Ryan Murdock
08-26-2004, 03:31 PM
Coach Sonnon asked me to post the following PM discussion. Hope it's useful to some of you :)
Discussion:
Hello,
I am a new member to the forum and noticed through your posts that you are part of the Bujinkan as well. I practice Taijutsu in Boston with Mark Davis. I was fortunate to meet Steve Byrne once 2 years ago at the Tai Kai in Atlanta.
I am always interested in improving my Taijutsu and have noticed corrolaries between Taijutsu and Coach Sonnon's methods. So far I have only purchased a few Clubbells®® and am asking for some advice. What aspects of Circular Strength Training™™ have you found to be the most productive towards your taijutsu? I realize that I am asking a personal question to a stranger, so please excuse my forwardness. I have a couple of 25 lbers (they are so very heavy!). The goals of Warrior Wellness™™ and Maximology™™ seem about the same as with junan taiso and tai sabaki. I do not have a good understanding of the other materials Coach Sonnon presents.
I have been practicing taijutsu for about 10 years and hold a shodan rank. I am in the process of trying to learn the Koto Ryu. I regularly practice the Kihon Happo, weight lift, run, and do junan taiso. I assume that one can practice holding the Clubbells®® while doing kamae and kihon happo/gogyo exercises, but wanted to check with a more experienced member of both systems for for any advice or warnings.
I appreciate any advice and consideration you give me,
Sincerely,
Mike B
_________________
Michael Bombardieri
Hi Mike,
I only have time for a brief reply to let you know I read your mail. I promise to reply to your questions this weekend, weekdays right now are really busy for me. Rest assured, I could write you a book on this topic! I have 17 years of constant, daily training in Bujinkan, and have been using the ROSS materials for 3 or 4 years now. At the time we found them we had been really picking apart the roots of all our Bujinkan work, trying to distill it all down, ruthlessly testing and examining everything we'd ever learned. ROSS was completely in line with where we were going. Approached as a performance enhancement system, it has taken my training to unbelievable heights and has enabled me to heal old injuries,... I can't say enough good things about it. I'll put together an email this weekend, all the stuff I wish I'd known at the outset, because we've certainly made plenty of mistakes too (wrong directions, misunderstandings due to leaping in without a full picture,...).
In the meantime, check out the forum for posts that I've made (I'm pretty sure you can search by login name). The questions I asked would probably be of significance to your training, given our similar backgrounds. You might particularly enjoy my summary of our work with the Plural Assailant series, I posted this on the Martial Art forum. We had lots of fun working with that.
Finally, with your permission I'd like to CC to Coach Sonnon my replies to your questions. In case they are of any use to him, for promo quotes or anything else. The folks on the forum, and Coach Sonnon in particular, are so generous with their time and knowledge, I'd like to give something back anytime that I can.
Okay, seems I've already started a book here More on the weekend. I need some time to gather my thoughts. Welcome to the forum, it's always nice to see someone with similar interests
Take care,
Ryan.
_________________
Ryan Murdock
Hi Mike,
Okay, here goes. I see the Rmax stuff being basically divided between what I'd call the Health System stuff and the Martial Art/Sportfighting stuff. But it all overlaps, because it's all just movement. We'll start with the Health stuff.
In many ways I've had the most revolutionary improvements in my training in this area. Forget about junan taiso, drop it for daily Warrior Wellness™™. Warrior Wellness™™ is far superior and goes much deeper. Once you've recovered the full range of motion in each of your joint complexes you can cut your Warrior Wellness™™ back to 15 or 20 min maintenance. It's necessary to take the joints through a full range of motion to counter the repetitive motions we move in due to our sports, work,... The first things that go when you get old are range of motion and balance. It doesn't have to happen at all. You'll also find that old injuries begin to go away with Warrior Wellness™™, though it's sometimes necessary to supplement with specific work to target deep tension, such as static holds. Also, you'll find tremendous benefit from the 4-Corner Balace Drill, it will give you incredible rooting ability with the legs, very tough to throw you.
