I had the strangest experience ever at the Dallas seminar this past weekend. I was in the gymnasium lying down as I watched Vladimir perform a punching demonstration. I stood up and went over to help a few guys with the work when I felt something on my leg. At first I thought I just caught a leg hair on my pants or something. I kept teaching but I felt it again, worse this time. I scratched my leg but it felt like it was spreading. I had not idea what it was so I pulled up my pant leg and out came a wasp. The wasp then flew onto the back of my shirt. I remained still while Jack, a friend of mine, calmly walked up scooped up the wasp and released it outside.
After repeated stings I opted to sit out the afternoon session and just watch. Jack and I got to talking about wasps and how to deal with them without getting stung. Having a wasp in my pants was a fluke but there was a guy in the seminar actively swatting at another wasp flying around. Jack and I agreed that that guy was asking to get stung. If he would have left the wasp alone it would have left him alone in turn.
Jack told me that wasps can sense your fear and agitation which gets them ready to defend themselves and more likely to sting you. He went on to say that if you are calm you can pick up a wasp or bee in your hand without being stung because it doesn't feel threatened by you. As Jack was explaining "Wasp-Fu" I was looking around the room at all the different people training and how dealing with a wasp is exactly like dealing with attackers in Systema.
This was the first time in my life that I have been stung by a wasp and about 2 years ago was the first time I was stung by a bee. As a child I have always froze when bees or wasps flew around and the eventually flew off without stinging me. Early on I learned that they don't want to sting you--in fact this costs the bee its life--so if you don't give them a reason to sting you then they won't.
Likewise there are dangerous people you might run into, ready to fight if you give them a reason to. If you move on and don't agitate them they move on peacefully. They attack because they are afraid and attacking is the best defense. By staying calm yourself you can calm down the other person, either preventing them from attacking in the first place or in the middle of their attack keeping them from tensing and being able to work and subdue them easier.
The same people I saw swatting at the wasps in the seminar were the same people I watched reacting to attackers with excess tension making the attacker more aggressive and harder to handle. (Like the wasp the attackers responded differently to the fear of the defender). These students were increasing their own trouble because they were afraid.
The simple lesson from I learned again from the wasp incident is that if you stay calm and keep your cool you can negotiate around dealing creatures, human or not.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
What Are You Trying To Achieve?
NOTE: My computer hard drive crashed and I lost a good bit of work, including my blogs. I have not posted a blog until I have copied the archives of the old material. I am working on getting them back up--and backing up in general more often.
All too many times I have been on the floor with a high-level Systema instructor (Mikhail, Vladimir, Martin Wheeler), watched them demonstrate beautiful movement and then stood there scratching my head as I observed students not only using far too much tension, but deliberately doing so. Were they seeing the same thing I was? Where they even listening to the explanation? Either way, they just weren’t getting it, which brings me to my initial question, “what are you trying to achieve?”
There are a few reasons people are so tense and aggressive. Here are a few. One is that most people are overly tense and it just comes out in training. They don’t realize how tense they are. Two is that they are trying to fight in what their minds is “realistically.” Three is they don’t believe that you can get more results with less effort. They make up with strength what they lack in skill. Four is they like to bully and overpower people with their strength.
Mikhail was asked once what is the first thing he would teach a new person and his answer was to teach him how to relax. Most people come in to class tense, inflexible and not very mobile. There is also an element of fear new students have which adds to their tension. My long-time students always comment on how much easier it is to work against people with so much tension. This typical new-student tension is forgivable. With practice they work it out.
I had a student named Ralph who was very tense when he attacked and was having a hard time relaxing when he defended. I finally asked him what was going on and replied that he was trying to give a realistic attack. While that made sense in his mind I told him that he couldn’t simultaneously train to be tense and relaxed (it is possible but he couldn’t do it and it was hindering his progress). In the end he wasn’t really giving realistic attacks because no one throws a punch as tense as he was trying to do. Again, this type of tension is forgivable and we straightened him out.
A common situation I see in students is the “Aha Moment.” This occurs when a student begins to move smoothly and escapes an attack. He then sees an opening, a chance to knock down his attacker. At this “Aha Moment” he suddenly tenses. The realization and the thought of doing a technique makes him over-eager and use far too much muscle. This is a common mistake and can be corrected with practice.
I had a student who was fairly skilled at Systema, enough to be better than beginners. He would toss them around but never let them work on him or improve. He always wanted to prove how good he was and would fight them all the way. I experienced this type of student myself in Toronto about 5 years back.
I paired up with a rather large Russian student who spoke very little English. I was doing some disarms that under normal circumstances would have worked, however, he just kept using all of his strength to hold on to the knife. As we were alternating being the attacker I just refused to let him do anything to me. I just kept moving, kept Form and frustrated his every effort to put me down. He finally got the point and changed his tune when he realized I knew what I was doing. We did some nice work after that.
