- Scott Sonnon
- 12 minutes ago
- 5 min read
What is honey for the fitness enthusiast can be poison for the martial artist. That’s because a well-conditioned, well-built martial artist can be well-prepared for the wrong fight. Not only might you be training to develop the wrong energy, but you also might be developing your muscles in a way that limits the range of motion you need to perform your techniques.
In short, you might be making yourself fit for the wrong fight. That can render your moves slow, poorly timed and insufficiently powered for competition or self-defense — even though people who are involved in sports might consider you fit.
This article will explain what you need to know to build “tactical fitness” by posing three questions, highlighting some relevant research, and demonstrating two self-defense sequences and exercises that were designed to augment them.
This approach comes from a program I developed to train special-operations personnel and law-enforcement officers, as well as ordinary martial artists who are interested in enhancing their self-defense readiness.
Crucial Questions
Have you trained the right energy system for the fight you’re expecting?
Your metabolic preparation determines whether your training is getting you ready for physical exertion that mimics the tempo of a fight. A fight is not a marathon; it’s more like a sprint that may or may not be followed by some jogging and then another sprint — or three.
Many videos of street assaults show incidents in which untrained attackers knock out trained martial artists even though the attackers are using poor technique. This is possible because although they’re exerting themselves, the attackers retain enough energy to deliver that “lucky shot” at just the right time. That luck actually comes from having developed good timing and energy conservation through repetitive encounters with victims
— for them, it’s like training.
– Running out of energy in a fight is one of the dangers you face when you elect not to engage in drills that force impact, leaving your opponent virtually unscathed. Often the reason is the martial artist failed to develop their structural platform through proper exercise.
– Being unable to generate power and transfer it to the target while moving — or from a position you momentarily find yourself in between maneuvers — is one of the dangers of focusing only on kata practice. Forms alone won’t foster the development of the awareness and mobility you need for self-defense in a dynamic environment.
Have you trained to recover from stress and reacquire your skills during a fight?
Your biochemical preparation determines whether you can rapidly regain your wherewithal in order to physically respond in a violent encounter. This can be challenging because of the extreme levels of stress that violence or the threat of violence can bring.
How fast you chemically recover determines whether you experience courage or cowardice. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, excessive stress makes cowards of us all. This is usually what happens when a martial artist who’s experienced only at sparring in the dojo or competing in tournaments gets caught in an ambush and is unable to recover — even when it’s only a training simulation.
– Being unable to regroup and counterattack is one of the dangers of practicing only in preplanned conditions. It’s far more beneficial to subject yourself to the unknown — to surprise situations that require you to endure sudden stress, recover quickly and regain your mental composure so you can continue the fight.
Proper Drilling
You can reduce the chance that you’ll be affected by the aforementioned dangers by running through properly designed self-defense drills on a regular basis, but that will take you only so far. You also should address the issue by engaging in the right kinds of physical conditioning.
Exercise science teaches a principle called SAID, which stands for “specific adaptation to imposed demands.” It holds that how well you perform is directly proportional to how well you’ve prepared. (In reality, it’s more accurate to say the worst you’ve prepared is the best you can hope to perform, but that’s a subject for another article.)
When creating an exercise routine, it pays to keep in mind the advice of experts. In Specificity of Training: Metabolic and Circulatory Responses, which E. Fox, D. McKenzie and K. Cohen wrote for Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the authors claim that performance is specific to the movements you do in training and the tempo and pace with which you do them.
Ellen Kreighbaum and Katharine M. Barthels wrote in Biomechanics: A Qualitative Approach for Studying Human Movement that training specifically for the pattern, joint position, speed and type of contraction produces improvement only for those movements. Specific training yields the greatest improvements.
What this means is the transfer of an exercise to a skill — in this case, a martial arts technique — will happen only if the exercise and the skill are very similar. Semyon M. Slobounov noted in Injuries in Athletics: Causes and Consequences that as the degree of similarity between exercise and the skill decreases, the benefits decrease and eventually even conflict.
Put another way, your exercise choices can hurt your performance of a martial arts technique.
It’s important that your joint position, speed and type of contraction be trained — without mimicking the martial arts technique too closely. Mel C. Siff, Ph.D., affirms this in Supertraining when he writes that if you simulate a skill under resistance, you’ll slow the speed and decrease the power of the skill when you’re calling on it for real.
A potentially more damaging fitness practice is the “extreme workout.” Exercise physiologists define this as a routine that leads to a heart rate greater than the maximum you should push your heart to in training. (It’s usually calculated by subtracting your age from 220.) When your heart exceeds its max, two negatives happen:
You don’t adapt to the exercise because your body is no longer reacting physiologically; it’s reacting chemically.
You lose access to the skills you’ve trained so hard to develop.
In case you’re wondering why that’s something to be avoided at all costs — and this will benefit all who engage in cross-training for enhanced martial arts performance — consider the following:
At 65 percent of your heart-rate max, you begin to lose fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination.
At 85 percent, you begin to lose complex-motor skills, which can sabotage the remainder of your martial arts techniques.
At 100 percent and higher, you lose gross-motor skills, such as the ability to walk and stand.
A host of phenomena are associated with insufficiently prepared people who find themselves in an ambush: tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, short-term memory loss, fumbling, stuttering, shaking, freezing, feinting, spontaneous bowel and bladder elimination, and so on.
(These data come from research conducted on law-enforcement personnel who were in life-or-death situations, as described in Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge: The Psychology & Science of Training by Bruce K. Siddle.)
The Solution
No matter which martial art you practice, by now you likely agree that you can benefit from enhanced tactical fitness. The next step is creating a program that meshes with your art. Start by analyzing the fighting techniques you use most in the dojo, then find or create drills and exercises that enhance those movements.
Make sure your solutions simulate the necessary range of motion and take place in positions that mimic the self-defense scenarios for which you’re training.
To get on the right path, refer to the two gun-defense sequences shown here and the exercises designed to enhance the fitness needed to perform the key movements more efficiently.
By following this lead, you’ll be able to do the same for your go-to self-defense techniques.
