Articles - Strength, Muscle & Athletics

Z-Health:
Super Training for Athletes & Martial Artists
Part 2

• Busting Fitness Myths
• Top Attributes of a Well-Rounded Athlete & Fighter
• Putting it All Together in Your Workouts

By Brian Copeland

If you haven't read Part 1 of this article read it here first.

In part 1 we busted common fitness myths specifically regarding strength, flexibility and cardio training.

In part 2 we will look at the attributes of amazing athletes that are typically not trained, at least not intentionally and I'll show you how I include those in my training and give you an idea of why they are important.

By the way if you are still wondering what Z-Health has to do with all of this, realize that Z-Health is a system of human performance that looks at all attributes of improving an athlete. So when I say Z-Health I don't just mean joint mobility or vision drills, I mean a deep understanding of neurophysiology and using that as a lens through which to view how to reach your athletic potential.

Attributes of Amazing Athletes & Fighters

In the last article I used the example of how Michael Jordan was not the strongest, nor fastest, nor most flexible, nor had the best cardio on his team. Yet he was clearly amazing in the sport of basketball. I correlated that to his amazing visual skills. Now I will dig deeper into visual skills and other attributes.

Attributes:

• Technique Skill

• Strength Skill

• Speed / Quickness Skill

• Mobility / Flexibility Skill

• Suppleness Skill

• Mental / Psychological Skill

• Tactical Skill

• Visual Skill

• Vestibular Skill

• Stamina Skill

• Recovery / Nutrition Skill

• Style Skill

• Rhythm Skill

A word on skill:

You may have noticed that I put the word "skill" after every single attribute, that is because everything in life is a skill. Recall the brain/nervous system connection from part 1 of this article? The motor maps? Everything you do is a skill, whether you consider it skilled or not. At one point or another you had to learn how to do everything that you do and thus it is a skill that is programmed in that map inside your brain. You have a map for your sport techniques, your exercise techniques, walking, talking, picking up a coffee cup, etc.

The question is how good is that map?

This is where the phrase "practice makes perfect" comes in. We all know that practice does not necessarily make perfect. Bad practice makes bad, good practice makes good, amazing practice makes amazing. So be careful how you practice because you will get better at what you practice, good or bad!

Technique Skill:

This should be a no-brainer! The better your technique the better... Better technique for a fighter means not telegraphing your strikes, getting more of your body weight behind your shots for greating striking power and maintaining your balance during quick changes of direction.

But how do most people train technique? They typically do punch after punch after punch against the heavy bag; dripping sweat, fighting fatigue and getting sloppy in the execution of their reps. Now what are they practicing?

Z-Health sees the practice of skill from a map-building perspective. Whenever you practice your technique just remember you are building your map. You are either making your map better or worse. So just practicing reps can sometimes make your technique worse! Once again, careful what and how you practice.

Strength Skill:

As discussed in part 1 of this article, strength is subjective and relative to the sport. Who would you rather be punched by Mike Tyson or Andy Bolton? Andy Bolton can deadlift 1003 lbs so he is as strong as they come... in powerlifting. Mike Tyson probably could not even deadlift half of what Andy did but he sure hits a lot harder.

So the question is what is the role of strength training for an athlete or fighter? Well if your sport involves powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting or another competition that involves lifting something then clearly you need to train that specific lift.

But for a fighter, a football player, a tennis player or other reactive sport athlete, your strength training has two components:

1. Strength in your technique
2. Full body strength training to toughen the connective tissues and bones of the body.

As your technique improves you can recruit more muscle fibers and thus you will get stronger in your sport technique from simply practicing your sport technique... this is why Mike Tyson has a harder punch than Andy Bolton even though Andy can lift more weight. So perfecting technique is top-priority.

Your second-priority for strength training is to teach your nervous system to be more comfortable with you lifting heavy crap! Two things happen as you lift heavy stuff. 1) you prime your body (nervous system) to create higher amounts of tension which will help you out if you ever need to power through an opponent. 2) lifting heavy objects will strengthen and thicken your bones, joint capsules, tendons, ligaments, muscles, etc. which means you will be more resistant to injury.

An athlete or fighter should be concerned with exercises that utilize full body mechanics, bicep curls are lame and pullups are a winner. Tricep kickbacks are for women in skin-tight leotards with poodle hair cuts from the 80's, overhead presses, one-arm pushups and other multijoint presses are kosher. For the money, you can't beat picking up something heavy off of the ground and putting something heavy overhead. Example exercises are the deadlift, military press, clean and jerk with kettlebells or barbells, snatches with kettlebell or barbells, kettlebell front squats, lunges, etc. There are other implements such as sandbags or strongman tools that are beneficial as well. Bottom line, ditch the bodybuilding and in with functional strength. P.S. You can still put on muscle and get cut without preacher curls and other bodybuilding exercises.

