Health Benefits Of Mixed Martial Arts Training

Arts blogger

Mixed martial arts is defined as a complete contact combat sport which involves a number of fighting skills and techniques, from a mixture of other fighting sports, used in competitions. Such training programs are great for the body and help one to improve stamina and strength.

It has been proved by a number of researches that individuals who practice any form of martial arts on a regular basis have high levels of fitness as compared to individuals who don’t. In addition to this, they also have a stronger immune system. These training programs are considered good for individuals suffering from innumerable health troubles like high cholesterol level, cardiac problems, high blood pressure, breathing difficulty, poor circulation and many others.

Some of the major benefits offered by MMA training programs are given below:

Increases flexibility and strength
This is one of the major benefits offered by such training programs. Regular training helps in the strengthening and toning of muscles thus increasing body flexibility. One becomes physical stronger and capable of defending himself from any kind of physical attack. Moreover, these training programs also help in muscle strengthening and stress release.

Weight loss programs
This is another major benefit associated with such training programs. Such programs are considered good for weight loss and help one to have a healthy and slim body.

Increases mind sharpness
Learning martial arts not only makes a person physically stronger but mentally sharper as well. The training involves good concentration and self control and thus improves coordination between the mind, body and soul.

Thus, mixed martial arts training provides innumerable health benefits to individuals and is becoming immensely popular worldwide. There are innumerable organizations which are offering MMA courses as per the needs of individuals.

Arts And Crafts India- With Bunches Of Benefits Of All Kind

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In todays world fashion are just taking U turn, Fashion of yesterday are just getting repeated in todays time and same is the case with arts products. From ancient time products of arts and carts were very famous but just at time when people reached in technology era they replaced their love towards such arts products with other things but now again they start inclining towards such arts products and so the market as response to such demand is flooded with such items.

Market well understands the fact that arts item are loved by all without any bar of economic situation, without any bar of age group and without any bar of place and so everywhere whether offline or online you can see arts and crafts India products available in all price range and in all size but in all such products you will find one few things common that is beauty, elegance and a sign of royal taste.

All such are facts related to the taste and demand of people for crafts products. And now lets talk about the benefits of such likeness on common people. Such likeness and high demand of arts and crafts India has given a good livelihood source to common people seeking income on basis of their talent and creativeness in this field.

Especially people living in villages do not use to be highly educated but they use to have extra ordinary talent and creativeness in making handmade arts and crafts statues etc. In lack of higher educational degrees they usually d not get high paid jobs and so in that way they live a life where they have to sacrifice their basic needs too but because of demand of arts items in todays market they can earn god sum of money too. Without any kind of educational degrees on basis of their ultimate creative skill and talent they can now earn good and can live a normal life.

Few people are from always from generation to generation engaged in such handmade craft products but they were not getting good value in return of selling their hard labor made arts items. For them too such increasing demand of arts product has come up with ultimate benefits in sense that now they are getting good sum of money in lieu of selling such. So they are now also getting what they really deserve.

In my eyes all love for such products has given various ultimate livelihood source and benefits to all section of people all over the world. Now in market too such demand has given great chance to marketers to earn money by selling such products worldwide. And normal people are getting benefits of beatification in their surroundings by placing such arts and craft items.

In short, it is the art which has opened all doors of benefits to all people and way to open such door is also very easy. Now its depends upon you that in which way you want to take benefit from this art.

Hand Conditioning For Extreme Martial Arts Punching Power

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All of us have seen those amazing feats of mind over matter, where a martial artist is breaking a stack of bricks as tall as he is. Most of us assume that he’s made of something different than we, super human perhaps. And while it may be true he has a higher tolerance for pain than many, it isn’t true that these skills are natural or in bred. They can be achieved by anyone willing to put the time in.

So exactly how does a person go from ordinary to indestructible? The key lies in hand conditioning. Hand conditioning is the secret tool used in many martial arts to prepare the body for very high impact and for combat. It conditions the bone and the nerves to withstand great trauma without sustaining injury. But it must be trained gradually and methodically if great gains are to be made.