Body-Flow™™ is great, a good intro to the Health System materials. Some of the rolling they show is far superior to ninjutsu ukemi. The long leg roll is a natural way to take a ganseki nage without that flatback thump that usually results from a well executed throw. You'll find the Body-Flow™™ exercises suddenly start popping up in your taijutsu, whether you're falling or groundfighting,... You're repatterning biomechanically efficient ways to move. There's incredible crossover to the actual randori on the mats (unlike pretty much all the weight training I did in the past). In fact that's one of the coolest things in ROSS, that your solo training has such amazing carryover.
The concept of Body-Flow™™ is also usefully applied to the kata. Think of them as flow drills. And take the basic strikes and apply them in this manner too, flowing one to the next. There is a danger with too much kata training, in that you end up binding the flow, becoming less spontaneous, less reactive to the environment.
The breathing tape of the Health System is also revolutionary. I do no cardio at all, but never get winded. The exercises repattern your breathing. Also the concept of Be Breathed™™, integrating Breathing, Structure and Movement so that the movement of your body breathes you. That's common throughout the health system materials.
Clubbells®®. Ditch the weight training, you don't need anything else (I'm assuming you have sufficient GPP). 25's are pretty heavy. I've been weight training for 20 years, but started with 15's. I've been using 15's for the past year. My focus was to master all the exercises in the Clubbell®® tape, to gain well-rounded circular strength before hitting the combination routines and density cycles (my current work). But the manual Core Cadre Curriculum presents a different approach of working the components and then going right on to combination routines. I'm amazed at the shoulder development I've experienced just with 15's, and my forearms have thickened noticeably. Amazing grip strength. This 3 dimensional coordination is the kind of strength you need in martial arts, the closest thing to training against a resisting opponent. Linear weight training is just too limited. Rather than waste precious time and recovery energies, better to drop the weight work and focus on Clubbells®® alone. See the new 3DPP manual for how to build your conditioning regimen for MA. And keep in mind that, if you're training for self-defence, fights are anaerobic, quick bursts of power, not aerobic marathons (only in the movies!).
In the martial art materials, it seems to me that we've seen very little that can be truly called ROSS. In there I would class Shockability (essential!), the Bayonet series, and Plural Assailant Engagements. Most of the releases are sportive fighting, but there's plenty to be squeezed from those tapes if you keep that in mind. In Bujinkan there's very little of this sort of work, competition (meaning work with a resisting partner, not win-lose sports). We always said "we can't do it, too dangerous, you'd kill someone", but ROSS presents plenty of ways to create safe drills in this environment. They're essential.
The main thing when using these sportive drills is to keep your training goals in mind. We drifted too far into the sportive stuff for a while, and away from our goal of effective self defence. Once you understand how to structure drills, and the whole continuum between Soft Work and Hard Work, you must sit down and become clear about your training goals, and what specifically you want to gain from these drills. Then you can design your own drills with the ones on the tape as examples. Always keep coming back to your own goals, it's easy to get sidetracked into just doing everything on the tapes, because it's fun.
A crucial thing to understand is the soft work/hard work protocols. There's plenty of info around the site on this stuff. It will revolutionize your training. For example, take your basic strikes and work them as Softwork™™ against an attacker, unplanned, trying to stay in flow. Softwork™™ gradually slides to Hard Work as your comfort level increases. But it must be incremental or you'll just induce counterproductive fear-reactivity. Our way of training in the Bujinkan was always to beat the hell out of each other, cause we were so tough, but that's just a great way to fill your students with year's worth of fear-reactivity to have to overcome. There are smarter ways to train that make you just as tough, perhaps tougher.
Other things that may interest you can be found in the Bayonet series. Lots of great dexterity drills for your bojutsu and knife fighting. And there (as well as Shockability) Scott presents the progression from beating, parrying, enveloping,... that will allow you to develop Hatsumi-like abilities to slip and counterstrike. It's not so hard if you understand the progression and how to program the drills. But you also have to test them in the realm of competition (the 'sportive' drills), trial by fire in a setting where you're not so relaxed and you'll have to recover from plenty of mistakes. That's much harder!
IOUF - some amazing stuff there. Simplifies throwing down to essentials. All throws, no matter what, are based on the principles of the Triangle Point and Locking Arm/Power Transfer. My old Bujinkan teacher made all this stuff so complicated, but it doesn't need to be at all. You'll dramatically increase your learning curve if you get these principles, and, as the series claims, you really will be able to throw at will from any position.