Speed / Quickness Skill

I will define speed as how long it takes an object, say a fist, to move from point A to point B. Quickness will be defined in our example as reaction time.

Speed comes from amazing technique practice, plain and simple.

Quickness comes from improving your visual skills and tactile skills and limiting your options as far as resonses. So for a fighter, if your opponent throws a punch at your face you need visual skills to be able to see that punch in time, whether it be in your peripheral field such as a hook punch or your foveal field such as a jab. If you are on the ground grappling and you feel your opponent is going for an arm lock it is your tactical awareness or skill that allows you to feel your opponent and then react appropriately.

There are a number of Z-Health drills to improve your visual and tactical reaction time because the sooner you see or feel what your opponent is doing the quicker you can respond. The difference between a boxer parrying a jab or getting hit is a fraction of a second... you need every edge you can get. Ditto for grappling.

Mobility / Flexibility Skill

Everyone understands what flexibility means but I am more of a fan of the word and attribute mobility. In this definition we will say that flexibility is the passive range of motion you have in a joint. So for instance if you lay on your back and someone grabs your leg and raises it as high as it will go.

Mobility on the other hand would be how high you can raise your leg using the strength in your leg muscles, this is active mobility or active flexibility. This is much more important.

In fact, the greater the gap between your passive flexibility and active mobility the greater your likelihood of injury. You DO NOT want to have the ability to move a joint further than you have control and strength in.

If you are serious about injury prevention, athletic performance, flexibility, strength, power, suppleness, etc. then you need to take every single joint in your body through its full range of motion at all speeds with complete control.

The only system out there that currently does this is Z-Health. The best place to get started is with the Level 1 program which is the R-Phase and then move into the Level 2 program which is I-Phase. R-Phase and I-Phase are consumer-level Z-Health programs of dynamic joint mobility. They take all of your joints through their full anatomical range of motion at all speeds and will turn you into a super coordinated bad-arse!

Suppleness Skill

Suppleness is often overlooked in the development of athletes. Suppleness is always appreciated but most people don't really understand what they are seeing. Why does one athlete look like they are stiff, rigid and using a lot of effort while the next one is fluid, relaxed and as Bruce Lee would say, "like water?"

Now imagine having this level of fluidness, relaxed strength and mobility and effortless movement in every single joint in your body! This is another goal of Z-Health's dynamic joint mobility.

Supple joints allow you to take extreme force strikes, falls and hits and as Ali would approve of, roll with the punches. A hit to the knee in most athlete means a torn ACL, meniscus, etc. But a strong, mobile and supple knee would be able to move into a more advantageous position to absorb and redirect the force of the blow and thus avoid injury.

A supple body can also spring back and move fluidly which can be quite frustrating to your opponent.

Suppleness... gotta get some of that! Once again, the R-Phase and I-Phase DVDs from Z-Health are your start to building suppleness.

Mental / Psychological Skill

Much can be said about this but often times a superior athlete or fighter is defeated by a lesser developed athlete simply because the lesser developed athlete has the mental edge. Getting psyched out or psyched up is common language we are used to. Well this is basically what we mean by the mental and psychological edge.

How many of you actually set aside time to practice your mental and psychological edge?

From a Z-Health perspective every aspect of our training is integrated into the next. I often tell my fighters that when they exercise they should always stay calm, cool and composed because they are in effect practicing how they will respond to stress and a fight is stress for sure.

Tactical Skill

I won't go too far into this since tactics change based on the sport and goal. But tactics are often more important than technique. As an example, remember Indiana Jones? Remember when the guy with the sword was swinging it around all fancy and then Indiana Jones pulled out his revolver and shot the guy with the sword ending the attack right there and now.

Well the guy with the sword had better technique but Indian Jones had superior tactics. Why fight a guy who is better than you in boxing when you can take them to the ground? Close the distance on a kicker. Keep the distance if you have superior kicking. This goes back to Bruce Lee's quote of being like water.

Top level boxers and football teams will watch videos of their opponent so that they can plan out how they will fight/play. The boxer will change tactics to be a boxer or a brawler or southpaw or orthodox, etc. to best leverage their skills and minimize their opponent's skills.