Hand conditioning has two physiological consequences. The first is a deadening of the nerves. Pounding bone on a hard object repeatedly eventually kills the feeling in that part of the body. So when expert breakers claim to have no pain during a break that is why. They can’t feel anything but pressure. The second change that occurs is actually a strengthening of the bone itself. When bone is cracked your body released calcium to that region which later hardens and becomes new bone. This often results in big thick fat knuckles, the trademark of a conditioned striker.

So for those interested, what is the best way to train for this sort of extreme skill? Hit stuff, plain and simple. Old school Karate practitioners would smash their knuckles with a hammer and then punch a wall until they passed out. This would turn the hand into more of a mangled club, good for little else but smashing. But this is unnecessary. Most hard core breakers take a long term and dedicated approach with a little each day mentality.

If you’re learning to strike with the fore fist, or the first two knuckles, you might start with lightly punching wood a hundred times a day or so. Go until the sting is too much to bear, rest, and repeat. Eventually your hands will harden and the nerves will deaden. You’ll know when its time to move onto brick or steal, a surface that won’t be so forgiving. But keep in mind, in training; you don’t need to be using great force. Keep relaxed and go for repetition.

This training is not recommended for everyone, but if this is your art and you’re dedicated, you can make great gains in just a few months. A few minutes a day will result in a rock hard punch after just a few months. But if anything feels off consult a doctor and use common sense.

How to Do Fa-Jing –Issuing Energy — in Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Bagua

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He was one of the greatest kung-fu masters in the world, a direct descendant of the creator of tai chi, and he was asking me to show him a punch. It was an exciting moment but also nerve-wracking. Trying not to be nervous, I settled into the posture and prepared to show him internal power. Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang stood in front of me, watching carefully.

Trying to remain relaxed, I shifted my weight from my right to my left leg and my right fist shot out, fast, relaxed, and powerful. At the same time, my left elbow thrust backward and my left hand stopped at my ribcage.

Grandmaster Chen was not impressed. He took my right hand in his left, my left hand in his right and told me to relax. Before I knew what was happening, he jerked the right hand out and pushed the left hand backward. I wasn’t quite relaxed enough and almost suffered whiplash in my neck.

Relax, he told me again, and once again he jerked my arms — hard — forcing one to punch and the other to return to my ribcage. For a minute, I was like a rag doll, completely limp as he repeatedly demonstrated how relaxed I was supposed to be when performing fa-jing.

It’s amazing how the internal arts of China — Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Bagua — have been distorted by teachers who take what they have read too literally. The subject of fa-jing (pronounced “fah-zhing”) is one example of how a simple concept is misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Fa-jing means “issuing energy.” Unfortunately, the people who desperately need to believe in the supernatural think that in doing fa-jing, you are shooting chi out of your hands or body. They take it literally.

It’s not magical or mystical. It’s a matter of physics, and in the internal arts, it’s a matter of body mechanics.

Boxers issue energy anytime they deliver a jab, a hook, or an uppercut. If you’re into karate, you issue energy when you break a board with your foot, and if you’re into MMA, energy is issued when you drive a knee into an opponent’s face.

In the internal arts, fa-jing — issuing energy — is more complex, but the end result is the same. You knock someone into next week.

Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang, whose ancestor,Chen Wangting created Tai Chi 11 generations ago, teaches that fa-jing is a matter of proper body structure (posture) and good internal movement. From there, he says you simply “step on the gas.” He likes using automobile metaphors. In other words, if you use good structure and mechanics and then add speed, you will create the unique relaxed power of the internal arts.

I’ve studied other martial arts and have found the body mechanics of the internal arts far more difficult and complex. For high-quality tai chi you must maintain ground strength, peng jin, whole-body movement, silk-reeling (spiraling movement through the body), dan t’ien rotation and opening/closing the kua. You must connect all of these skills through the body as you deliver the strike with speed, power, and relaxation.

It takes years to learn how to do this from an internal perspective, because we all bring bad habits to the internal arts and it takes years to learn the above-mentioned skills and learn to maintain the whole-body connection as you move. It takes years for us to lose the muscular tension that we’ve developed all of our lives.

