmore & Costill, 2004). In training environments this is commonly referred to as Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands (SAID). Adaptations to training are limited to the physiological system overloaded by the program. This includes neuromotor, morphological, hormonal and metabolic elements. Fighting activities (encompassing both combat sports and fighting/self protection scenarios) present a unique programming challenge, requiring a range of adaptations to all systems.
One of our VA students exploring the utility of the elbows at close range to strike upwards and/or cover, then strike downwards into the throat or clavicles on the return. The collar tie can come out of the strike or cover, or from the other arm, and gives her the ability to create a force couple between elbow and target.
Last Saturday’s class featured an introduction to kneeling shoulder locks. After class, I was going through some of the pictures taken for review purposes, and noticed this uncanny (but unintentional) resemblance to Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.” During semi-open randori, both students threw their partner in the same direction, and applied the lock at the same time, resulting in the visual pun. Next weekend, we’ll try for da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” out of juji gatame.
-there really isn’t much new under the sun when it comes to fighting techniques and “mixed martial arts”
-although there is some camp involved in the demonstrations, proper leverage against a joint’s weak angles can go a long way- and it’s good to have some contingencies in store if a go-to technique fails.
Coincidentally, the guy looks a lot like one of the assistants from Jack Dempsey’s 1942 combatives manual, “Fight Tough,” and I love her liberal use of the heels…
Ed. Note: while the examples used in the piece below relate to punching and recreational/athletic MA training, the concepts can easily be applied to all other fighting skills and situations in which they might be used.
How many ways are there to skin a cat? Or in this case, throw a punch? Among both novice and experts (and “experts”), it can seem as if there is a “right” way to perform a fighting skill, yet variations are to be found from style to style, from individual to individual, and even from moment to moment within the same encounter. The Q & A below came out of a discussion with martial artist and CSCS Daniel Ramos (fellow ATSU Human Movement Science alum).
The overhead squat assessment promoted by NASM (Clark & Lucett, 2011) provides a useful evaluation of the functional status of the latissimus dorsi during a common movement (video example here). The OHS requires that both trunk extension and shoulder flexion occur simultaneously, either or both of which may be altered if the muscle has become chronically shortened and tight. When the lats are hypertonic, shoulder range or motion (ROM) is altered due to excessive internal rotation and depression of the humerus, which further affects the actions of the scapula. This can be seen when an individual’s arms habitually fall forward past the line of the torso during the eccentric phase of the squat in an OHS evaluation, which is an indication of the arthrokinematic (joint movement) compensations needed to accommodate functional ROM as the muscle attempts to maintain a shorter distance between origin and insertion (for an excellent visual of how this occurs, take a look here).
Rear view of the latissimus dorsi. Note the broad connection to the pelvis, and the insertion on the humerus. An overactive (hypertonic) lat will cause alterations in shoulder and hip function, impairing good technique by reducing strength and mobility, while increasing the chances of an avoidable chronic injury.
Regarding historical or traditional training practices:
Within physical culture, old practices or concepts aren’t necessarily good or better than modern ones just because they’ve been around awhile. There is belief in martial arts circles, especially in “traditional” groups, that something which has been passed down for decades is unquestionably valuable, or even superior to modern evidence-based understandings. A common defense is “do you think technique x would still be around it if it wasn’t battle tested?” Another is “look at practitioner x- if it worked for him, and he had no fancy research.”
The plain and unglamorous truth is that sometimes techniques or training practices got passed down simply because no one knew any better, or it fulfilled a cultural function (particularly in Confucian-influenced societies) or because they maintained a certain personal prestige or power structure within a group. A technique may have never actually been used in a fight; a conditioning activity may routinely cause joint damage that actually weakens a student over time, but the status of the originator serves to enshrine it. Old can be good; old is not automatically good.
What constitutes an “expert” in a fighting art or practice? Approaching the question from a motor learning perspective is highly useful, and has many obvious inroads into discussing pedagogy, practicality and transferability of a training method to a performance setting.Experts in any physical activity exhibit several common characteristics, regardless of the nature of the activity:
1. Superior ability to anticipate the likely outcome of a situation as it emerges. This is distinct from a conscious effort to guess what will happen, which we see in relative novices. Instead, this is more efficient perception-action linking. It manifests as shorter reaction time, with reaction time being the interval between stimulus and initiation of movement. RT is a reflection of the cognitive processing going on between perceptual and motor regions before a physical response is initiated. Combined with more efficient motor programs for the movement time, the result is a faster overall response time (RT and MT combined).
2. Less visual search for the important aspects of a developing situation. A relative novice looks everywhere, whereas the expert looks immediately at the salient areas (a shoulder movement before a punch, a slight drop of the forearm towards the belt line, etc.)
After a brutally hot summer the last few weekends have brought nice, mild weather here in VA, and what better way to enjoy it than working duck-to-counter setups on the training contraptions in the back yard:
On August 16th, 2010, I tore my right anterior cruciate ligament – the main ligament in the knee – at a fight training class. This is part 1 of the story of how it happened, the reconstructive surgery, the 5 months of physical therapy that followed the surgery, and my gradual return to full participation in fight training.
