Bigger isn't Better; Better is Better!

We see evidence of this no more obvious than in combat sports, such as mixed martial arts competitions. Smaller, weaker but more athletic fighters specifically conditioned for their sport win the day most frequently. To understand what leads people to believe that size and (limit) strength will aid them to victory, let’s explore the underlying myths.

The Myth of Isolation

Both bodybuilding and powerlifting believe that loading specific muscles will make those respective muscles stronger and larger. The belief is accurate in the sense that the local areas do increase in size and strength. It’s inaccurate in believing that it doesn’t impact the entire body. When it comes to the human body, if you impact one place, you impact the whole.

Bodybuilding and powerlifting have given the public the impression that the body is like a house: a strong foundation, sturdy walls and a roof. When a tree falls on your house, that corner may crumble but the rest remains unaffected. The body isn’t like this as we all know intuitively.

The body is a web of intricately woven connective tissue: a sea of continuous tension pulling in with compressive struts (bones) pushing out equally a harmonious balance which traditional martial arts have referred to as Yin-Yang, and what modern science names Biotensegrity (see founder and CST enthusiast Dr. Steven Levin).

A more accurate picture for the human body is a tree falling on a trail of telephone wires. If the wire snaps in half where it’s hit, on both sides of the snap, the telephone poles rip free creating hanging slack on both sides. If the wire doesn’t snap at the point of impact, everything else along the chain because super taught so that if anything would hit the high tension along the chain, they would snap immediately. How like our bodies this is when we consider an injury in one part of our body is compensating throughout our entire body!

Nothing happens in isolation as everything is connected! So, what happens to our body when we practice a strength system based upon the myth of isolation?

The Dangers of Bodybuilding and Powerlifting

Bodybuilding and powerlifting injure your joints and connective tissue though for opposite causes: the former due to excessive repetitions and the latter due to excessive tension. The local wear and tear of high volume and intensity causes the connective tissue over joints become strained, shortened and compressed. Though the muscle tissue is larger and stronger in bodybuilders and powerlifters, weak joints are a catastrophic injury waiting to happen – exactly like the tree fallen over the telephone wire. Eventually anything adding load anywhere along the line will cause a rip!

Bodybuilding and powerlifting are to martial art specific fitness what competing in demolition derbies is to learning how to drive; you do get to steer the car, but ultimately the goal is to get wrecked.

How did the Isolation Myth Come About?

Bodybuilding and powerlifting are based upon a belief system created centuries ago when we first began to create the discipline of anatomy. Anatomy came from our tools of the time – the knife and the scalpel. So when we would butcher an animal after hunting, or dissect a cadaver in early medicine, we would ‘cut out the parts.’ However, as we remove the parts, we cut the fascia, our connective tissue: the very thing that holds us together, makes us anti-gravitational and animates us. By the time the dissection is completed, we are left with a pile of parts.

Conventional strength training believes that you should increase the size and strength of each of these parts, and somehow magically the whole will become better. Over the years hundred thousand dollar bodybuilding machines evolved which shackle us in place forcing the load to be localized as much as possible. These machines substituted efficiency for us, and began the neural adaptation of dumb-ing down our coordination.

Likewise, in order to lift the heaviest possible weight, powerlifting created three ultra-short range, gross motor lifts. And like bodybuilding, these so-called power-lifts caused us to move less and less, until through injury and adaptation one’s mobility becomes non-existent. It was because of the belief that by isolating these parts, making the bigger and stronger, we would become more fit and perform better.

But as we all know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Bodybuilding and powerlifting, moving in isolated planes, fail to address how we move in the real world: three dimensionally. They ignore the rotary, angular/diagonal, as well as the most important – synergistic nature of human performance.

We are actually what modern scientists describe as a “double bag” system as described by Thomas Myers in his seminal work Anatomy Trains. The inner bag contains hard tissue: bones and cartilage. Where it is cling-wrap around the bones, it is called periosteum; and where it wraps the ends of bones together, it’s called joint capsule. The outer bag contains an electric jelly we call muscle. Where it wraps the muscle we call it fascia and where it tacks down to the inner bag, we call it muscle attachment or insertion point.

Forcing the isolation belief onto the reality of our double bag system is like firing a cannon from a canoe. The detonation may happen but with adverse catastrophic results.

So how can we train to improve the health and fitness of the entire double bag system?

The Shocking Truth to the Isolation Myth

Some schools of traditional martial art use the notion of “tendon strength” referring to the ability to hit hard but without being muscle-bound. One can strengthen the connective tissue through short, ballistic shock. Traditional examples of this are Chinese iron body and Russian shock absorption training. Modern science details contemporary athletic exercises called plyometrics: originally named “shock training.”