This type of tension is not excusable as it comes from ego and pride. I am blessed with very nice students, really, they are nice people. It is hard to get them to hit people who need it as they don’t want to hurt anyone. They get frustrated when they work with someone with this type of tension. Sometimes even striking to relax the person just makes them more aggressive and tense. It is an unfortunate scenario as this type of person usually winds up getting hurt working with more advanced students due to his own tension.
I tell my students that they can learn to be tense, fight and struggle in most other martial arts schools. “You can learn that anywhere.” Why would you even try to learn Systema and deliberately try to be tense and muscle everything.
If you are trying to improve at Systema you should be training to be more relaxed, more fluid and use tension judiciously. I tell my students (and myself) if you find yourself getting tense unconsciously then back off because you are not learning anything. When you are training just ask yourself, “is this getting me closer to moving like Mikhail or Vladimir?” If so, then great, you are on the right track. If not, why are you doing it that way.
So, what are you trying to achieve in your training?
All too many times I have been on the floor with a high-level Systema instructor (Mikhail, Vladimir, Martin Wheeler), watched them demonstrate beautiful movement and then stood there scratching my head as I observed students not only using far too much tension, but deliberately doing so. Were they seeing the same thing I was? Where they even listening to the explanation? Either way, they just weren’t getting it, which brings me to my initial question, “what are you trying to achieve?”
There are a few reasons people are so tense and aggressive. Here are a few. One is that most people are overly tense and it just comes out in training. They don’t realize how tense they are. Two is that they are trying to fight in what their minds is “realistically.” Three is they don’t believe that you can get more results with less effort. They make up with strength what they lack in skill. Four is they like to bully and overpower people with their strength.
Mikhail was asked once what is the first thing he would teach a new person and his answer was to teach him how to relax. Most people come in to class tense, inflexible and not very mobile. There is also an element of fear new students have which adds to their tension. My long-time students always comment on how much easier it is to work against people with so much tension. This typical new-student tension is forgivable. With practice they work it out.
I had a student named Ralph who was very tense when he attacked and was having a hard time relaxing when he defended. I finally asked him what was going on and replied that he was trying to give a realistic attack. While that made sense in his mind I told him that he couldn’t simultaneously train to be tense and relaxed (it is possible but he couldn’t do it and it was hindering his progress). In the end he wasn’t really giving realistic attacks because no one throws a punch as tense as he was trying to do. Again, this type of tension is forgivable and we straightened him out.
A common situation I see in students is the “Aha Moment.” This occurs when a student begins to move smoothly and escapes an attack. He then sees an opening, a chance to knock down his attacker. At this “Aha Moment” he suddenly tenses. The realization and the thought of doing a technique makes him over-eager and use far too much muscle. This is a common mistake and can be corrected with practice.
I had a student who was fairly skilled at Systema, enough to be better than beginners. He would toss them around but never let them work on him or improve. He always wanted to prove how good he was and would fight them all the way. I experienced this type of student myself in Toronto about 5 years back.
I paired up with a rather large Russian student who spoke very little English. I was doing some disarms that under normal circumstances would have worked, however, he just kept using all of his strength to hold on to the knife. As we were alternating being the attacker I just refused to let him do anything to me. I just kept moving, kept Form and frustrated his every effort to put me down. He finally got the point and changed his tune when he realized I knew what I was doing. We did some nice work after that.
This type of tension is not excusable as it comes from ego and pride. I am blessed with very nice students, really, they are nice people. It is hard to get them to hit people who need it as they don’t want to hurt anyone. They get frustrated when they work with someone with this type of tension. Sometimes even striking to relax the person just makes them more aggressive and tense. It is an unfortunate scenario as this type of person usually winds up getting hurt working with more advanced students due to his own tension.
I tell my students that they can learn to be tense, fight and struggle in most other martial arts schools. “You can learn that anywhere.” Why would you even try to learn Systema and deliberately try to be tense and muscle everything.
If you are trying to improve at Systema you should be training to be more relaxed, more fluid and use tension judiciously. I tell my students (and myself) if you find yourself getting tense unconsciously then back off because you are not learning anything. When you are training just ask yourself, “is this getting me closer to moving like Mikhail or Vladimir?” If so, then great, you are on the right track. If not, why are you doing it that way.
So, what are you trying to achieve in your training?
Brad's Book Club: March Selection
MARCH’S BOOK SELECTION
“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This simple advice, by his own admission sums up Michael Pollan’s new book In Defense of Food. So why read it? Because although this is common-sense advice, it is important to understand the history of why such a self-evident statement need be made at all. In Defense of Food relates that history.
