“Fang song!”
“Relax!” – That’s all I used to hear my kung fu teacher bellow when I was training in China. Well, apart from “more power!” which was usually followed by a dig in the ribs for emphasis.
He was 100% correct though. Relaxation in martial arts is the key to speed, awareness, and generating power. It’s what gives ‘flow’ to your moves and perhaps more importantly, control.
So Why Relax?
Isn’t relaxing all the time something that hippies do? Surely it seems counter-intuitive – when some big guy wants to beat my brains out, surely the last thing I want to do is start chilling out, right? Well, yes, but relaxing here doesn’t mean ‘chilling out’. I can’t put it any better than the late, great, Bruce Lee, when he said;
“A good martial artist does not become tense but ready…”
Here relaxation encompasses being alert, being ready and waiting without tension. You’re relaxed because you’re not stiff; but you are also relaxed because your mind is clear and in the moment. So in the martial arts, relaxation has both a physical and mental component.
Relaxing has three key advantages that will help you in an ugly situation:
- You’re better able to make good decisions (i.e. should you walk away, rather than let yourself get provoked?)
- You’re faster, much faster, than if you’re tense.
- You use less energy – which if your opponent is tense, he’ll get tired quicker than you.
But How Can I Relax When Someone Wants to Punch Me in the Face?
Again, on the surface, this would seem like a really hard thing to do – the natural instinct is to tense up when you’ve got someone provoking you and a fight about to break out.
As we’ve seen, relaxation is both mental and physical. I would argue that physical relaxation follows mental relaxation, and not the other way around. Your mind has to tell your muscles to unwind. So when learning to relax we’ll start with the mind.
- Train for Realism. OK, so this tip you have to do well in advance of a confrontational situation. When you train, you’ve got to train for realism. Otherwise you’ll just freeze when you see a six-foot four behemoth bearing down at you screaming obscenities in your face. The more you’ve trained for these types of situation, the easier you’ll find it stay relaxed in real life.
- Focus on Your Breathing. And remember to breathe into your stomach, nice and easy. Normally in a ‘fight-or-flight’ situation, us humans have a natural physiological response that gives us a massive shot of adrenalin, and makes us breather faster to get more oxygen into the blood, ready for physical exertion. Unfortunately, because most of us don’t breathe properly (i.e. just short, shallow breaths), that’s what we do when we should be taking nice big lungfuls of air. Just by following this step alone, you’ll notice a huge improvement in your awareness and feeling of being in control.
- Detach, and Focus on ‘Now’. When you’re in a fight situation, the last thing you want to do is start to go through a checklist of points to get yourself ready. So just retreat into the middle of your head and watch the scene in front of you as if it were on the TV screen. Trust your training.
So… in summary; train for realism, and train to relax. Remember to breathe, and detach yourself with focus. You’ve probably spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours practicing in the training hall, so trust that your body and muscle memory knows how to take care of this idiot in front of you. You definitely don’t need a physiological response wrecking it all.
