Have you learned and practiced martial arts for a long time and mastery still somehow eludes you?

We’ve all been there. Sometimes the more I know, the less I seem to know.

So how should you get to where you want to be? Should you train harder or train smarter? There is no one answer that fits all learning scenarios.

I am reading a book now on muscles. It is not so much a book on strength and conditioning but a book that covers the topic of muscles in literature, human movement and athletic training.

One interesting topic brought up is a paradox termed the sport-specific paradox. This paradox states that the more you try to be better at a specific sport, the more you overuse certain muscles in a certain range of movement, and the higher the risk of injury. If you examine the popular sports such as football, golf, soccer, running, basketball, weightlifting, and so on you can find examples of this paradox. And yes, it applies to the practice of martial arts too.

A coach that is highlighted in the book said that :-

You don’t need to do so much. Doing more is not better. Just do it smarter. And do it more effectively.

This came from his own experience of rehabilitation after suffering injuries from weightlifting twice. From his own research and the findings of other researches he concluded that :-

Muscles in the core need to be trained to be stiff and hold still, to practice what they are designed to do: hold stiffness over time.

Does the above sound familiar? Yes, it should because it basically describes one of the things practiced in zhanzhuang.

In Grandmaster Wei Shuren’s Tai Chi we do not practice zhanzhuang. However, we practice the Ancient Bell Body structure which in the light of what I read in this book can be framed as the practice of holding a zhanzhuang postural requirements throughout the practice of the form.

I find that this is a smarter way of training zhanzhuang, by not doing it just by standing there in a Zhuang because you can stand still a lot but the moment you start to move you lose the structure. By finding the structure as we move, we actually learn to maintain it whether we stand still or we keep moving.

Reading the above also brings to mind the individual postures practice of NGK. In this practice we don’t stand still to breathe and seek stillness. Instead, we use the stiffened postures to train muscular tension as a means of conditioning and power generation through states of tension and relaxation to practice motion and stop motion that can support the techniques of the style.