As with all these series you'll add layers to your understanding by taking these ROSS principles and analyzing your Bujinkan training from that perspective. Traditional martial arts is trapped in traditional ways of teaching, that aren't always the most efficient. There's also the cultural baggage to try to see past. The ROSS people really seem to have understood how to program training so that you can put yourself on the path to mastery, and so that, with rigourous honesty, you can be your own coach (analyze your weaknesses and program your training to work those areas). Go beyond such concepts as Kihon Happo to study the function and disfunction of the joints. That's the sort of understanding that stuff like Kihon Happo points to. Keep in mind that Hatsumi was a bonesetter. He studied all that stuff. And don't get trapped in labels like "This is Bujinkan" and "That is ROSS". It's all just movement. You don't want to be a slave to a system, you want to use that system to discover your own greatest potential.
One last point I wanted to mention, about ROSS as a way of seeing, and the vocabulary they use. I typed a long post about that yesterday in the General section, I think the thread was called Lost Message. I won't retype it here, since you can find it on the forum.
I think that's it off the top of my head. I'm sure I missed some stuff, but those are some of my impressions of the RMax stuff, based on my foundation of Bujinkan training. I hope none of that came across as condescending or anything. I respect your 10 years of training. I wasn't sure how much you know about the RMax, and I was thinking this through for myself as I wrote. Also, keep in mind that I have no real credentials in the Bujinkan. I received a shodan 14 years ago, and a nidan after that. But I haven't been an active part of the Bujinkan for a long time. Though I have continued to train daily with an informal training group for the past 17 years. So take all of what I've said with that in mind. Also, I have no connection to RMax, these are just our observations after years of dedicated study as garage martial artists, training for its own sake.
I hope this is helpful for you, and I hope you'll be able to avoid some of the mistakes and dead ends we tried as we struggled along. Feel free to ask me about any of the materials or tape series if you have any questions, we have pretty much everything.
Take care, and good training!
Ryan.
_________________
Ryan Murdock
Discussion:
Hello,
I am a new member to the forum and noticed through your posts that you are part of the Bujinkan as well. I practice Taijutsu in Boston with Mark Davis. I was fortunate to meet Steve Byrne once 2 years ago at the Tai Kai in Atlanta.
I am always interested in improving my Taijutsu and have noticed corrolaries between Taijutsu and Coach Sonnon's methods. So far I have only purchased a few Clubbells®® and am asking for some advice. What aspects of Circular Strength Training™™ have you found to be the most productive towards your taijutsu? I realize that I am asking a personal question to a stranger, so please excuse my forwardness. I have a couple of 25 lbers (they are so very heavy!). The goals of Warrior Wellness™™ and Maximology™™ seem about the same as with junan taiso and tai sabaki. I do not have a good understanding of the other materials Coach Sonnon presents.
I have been practicing taijutsu for about 10 years and hold a shodan rank. I am in the process of trying to learn the Koto Ryu. I regularly practice the Kihon Happo, weight lift, run, and do junan taiso. I assume that one can practice holding the Clubbells®® while doing kamae and kihon happo/gogyo exercises, but wanted to check with a more experienced member of both systems for for any advice or warnings.
I appreciate any advice and consideration you give me,
Sincerely,
Mike B
_________________
Michael Bombardieri
Hi Mike,
I only have time for a brief reply to let you know I read your mail. I promise to reply to your questions this weekend, weekdays right now are really busy for me. Rest assured, I could write you a book on this topic! I have 17 years of constant, daily training in Bujinkan, and have been using the ROSS materials for 3 or 4 years now. At the time we found them we had been really picking apart the roots of all our Bujinkan work, trying to distill it all down, ruthlessly testing and examining everything we'd ever learned. ROSS was completely in line with where we were going. Approached as a performance enhancement system, it has taken my training to unbelievable heights and has enabled me to heal old injuries,... I can't say enough good things about it. I'll put together an email this weekend, all the stuff I wish I'd known at the outset, because we've certainly made plenty of mistakes too (wrong directions, misunderstandings due to leaping in without a full picture,...).
