293 - Savages Undercover: Relax!
Guest post from a friend in Lebanon
(Thanks to our friend S.U. - a personal security instructor from Lebanon - for sharing this post with Journal readers - check out his link below.
Relaxation seems an oxymoron when training for extreme stress events but it has central importance as a habit to cultivate both in and out of workshop and solo practice. Jeth
Savages Undercover
“I've been recently looking deeply into training concepts and the difference between the conventional way of training and the Systema (Russian martial art) approach. This can help us train in a healthier and more efficient manner. It's obviously a wide topic but i want to briefly mention the following 2 points:
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1- Stimulus response training works really well without a doubt and it's been proven in the battlefield. However briefly; this neuro-physical shortcut comes with a big cost of extreme combat fatigue and PTSD from training. It creates a trade off between immediate survival skill versus potential long term psychological and neurological damage. After all PTSD is not just a psychological disorder, it produces permanent neurological alterations creating fundamental physiological damage.
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However; if your goal is continuous improvement of your combat effectiveness combined with physical and emotional health, then stimulus response training may be counter productive. What you need is slow progressive training which provides a safer alternative for the long term, because it minimizes the practitioner's exposure to the hormonal dumps in our bodies like adrenaline, cortisol and other chemicals. Systema seeks a method of combat training that permits the continual improvement of the practitioner without deteriorating normal daily functions or quality of life. As Vladimir Vasiliev said "Fighting skill should evolve into unconquerable weapon that can't be seen until used nor taken away while its practitioner is alive".
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2- While you might think the "fight or flight" response is necessary, and it is! It is actually an exception. Naturally, we have the instinct to relax. It is the "relaxation response" that makes you prevail, think clearly and can functionalize the flinch response in a healthy way instead of a damaging way as an exceptional worst case scenario with the conventional flinch response training that many so called modern combatants promote as a method for short term effectiveness gain.
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Prevail
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Stay Safe.”
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Interesting. I’m not 100% sure what stimulus response training means in this context.
From KiwiChic via email:
"Yes, this! There is so much more strength and power to be had in working with our body instead of striving always to force it into a militant degree of control and rigidity.
This was an interesting read (and follows on well from your previous 'Intention vs Tension' post); it would be great to see more on the subjects of understanding and working around physiological responses, and of tapping into the power of the mind/body connection."