Any type of training which isn’t conducted incrementally and with a qualified coach is dangerous, especially shock training. Shock training is akin to jerking a weight which you cannot grind out: such as an Olympic clean and jerk versus the powerlifting deadlift or squat; a clapping pushup versus a standard one; or a kipping pull-up versus a ‘strict’ pull-up.

The shock absorbs throughout the entire web of connective tissue, increasing bone density, lubricating the joint capsule with nutrition and making the fascia more elastic; like how a smaller rubber band can be shot farther than a larger, but cracked and brittle one.

The intramuscular coordination which develops from shock training cannot be understated. Real-world strength, as we see in any combative outlet such as MMA, is based not upon size and limit strength, but upon timing, rhythm and accuracy which shock training supplies dutifully.

Strength and Flexibility: Two Doorways to Danger

Do you pick doorway #1 or #2? Do you want to be strong or do you want to be flexibility? You cannot be very strong and very flexible at the same time because they are polar opposites. Strength, or muscular tension, is the ability to contract and shorten tissue – flexibility, contrarily, is the ability to release and lengthen tissue.

More over, bodybuilding and powerlifting by definition create the “muscle-bound” effect of being unable to relax and lengthen. To generate any power, one must move from relaxation to tension. If one begins with tension, no power results. Additionally, when the tissue is suddenly forcibly moved, such as in suddenly changing directions, the very fragile connective tissue (due to the shortened, high tension environment) snaps.

Stretching is the deforming elongation of the tissues, much like overstretching a rubber band, tacking it down, and letting the elasticity leak until it loses its ability to snap back to shape. This is highly dangerous for the body, and is why dancers, contortionists and those who static stretch suffer sudden tendon and ligament tears. There’s just no resiliency remaining in the tissue.

Bodybuilders and powerlifters have very little usable range of motion. Contortionists and many dancers have little usable strength. You can, however, avoid both of these deviant extremes, through learning “Selective Tension” – appropriate, proportional intramuscular timing of the contraction and relaxation firing sequence of a “tension chain” – a series of muscular actions along the length of the body.

Mobility drills, either local (such as Intu-Flow®) or global (such as Prasara Body-Flow) take one through the degrees of freedom that each joint may naturally move. Mobility also aids in the greater elasticity of the tissues, while lubricating the joints and washing them with nutrition to heal damage and foster growth - which they cannot receive through conventional weight training.

Mobility further compensates for each specific adaptation in a harmonious yin-yang balancing act. For instance, too much forward bending eventually leads to over-specialization problems as the body adapts. Therefore backward bending balances the progress symmetrically. That gross example is how Selective Tension teaches us to keep in tune with how we are specifically adapting to our conditioning.

Learning the skill of Selective Tension allows one to be appropriately strong and flexible in all skills. This is the truth of how one’s conditioning can ‘carry-over’ into one’s performance. Let’s dispel the myth of carry-over, first.

The Myth of Carry-Over

What is the gap between conventional weight training and performance? Why is it that bodybuilding and powerlifting have little to no positive carry-over to performance?

Could anyone possible improve the performance of a golf swing by making the individual muscles stronger and larger? What if you performed lateral deltoid raises, crunches and bench press. Shouldn’t that make you stronger and bigger and therefore better at your golf swing?

No, the swing is synergistically greater than the sum of its individual actions: a firing sequence which slings tension from one to the next in a sequential summation of movement. Isolating the parts and making them “bigger and stronger” will not improve your performance any more than adding a huge suspension lift kit, monster truck tires and a tractor pull sized engine will help you drive across town through traffic. Sure, you could drive over everyone else… in fantasy-land; because in the reality of performance, there are always specific parameters, skills and rules. Even the most chaotic environment in existence, the battlefield, has rules of engagement.

Just like the golf swing, your striking, kicking, throws, locks, hold-downs, each comprise a specific firing sequence which ‘slings’ (stores and releases) elastic energy in a domino effect across your body, and throughout your entire body.

Shock training can elicit an adaptation in the body which strengthens the connective tissue system-wide. It can develop the entire fascial web so that like the elastic net catching a falling trapeze artist throws him higher in the air depending upon how it is elastically strengthened – in other words, “Selective Tension."

Now, take a look at true functional power, in the actions of the Gama Cast, demonstrated by CST Head Coach, Alberto Gallazzi in Milan, Italy:

Flow Thyself™,