The MartialBody Blog

Articles on the MartialBody Method, Martial Arts & body method development.

Archive by year: 2016Return

December 2016

27Dec

The utility of the spiral

In some martial arts the ‘spiral’ holds a place of special importance for the practitioners. Along with the circle, it is one of the most commonly targeted shapes in body development methods, but what is it about the spiral that makes it so useful?If you watch the motions of some grapplers you will notice the clear circularity and ‘twist’ in their throwing technique, the body coils as it exerts the forces required. But there is more to the meaning of the 'Spiral...

08Dec

The Skill of being 'heavy'

Engage with any high level martial artist from almost any style and one quality you often encounter is the ability to seem heavier than they should. Certainly, if you have ever interacted with high level grapplers you will have felt this attribute, and boxers will often talk about a fighter ‘heavy hands’. More often than not this quality is said to be a 'natural talent', however quality of ‘weight’ is a skill that can be trained and developed.In this article...

November 2016

30Nov

Embedding Movement Attributes

We can’t really look at movement skills without talking about how movement complexity and capacity is handled by the brain and nervous system. It is our brains that give rise to our ability to move in complex ways and also our brains that allow us to retain good movement habits once they are learned. Indeed, some people theorize that movement diversity is the reason for humans developing such large and complex brains.In the Animal kingdom we are not the best sprinters, not the best climber...

25Nov

Martial Movement

Martial arts are, at their core, simply ways to move. The movements can be those of war, violence, tradition, beauty, efficiency, ceremony, cruelty or profundity but they movements none the less. And these movements always boil down to a core set of mechanics.The development of the mechanics found in the combat arts is driven by the search for efficiency in creating and dealing with forces. These could be forces acting upon us, or forces that we produce to act on others. Forces as we mean them h...

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