I first ran across Pollan’s previous book The Omnivore’s Dilemma at the Tattered Cover bookstore. I flipped through it, was mildly interested, got the point about where food literally comes from and how it gets to your table and then forgot about the author. Some time later Pollan wrote an excellent article for the New York Times magazine about the rise of “Nutritionism.” I enjoyed this article so much I emailed it to anyone I thought might learn from it. Pollan then expanded upon that article into his latest book In Defense of Food.
In Defense of Food is broken down into three sections: The Rise of Nutritionism, The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization, and Getting Over Nutritionism. First, a quick definition of “nutritionism.” Nutritionism is the reductionist ideology that food is just the sum of its nutrients, i.e. a banana isn’t a banana but just some potassium and other nutrients thrown together.
The Rise of Nutritionism is a history of how scientists began to break down food into its nutrient parts to find the active ingredients, and then synthesize them. Pollan uses margarine as a prime example of “imitation food” that was supposed to be better than the food, in this case butter, it replaced. People originally wanted margarine to be colored pink so it would not be mistaken for butter. They failed. As years went by lobbyists got the government to redefine food as the sum of its nutrients. This meant that as long as margarine could boast the same nutrient-content as butter it would not have to advertise itself as “imitation.” The same goes with any other imitation food or food-like ingestible. The margarine industry recently took out the trans fats in margarine that have been seen as contributing to heart disease so that it can continue to be marketed as a healthy butter substitute. I never did like margarine.
As far as imitation food goes, why not just eat the butter? For that matter why do people eat aspartame and sugar substitutes that are far worse than eating empty sugar calories or just eating raw sugar? Or how about Olestra? Would you suffer the possibility of “anal-leakage” just to eat a bag of chips? I have always been leery of “fake-food” and as more research is done into them the conclusions are the same. Eat the real thing, but in moderation, with other healthy food.
It was this history from food to food-like items and from whole food to the sum of its parts that hooked me in. I remember growing up being bombarded with nutritionist health-claims along with the idea that this one super-nutrient would make me healthy for the rest of my life. (It can never be one nutrient) Omega-3 fatty acids are the latest Nutritionism gambit. Everything you pick up says Omega-3’s on it, it used to be fiber. I can always tell what the Nutritionism industry is pushing next by what my sister calls me and says she is feeding my parents. Her kick seems to be “probiotics” right now. What’s next? Whatever they can get a health claim for. By the way stay away from any food-like item that has to make a health claim.
The bottom line in the Nutritionism ideology is that if you could create a fake-food with all the same nutrients (at least the ones we currently recognize) as real food, say an apple, than you have the same nutritional value as the actual apple. Taken one step further if you could put more nutrients in your fake apple then you would have a fake apple that is healthier than a real apple?! Or you could just take a whole bunch of pills with each nutrient; you could pop fish oil pills instead of eating an actual fish.
The middle section of In Defense of Food chronicles the Western Diet--lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added sugar and fat, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—and the diseases it causes such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Pollan relates a story about aboriginal Australians who ate the Western Diet and were developing the above diseases. As part of an experiment they went back to their traditional lifestyle, back “into the bush.” Symptoms of these diseases vanished within weeks of abandoning their Western Diet. I saw the exact same story years ago about native Hawaiians. Same results as the Aborigines, including huge weight loss.
Pollan’s answer to nutritionism and the Western Diet is as simple as that first sentence. Eat a traditional diet. Pollan goes on to show the variety in traditional diets from around the world and how they all have withstood the test of time by keeping their communities nourished and healthy.
In the final section of In Defense of Food Pollan gives a simple list of suggestions on how to eat. Here they are.
• Avoid Food Products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, b) Unpronounceable, c) more than 5 in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup.
• Avoid food products that make health claims
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
• Get out of the supermarket whenever you can
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
• You are what you eat eats too
• If you have space buy a freezer
• Eat like an omnivore
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
• Eat wild foods when you can.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements
• Eat more like the French, the Italians, or the Japanese or the Indians, or the Greeks.
• Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism.
• Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner
How not to eat too much..
• Pay More, Eat Less. Go for quality of food, especially meat, i.e. grass-fed.
• Eat Meals
• Do all your eating at a table
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place as your car does
• Try not to eat alone
• Consult your gut
• Eat Slowly
• Cook, and if you can, plant a garden
Each of these bullet-points is expanded upon and explained in the book.
In Defense of Food is currently top ten on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. One goal of Brad’s Book Club is to point you toward books that are worth reading that you may never have heard of, another goal is to point you toward books that are worth reading period. In Defense of Food is such a book that, along with Volumetrics by Barbara Rolls, I consider an essential textbook on how approach eating.
In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan
“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This simple advice, by his own admission sums up Michael Pollan’s new book In Defense of Food. So why read it? Because although this is common-sense advice, it is important to understand the history of why such a self-evident statement need be made at all. In Defense of Food relates that history.