When Grandmaster Chen worked with me on the punch, I didn’t have it the first few times I did the punch and he corrected me each time. Suddenly I understood, and the next time I punched I connected the relaxed power from my foot, through my body and out my hand, exploding and shifting my weight at the same time.

“Ahh!” he said, his face lighting up. “Good.”

As a martial artist, few things are better than getting a “good” from Chen Xiaowang.

A short time later, he astonished those of us attending his Washington, D.C. workshop by doing a series of fa-jing strikes.C. With each strike, it seemed his uniform was exploding in all directions. That type of power comes from being connected and relaxing — and from a lifetime of practice. When he does fa-jing, you can almost feel the energy even standing halfway across a room. It reminded me of being on the floor right behind the basketball hoop during a University of Iowa game. When the big players were slamming into each other beneath the hoop, you could feel the body heat and almost feel the energy as they collided. I’ll never forget it, and being close to Chen Xiaowang when he does fa-jing is very similar.

There are two myths about tai chi that all martial artists should put aside. One is that tai chi is a slow motion health and meditation exercise. In truth, it’s a powerful martial art that is practiced slowly so students can learn the body mechanics and later can speed up the movements and deliver amazing power without a lot of obvious effort to the untrained observer.

The other myth people should forget is about chi. Fa-jing has nothing to do with shooting energy out of your body. Instead of focusing on chi, which has never been proven exist in independent scientific studies and which is too often the focus of tai chi teachers, you should focus on proper posture and body mechanics. Do this and you’ll be closer to developing the relaxed power of fa-jing.

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Ken Gullette has practiced martial arts for 36 years and is best known for his high-quality instructional DVDs, his online internal arts school and his internal arts blog. He is dedicated to dispelling the myths surrounding tai chi, hsing-i and bagua, showing that the skills required for the internal arts are physical, not metaphysical.

Combining Martial Arts Like Wing Chun And Aikido

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Most martial arts don’t fit together easily. You take the circular hands of Chinese kenpo Karate and try to put them atop the linear stances of Japanese shotokan, and you are going to get an uncoordinated mish mash. Or, the quick and slick jabs of boxing might fit with wing chun, but the round house power punches don’t fit at all.

And, of course, there are arts that do fit together. You can put aikido together with pa kua chang, but it is going to take discipline and logic to categorize individual techniques. And, this leaves the creator with a problem of how do you teach the beast without confusing.

That all said, I was taking an Aikido class one day, I was a mere beginner in that art, though I had seven years of kenpo and karate and a bit of wing chun. So they asked me to partake in randori. which is the freestyle aikido employs to train students. And, it was a sad experience, at best.

I didn’t want to give them my punches, karate had taught me to lock down and become immoveable, and the result was that nobody could throw me, and the give and take of the randori exercise broke down. I blame no one, it was mixing apples and peaches, and one could argue they should have been able to make their art work, but I should have been able to work with them. Interestingly, it was what happened after that that became interesting.

Paul, one of the advanced black belts came up to me and wondered where the breakdown had been. Other black belts, lower ones, stayed away from me like a pariah, but he wanted to learn, and that was the mark of an advanced belt.

So I explained about l how I had been taught to lock down my stance, and we looked at that in conjunction with aikido techniques, and how things could have been different. Nothing was really making sense, until I asked him if he had ever heard of sticky hands. When I showed it to him the lights began to go on.

Wing Chun, you see, has more mobile stances, and we spent hours figuring out how to get the feet to go fast enough to keep up with the aikido centrifugal action. Slowly, we figured out how the feet were supposed to cross or circle with the action of the attack. We began to go into advanced techniques, Paul excited because of all he was learning, myself grinning, because I was getting a super advanced lesson in higher Aikido that the other fellows in the school, the lower black belts, would have died for.

It takes logic to put arts together, and very few people are successful at the endeavor. I succeeded wildly, and this because I always seem to run into people that are willing to look a little deeper, and willing to share what they learn. If you think you know it all, if you’re proud, if you look down on other students, then you will never open your mind and be able to ingest all the wonderful truth that flows so freely in the universe.