In the meantime, check out the forum for posts that I've made (I'm pretty sure you can search by login name). The questions I asked would probably be of significance to your training, given our similar backgrounds. You might particularly enjoy my summary of our work with the Plural Assailant series, I posted this on the Martial Art forum. We had lots of fun working with that.
Finally, with your permission I'd like to CC to Coach Sonnon my replies to your questions. In case they are of any use to him, for promo quotes or anything else. The folks on the forum, and Coach Sonnon in particular, are so generous with their time and knowledge, I'd like to give something back anytime that I can.
Okay, seems I've already started a book here More on the weekend. I need some time to gather my thoughts. Welcome to the forum, it's always nice to see someone with similar interests
Take care,
Ryan.
_________________
Ryan Murdock
Hi Mike,
Okay, here goes. I see the Rmax stuff being basically divided between what I'd call the Health System stuff and the Martial Art/Sportfighting stuff. But it all overlaps, because it's all just movement. We'll start with the Health stuff.
In many ways I've had the most revolutionary improvements in my training in this area. Forget about junan taiso, drop it for daily Warrior Wellness™™. Warrior Wellness™™ is far superior and goes much deeper. Once you've recovered the full range of motion in each of your joint complexes you can cut your Warrior Wellness™™ back to 15 or 20 min maintenance. It's necessary to take the joints through a full range of motion to counter the repetitive motions we move in due to our sports, work,... The first things that go when you get old are range of motion and balance. It doesn't have to happen at all. You'll also find that old injuries begin to go away with Warrior Wellness™™, though it's sometimes necessary to supplement with specific work to target deep tension, such as static holds. Also, you'll find tremendous benefit from the 4-Corner Balace Drill, it will give you incredible rooting ability with the legs, very tough to throw you.
Body-Flow™™ is great, a good intro to the Health System materials. Some of the rolling they show is far superior to ninjutsu ukemi. The long leg roll is a natural way to take a ganseki nage without that flatback thump that usually results from a well executed throw. You'll find the Body-Flow™™ exercises suddenly start popping up in your taijutsu, whether you're falling or groundfighting,... You're repatterning biomechanically efficient ways to move. There's incredible crossover to the actual randori on the mats (unlike pretty much all the weight training I did in the past). In fact that's one of the coolest things in ROSS, that your solo training has such amazing carryover.
The concept of Body-Flow™™ is also usefully applied to the kata. Think of them as flow drills. And take the basic strikes and apply them in this manner too, flowing one to the next. There is a danger with too much kata training, in that you end up binding the flow, becoming less spontaneous, less reactive to the environment.
The breathing tape of the Health System is also revolutionary. I do no cardio at all, but never get winded. The exercises repattern your breathing. Also the concept of Be Breathed™™, integrating Breathing, Structure and Movement so that the movement of your body breathes you. That's common throughout the health system materials.
Clubbells®®. Ditch the weight training, you don't need anything else (I'm assuming you have sufficient GPP). 25's are pretty heavy. I've been weight training for 20 years, but started with 15's. I've been using 15's for the past year. My focus was to master all the exercises in the Clubbell®® tape, to gain well-rounded circular strength before hitting the combination routines and density cycles (my current work). But the manual Core Cadre Curriculum presents a different approach of working the components and then going right on to combination routines. I'm amazed at the shoulder development I've experienced just with 15's, and my forearms have thickened noticeably. Amazing grip strength. This 3 dimensional coordination is the kind of strength you need in martial arts, the closest thing to training against a resisting opponent. Linear weight training is just too limited. Rather than waste precious time and recovery energies, better to drop the weight work and focus on Clubbells®® alone. See the new 3DPP manual for how to build your conditioning regimen for MA. And keep in mind that, if you're training for self-defence, fights are anaerobic, quick bursts of power, not aerobic marathons (only in the movies!).