I first ran across Pollan’s previous book The Omnivore’s Dilemma at the Tattered Cover bookstore. I flipped through it, was mildly interested, got the point about where food literally comes from and how it gets to your table and then forgot about the author. Some time later Pollan wrote an excellent article for the New York Times magazine about the rise of “Nutritionism.” I enjoyed this article so much I emailed it to anyone I thought might learn from it. Pollan then expanded upon that article into his latest book In Defense of Food.
In Defense of Food is broken down into three sections: The Rise of Nutritionism, The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization, and Getting Over Nutritionism. First, a quick definition of “nutritionism.” Nutritionism is the reductionist ideology that food is just the sum of its nutrients, i.e. a banana isn’t a banana but just some potassium and other nutrients thrown together.
The Rise of Nutritionism is a history of how scientists began to break down food into its nutrient parts to find the active ingredients, and then synthesize them. Pollan uses margarine as a prime example of “imitation food” that was supposed to be better than the food, in this case butter, it replaced. People originally wanted margarine to be colored pink so it would not be mistaken for butter. They failed. As years went by lobbyists got the government to redefine food as the sum of its nutrients. This meant that as long as margarine could boast the same nutrient-content as butter it would not have to advertise itself as “imitation.” The same goes with any other imitation food or food-like ingestible. The margarine industry recently took out the trans fats in margarine that have been seen as contributing to heart disease so that it can continue to be marketed as a healthy butter substitute. I never did like margarine.
As far as imitation food goes, why not just eat the butter? For that matter why do people eat aspartame and sugar substitutes that are far worse than eating empty sugar calories or just eating raw sugar? Or how about Olestra? Would you suffer the possibility of “anal-leakage” just to eat a bag of chips? I have always been leery of “fake-food” and as more research is done into them the conclusions are the same. Eat the real thing, but in moderation, with other healthy food.
It was this history from food to food-like items and from whole food to the sum of its parts that hooked me in. I remember growing up being bombarded with nutritionist health-claims along with the idea that this one super-nutrient would make me healthy for the rest of my life. (It can never be one nutrient) Omega-3 fatty acids are the latest Nutritionism gambit. Everything you pick up says Omega-3’s on it, it used to be fiber. I can always tell what the Nutritionism industry is pushing next by what my sister calls me and says she is feeding my parents. Her kick seems to be “probiotics” right now. What’s next? Whatever they can get a health claim for. By the way stay away from any food-like item that has to make a health claim.
The bottom line in the Nutritionism ideology is that if you could create a fake-food with all the same nutrients (at least the ones we currently recognize) as real food, say an apple, than you have the same nutritional value as the actual apple. Taken one step further if you could put more nutrients in your fake apple then you would have a fake apple that is healthier than a real apple?! Or you could just take a whole bunch of pills with each nutrient; you could pop fish oil pills instead of eating an actual fish.
The middle section of In Defense of Food chronicles the Western Diet--lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added sugar and fat, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—and the diseases it causes such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Pollan relates a story about aboriginal Australians who ate the Western Diet and were developing the above diseases. As part of an experiment they went back to their traditional lifestyle, back “into the bush.” Symptoms of these diseases vanished within weeks of abandoning their Western Diet. I saw the exact same story years ago about native Hawaiians. Same results as the Aborigines, including huge weight loss.
Pollan’s answer to nutritionism and the Western Diet is as simple as that first sentence. Eat a traditional diet. Pollan goes on to show the variety in traditional diets from around the world and how they all have withstood the test of time by keeping their communities nourished and healthy.
In the final section of In Defense of Food Pollan gives a simple list of suggestions on how to eat. Here they are.
• Avoid Food Products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, b) Unpronounceable, c) more than 5 in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup.
• Avoid food products that make health claims
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
• Get out of the supermarket whenever you can
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
• You are what you eat eats too
• If you have space buy a freezer
• Eat like an omnivore
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
• Eat wild foods when you can.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements
• Eat more like the French, the Italians, or the Japanese or the Indians, or the Greeks.
• Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism.
• Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner
How not to eat too much..
• Pay More, Eat Less. Go for quality of food, especially meat, i.e. grass-fed.
• Eat Meals
• Do all your eating at a table
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place as your car does
• Try not to eat alone
• Consult your gut
• Eat Slowly
• Cook, and if you can, plant a garden
Each of these bullet-points is expanded upon and explained in the book.
In Defense of Food is currently top ten on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. One goal of Brad’s Book Club is to point you toward books that are worth reading that you may never have heard of, another goal is to point you toward books that are worth reading period. In Defense of Food is such a book that, along with Volumetrics by Barbara Rolls, I consider an essential textbook on how approach eating.
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