The Injury
The ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is the most important of the four ligaments which stabilise your knee. It is is a strip of connective tissue which inserts at the front of the bony plateau at the top of your tibia, in your lower leg, and crosses to the back of the distal part of the femur, in your upper leg. Its major function is to resist your lower leg being drawn forward and/or twisted in relation to your upper leg.
The major ligaments of the knee.
The other three ligaments in the knee are the PCL, LCL and MCL. The PCL (posterior cruciate ligament) inserts towards the back of the tibial plateau and runs forward to the front part of the femur. It forms a cross with the ACL, hence the name “cruciate” and the “anterior/posterior” part comes from where the ligament attaches to the tibia. The other two ligaments are the LCL, or Lateral Collateral Ligament, on the outside of the knee, and MCL or Medial Collateral Ligament, on the inside of the knee.
ACL tears are common sports injuries, especially in sports that involve a lot of cutting and landing, such as football and basketball. One man I met at physical therapy had torn an ACL on five separate occasions – getting it reconstructed in between, of course, he only had the two legs.) Women are more likely to tear an ACL than men, but at the time of my injury, the only ACL incident I had heard about was that of football legend Michael Owen, who tore his ACL in 2006 World Cup against Sweden. You can actually watch him do it here:
You will see that Owen isn’t touching anyone. Non-contact tears like this are very common; you don’t need to be tackled or kicked to tear your ACL.
Unlike many, mine was not a non-contact tear though. I was doing stand-up randori with a friend. We were the only two people in the class at the time, so our instructor, Robert Miller, was watching closely. We were outside on grass, and wearing athletic shoes. My friend is a fair bit bigger than I am, so was really putting my all into my attempts to throw him. We were in the last few seconds of the round and I managed to line everything up for a good o-soto-gari leg sweep with my right leg. I didn’t get it cleanly and he didn’t go down right away. So I did what you do to force it: I planted my sweeping leg, and attempted to use every atom in my body to force him back over it. He bore down to resist. I pushed hard…but instead of him going back, there was a pop from my right knee and I found myself on the ground, yelling and clutching my knee, with a very worried looking practice partner looking down at me and wondering what the hell had happened.
The intense pain didn’t last long, and within two minutes I was able to get to my feet and limp away. We ended the class then. The back of my calf felt tight at the top, near my knee (I now know that was because when your ACL isn’t there to resist anterior draw of the tibia relative to the femur, your gastroc muscle tries to do that job instead. The tightness was my gastroc freaking out at all the new work it was going to have to do.) But I was ok, I thought, I had just strained my knee or my calf in some way, and a little ice and elevation would have me fixed up in a couple of days. Deep down I knew that the popping sound I’d heard was a bad sign—that people reported hearing such noises when their ACLs went but, honestly, it just didn’t hurt that much any more. I iced, I elevated. I walked funny. But I didn’t think I I’d done anything that wouldn’t heal itself in couple of days. But I was wrong.
The next night I was teaching karate at Washington University. I was demonstrating a technique, shifting forward in stance to block before grabbing and pulling my uke into my punch. And as I shifted forwards there was another crack from my forward knee—this time it felt like the noise was from the femur slipping against the tibia—and I found myself back on the ground, with more yelling, this time with a few more alarmed people looking down at me. Everyone had heard the crack. And my knee had just collapsed on me.
Diagnosis
That collapse was surprising and unexpected enough that I called my GP the next morning. Robert Miller came with me when I went to see her. She asked me what had happened and performed a few tests for knee stability, including one with which I am now very familiar— the Lachman test—the standard clinical test for ACL function. Then she said: “I’m not totally sure, but going from what you’ve said, the way you are holding your leg when you stand, and from manipulating it, I think you might have torn your ACL. Anyway, I’m going to send you to an orthopedist, so we can find out for sure.”
And honestly, I thought—naah. What does she know? She isn’t even sure and she’s probably just being careful. My leg is fine. I’ll go and see the orthopedist and they’ll tell me it’s just a strain. Looking back I find it easy to recognise the element of denial— a commonly reported response in the sports psychology literature—in my own responses. But I went to see the orthopedist. He repeated the Lachman test, immediately diagnosed an ACL tear and scheduled me for an MRI to try to find out what other damage I might have done. He also gave me a brace for my leg in order to minimise any extra damage I might do to the soft tissues until we figured out just how stable my leg was (at this point there was some question about whether I might have damaged the LCL at the same time as the ACL.)
One of the sad things about the injury and brace was that it took me out of the FSRI demo at the 2010 MoBot Japanese Festival. Here I am mic'd up to present while Chris looks sad about having no-one to demonstrate with.