In the martial art materials, it seems to me that we've seen very little that can be truly called ROSS. In there I would class Shockability (essential!), the Bayonet series, and Plural Assailant Engagements. Most of the releases are sportive fighting, but there's plenty to be squeezed from those tapes if you keep that in mind. In Bujinkan there's very little of this sort of work, competition (meaning work with a resisting partner, not win-lose sports). We always said "we can't do it, too dangerous, you'd kill someone", but ROSS presents plenty of ways to create safe drills in this environment. They're essential.
The main thing when using these sportive drills is to keep your training goals in mind. We drifted too far into the sportive stuff for a while, and away from our goal of effective self defence. Once you understand how to structure drills, and the whole continuum between Soft Work and Hard Work, you must sit down and become clear about your training goals, and what specifically you want to gain from these drills. Then you can design your own drills with the ones on the tape as examples. Always keep coming back to your own goals, it's easy to get sidetracked into just doing everything on the tapes, because it's fun.
A crucial thing to understand is the soft work/hard work protocols. There's plenty of info around the site on this stuff. It will revolutionize your training. For example, take your basic strikes and work them as Softwork™™ against an attacker, unplanned, trying to stay in flow. Softwork™™ gradually slides to Hard Work as your comfort level increases. But it must be incremental or you'll just induce counterproductive fear-reactivity. Our way of training in the Bujinkan was always to beat the hell out of each other, cause we were so tough, but that's just a great way to fill your students with year's worth of fear-reactivity to have to overcome. There are smarter ways to train that make you just as tough, perhaps tougher.
Other things that may interest you can be found in the Bayonet series. Lots of great dexterity drills for your bojutsu and knife fighting. And there (as well as Shockability) Scott presents the progression from beating, parrying, enveloping,... that will allow you to develop Hatsumi-like abilities to slip and counterstrike. It's not so hard if you understand the progression and how to program the drills. But you also have to test them in the realm of competition (the 'sportive' drills), trial by fire in a setting where you're not so relaxed and you'll have to recover from plenty of mistakes. That's much harder!
IOUF - some amazing stuff there. Simplifies throwing down to essentials. All throws, no matter what, are based on the principles of the Triangle Point and Locking Arm/Power Transfer. My old Bujinkan teacher made all this stuff so complicated, but it doesn't need to be at all. You'll dramatically increase your learning curve if you get these principles, and, as the series claims, you really will be able to throw at will from any position.
As with all these series you'll add layers to your understanding by taking these ROSS principles and analyzing your Bujinkan training from that perspective. Traditional martial arts is trapped in traditional ways of teaching, that aren't always the most efficient. There's also the cultural baggage to try to see past. The ROSS people really seem to have understood how to program training so that you can put yourself on the path to mastery, and so that, with rigourous honesty, you can be your own coach (analyze your weaknesses and program your training to work those areas). Go beyond such concepts as Kihon Happo to study the function and disfunction of the joints. That's the sort of understanding that stuff like Kihon Happo points to. Keep in mind that Hatsumi was a bonesetter. He studied all that stuff. And don't get trapped in labels like "This is Bujinkan" and "That is ROSS". It's all just movement. You don't want to be a slave to a system, you want to use that system to discover your own greatest potential.
One last point I wanted to mention, about ROSS as a way of seeing, and the vocabulary they use. I typed a long post about that yesterday in the General section, I think the thread was called Lost Message. I won't retype it here, since you can find it on the forum.
I think that's it off the top of my head. I'm sure I missed some stuff, but those are some of my impressions of the RMax stuff, based on my foundation of Bujinkan training. I hope none of that came across as condescending or anything. I respect your 10 years of training. I wasn't sure how much you know about the RMax, and I was thinking this through for myself as I wrote. Also, keep in mind that I have no real credentials in the Bujinkan. I received a shodan 14 years ago, and a nidan after that. But I haven't been an active part of the Bujinkan for a long time. Though I have continued to train daily with an informal training group for the past 17 years. So take all of what I've said with that in mind. Also, I have no connection to RMax, these are just our observations after years of dedicated study as garage martial artists, training for its own sake.
I hope this is helpful for you, and I hope you'll be able to avoid some of the mistakes and dead ends we tried as we struggled along. Feel free to ask me about any of the materials or tape series if you have any questions, we have pretty much everything.
Take care, and good training!
Ryan.
_________________
Ryan Murdock