Visual and Vestibular Skills

I'm linking these together because they are so closely related.

Your vestibular system is in your inner ear. It basically provides your equilibrium or balance while you are in motion, specifically while your head is in motion. If you get sea sick then you have poor vestibular skill. The vestibular system is consists of 3 semi-circular canals in each ear. Those canals have liquid in them that spins as your head moves. This spinning liquid provides information to your brain telling it which way is up so you don't fall.

If you are an athlete or fighter then your head is will move through quick movements and changes of direction. Poor vestibular skill will make you feel disoriented and more likely to lose your balance and fall. The better your vestibular system skills the more sure-footed you will be.

Visual Skills...

When people think vision they often mean eyesight. Eyesight is measured as 20/20. At 20 feet can you see clearly. But this is a static test. Life and sport is not static, it is in motion.

When a grappler shoots in for a double-leg take down you need to visually see their body posture changes, your head will be in motion as you drop down to sprawl thus integrating your vestibular system with your vision.

Fun fact: Did you know that 70% of your balance comes from your visual system?

So wobble boards, bosu balls and other silly tools aren't doing hardly anything at all for your balance, train your vision and your balance will improve.

Visual skills include but are not limited to:

• Quick side to side movements (called saccadic eye movement)
• Tracking objects far to near and far again
• Quick changes of focus from object to object
• Reaction time, seeing an stimulus and responding to it before it is too late
• Peripheral field of view while maintaining focus on a central point. For instance, you are looking at your opponents face but see that kick or hook punch come from the side just in time to block it.
• Integrating all of these with movement, vestibular system, cognitive tasks like your sport tactics and more.
• Field mapping. This is where Michael Jordan could see where he was in relation to the court, ball and other players friend and foe and he knew exactly where he needed to be and when.

Much more could be said about visual skills but to put it frankly, if you are not practicing visual skills on a daily basis you are not going to reach your athletic potential. In fact, poor visual skills could be what makes you suck and once you start training them you could become amazing!

Here is a sample vision exercise from Z-Health's S-Phase DVD.

You can learn this and other cool drills on the S-Phase DVD from Z-Health.

Stamina Skill

When most people think of cardio what they mean is stamina. Cardio is just training an aspect of stamina. Think of stamina simply as how fast you get fatigued and performance drops.

Fatigue comes from a variety of places:

• Muscle fatigue
• Mental fatigue
• Visual fatigue (one more reason to train visual skills and stamina)
• Cardio fatigue

When training for stamina it is important to train for all aspects of fatigue. For more in-depth on the cardio aspect read part 1 of this article here.

At the end of the day, I feel the best way to improve stamina is to learn to expend less energy. One can only improve their cardio, ability to deal with lactic acid in the muslces, ATP and glycogen stores so far before you reach capacity for improvement. But if one also simultaneously trains themselve to expend less energy during their sport or fight then you can stretch your stamina a lot further.

This primarily comes from the mantra Z-Health preaches which is a balance of tension and relaxation. In other words, use as much energy as you need but no more. This may sound simple but how many of you have actually ever really practiced using the perfect amount of energy to get the job done in your sport, in your weight lifting, in sprinting, etc. Any experienced martial artists can tell you that their hardest punch or kick comes when they use about 60% effort. If they try to use 100% effort the excessive tension slows them down plus will exhaust them sooner.

Recovery / Nutrition Skill

Ok here is the secret of steroids... they don't slap muslce on you by themselves, they don't make you stronger per se. What they do is super-charge your recovery so that you can exercise more, recover faster and thus speed up your results, decrease injury rates, etc. So that is why you can see people who take steroids but are not big and strong because they are not bodybuilding or powerlifting, they are practicing sprinting, martial arts or other skills. But do to the roids they can train 6 hours per day 7 days per week whereas a normal person might be able to get away with 2-3 hours per day 5 days per week before they start feeling like poopy.

For those of us who choose to stay steroid-free we need to maximize our recovery. Recovery is simple:

1. Avoid over training - minimize needless exercise and focus on the stuff that makes you better. The 80 / 20 rule definetly applies here.
2. Minimize stress - the higher your life stress (emotional, physical, nutritional, environmental, etc.) the less your ability to recover from exercise.
3. Get 8 - 9 hours of sleep per night plus a nap here and there.
4. Eat lots of protein and veggies.
5. Supplements are important but most supplements are a waste of money. There are a handfull of tier 1 supplements that I recommend.