As it turned out, I only had to wear the brace for a week, but that week was miserable. You wouldn’t think it would be such a big deal—the brace only weighs a few pounds and since I was injured anyway, it’s not as if I was walking normally before I started wearing it. So let me break down the ways in which wearing it was bad. First, it locked my leg in extension, making it impossible to bend my knee. I couldn’t ride my bike, and I couldn’t walk normally—a major disruption to my lifestyle, though since classes hadn’t yet started at the University where I teach, I didn’t need to get to work each day, and so didn’t need to ride my bike as much. But you only have to go without bending your knee for a few hours to really, really develop a serious yen to bend your knee. When I took the brace off to shower I would attempt to bend it but the hours of extension had shortened the quadriceps around it to such a degree that bending it was slow torture. The additional weight of the brace puts extra strain on your hip flexors as you walk (you end up walking as if your braced leg was a pendulum—something you have to swing forward as one piece, like a crutch) tightening them on the side with the brace. This in turn puts extra pressure on your lower back, leading to much achey-ness. I also to sleep in the brace, which is not so easy, and meant that I was getting less sleep, and with it less recovery.
I haven’t mentioned the worst part yet, which is that in the week of wearing the brace the muscle melted off my right leg like warm butter. All those years of training and building up quad and hamstring strength were undone in a few days, leaving my right leg about half the size of the left. It was this, I think, that really brought it home to me that I had to take this seriously. I couldn’t look at my shrivelled right leg next to the as-yet still muscular left one in the mirror and not realise that something had gone very, very wrong.
The results of the MRI came back, confirming that I had a complete ACL tear, but no other serious problems, except for the fact that I was as incapable of lying completely still for 40 minutes as a 2 year old on Red Bull. Doctors from then on would frown and shake their heads over the “movement artefact” on my MRI. I was allowed to take the brace off, and proscribed physical therapy for a few weeks while the inflammation from the initial injury went down, and while we considered options for surgery—the topic of a future instalment of this account.
Among athletes, knee injury is a predisposing factor towards the development of knee osteoarthritis (OA). (Molloy & Molloy, 2011). Other joints may be at risk for overuse injuries and OA, but it is the knees in particular that seem to occupy a special place in the realm of chronic injuries. Recognizing the risks of an activity allows for the development of injury-prevention programs specific to it’s demands and conditions. Although many martial artists don’t identify themselves as athletes, the demands of training are inherently athletic and the effects of training on the body are no different from those of athletic training.
Fighting arts and sports pose inherent risks to joint health, particularly acute or chronic injuries associated with the knees. A case by case analysis of the training activities and priorities of the various combat sports and so-called martial arts would be necessary to discuss the risk of a certain format or style, but several mechanisms of injury are common to many:
rapid and asymmetrical loading and unloading of joints during throws, tackles, sweeps, etc.
bounding, cutting and darting movements, often under external load or force
impact trauma from falls, kicks, sweeps
compressive, shearing, tension and torsional trauma from joint manipulations
Welcome to the brand-spanking new Fight Sciences Research Institute blog. For readers familiar with our former TKRI blog and identity, you can expect the same high level of quality original research and articles, training information and ideas, discussions, and accurate resources about the fighting arts and sports.
For those just tuning in, FSRI is a collective of experienced martial artists who value the development and training of practical fighting and self protection skills over historical claims or stylistic identities. We offer training in practical, highly adaptable fighting and self protection skills developed from our extensive collective experiences in karate, Judo, Aikido, wrestling, violent situations and ongoing research. Fighting and violence are complex phenomena that encompass a wide range of related fields, ranging from psychology and anatomy to exercise science and motor learning. We are committed to reason-and evidence-based approaches, and it is a part of our mission to update our beliefs and practices in response to new evidence. Our individual members have professional experience in the fields of education, psychology, personal training, corrective exercise, and Human Movement science, all of which influence our collective approach.
So have a look through our large back catalog of older content and subscribe to the new- we hope that you find ways to improve your training, no matter what your practice is. For more information, please visit ourabout FSRIand mission statementpages. We welcome input and discussion from practitioners of all fighting arts and sports. Guest contributors are welcome and submissions are encouraged!
The modern understanding of “the core” and the need to properly condition it has become well known among athletic and active people, including martial artists (yes, the importance of the hips has been belabored for centuries, but the modern anatomically based concept is not necessarily the same thing). The core refers to the muscles, connective tissues and bones of the torso, yet to many it’s just the rectus abdominis (the “6-pack’). However, the core can be more accurately thought of as the support, stabilization and movement system for the spinal column. This stack of 33 vertebrae (24 moving and 9 fixed) is connected by many ligaments and muscles, which provide oppositional tension akin to the guy wires on a tall tower.
Rhabdomyolysis is the destruction of skeletal muscle leading to the release of the muscular tissue components creatine kinease (CK) and myoglobin into the bloodstream (Huerta-Alardin, Varon & Marik, 2004). These components can pose a potential serious risk to the kidneys as they are cleared from the blood stream. Rhabdo can be caused by numerous factors, and can cause symptoms ranging in severity from mild to life threatening. Classic symtpoms include muscle pain, weakness and darkened urine (ranging from pinkto cola colored). Blood tests reveal elevated serum CK and myoglobin levels. More severe cases may present symptoms such as malaise, fever, tachycardia, nausea and vomiting (Huerta-Alardin et al., 2004). In severe cases acute renal failure can result, requiring medical attention.
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Fight Sciences Research Institute blog 