A good Z-Health Performance Specialist can help you find the correct nutritional strategy and supplements that you need to reach your individual goals; whether they be fat loss, muscle, recovery, etc.

By the way, there is no perfect diet so don't believe the hype. Humans are quite individual and respond to different diets differently. Certainly there are some key principles that apply accross the board but whether you eat 3 square meals per day, 6-8 small meals or intermittent fasting is more of a personal preference.

And eating after 7pm is perfectly ok for crying out loud. There is more mythology in the field of nutrition than in Homer's Illiad, Oddyssey and all of Greek mythology put together.

Style & Rhythm Skill

Everyone has an internal rhythm, a cadence that they naturally want to move at. We spar with this rhythm, we train on the heavy bag with it, we even exercise with it... heck we probably grocery shop with it... if you have ever been in my way at the grocery store you know that is true!

But what happens when someone takes us out of our rhythm? Well if you have ever seen Manny Pacquiao fight, the other guy is forced out of their rhythm. In other words you need to be able to perform as an athlete or fighter in any rhythm or cadence. There are a number of ways to train the rhythm attribute but shadow boxing to a song is a good start. Find the beat(s) within the music and time your strikes to it. Make sure to vary the music from slow to fast so you learn several rhythms.

Style in martial arts often is though of as Karate vs. boxing vs. mixed martial arts vs. etc.

But I submit to you that style is more individual. Besides if you are following any style of martial arts you are following someone else's style anyway... I am more interested in your style.

Watch the videos of Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. below and you can see two completely different styles within the style of boxing. You can also see different rhythmes. You can especially see Roy Jones Jr. change up his rhythm based on distance to his opponent.

Tyson - one of the shortest heavyweights of all times had to use quickness and headwork to get close to his opponents where hooks and uppercuts favored his shorter arms.

Tyson is very tight and compact, compare that to Roy Jones Jr. who is more elusive, fast and loose with his stance and movements.

Imagine the visual skills these athlete had. Now, I can guarantee you they did not do Z-Health visual exercises to get as good as they were, Z-Health was not around yet. But they lucked into good visual skills. Some people are born with better visual skills than others, just like some people are born quicker, stronger, more flexible, etc. But they are also developing at least some visual skills from their boxing. No doubt there were areas that could be improved in their visual and vestibular systems, strength and stamina training and more. Could you imagine how great these athletes could have been if they plugged in the other pieces of the athlete puzzle? WOW!

Putting it All Together

Hopefully you are now starting to realize there is a whole world out there beyond what you have traditionally thought of as exercise. But you may not know where to get started in developing the attributes that are new to you.

Well many of them can be developed by getting a consumer level Z-Health product, see all products here:

Here are two sample training sessions, one is my fitness session and the other is my martial arts/combatives session.

Typical Fitness Session

1. 5 - 10 minutes of Z-Health dynamic joint mobility (R-Phase and I-Phase moves, this is where suppleness and mobility are developed)
2. 3 - 5 minutes of Z-Health visual and vestibular exercises (this is where balance is developed)
3. 5 - 10 minutes of skill practice (this is where I pick a new skill I want to work on, whether it be martial arts or other, I isolate it here and work slow motion and then faster focusing on pure technique)
4. 5 minutes of sub-maximal plyometrics (often sports-speed R & I-Phase drills, jumping drills, etc.)
5. 45 minutes of strength training (for me this involved kettlebell lifting, weighted chin-ups, barbell deadlifts)
6. 5 minutes of cardio training (I train to maintain 100 kettlebell snatches in 5 minutes with a 53 lb kettlebell. This is the standard for an RKC kettlebell instructor. As long as I focus on staying relaxed and calm I find this is all I need for my cardio. I like to do sprints in the warmer months though)
7. 3 - 5 minutes of dynamic joint mobility for a cool down (R and I-Phase moves)

Typical Martial Arts Session

1. 5 - 10 minutes of Z-Health dynamic joint mobility (R-Phase and I-Phase moves)
2. 3 - 5 minutes of Z-Health visual and vestibular exercises (I usually modify these drills to mimic combat)
3. The Skill segment makes up almost our entire class after this point because combat is skill. We include:
   1. Gun disarms
   2. Knife and club weapon fighting
   3. Grappling
   4. Stand up
   5. Multi attackers
   6. Tactics
   7. Mental / psychological training
   8. Tactile reaction time drills
   9. Rhythm drills
   10. etc.
4. 3 - 5 minutes of dynamic joint mobility for a cool down (R and I-Phase moves)

Brian

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