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Unleaded: Old School Conditioning Volume I: The Pliant Physique by Mark Hatmaker

 


Pliancy vs. Flexibility One

Let’s start with a definition, as this strict use of the adjective gets to the heart of what Old-Schoolers meant when they used the word “pliant” or sometimes “lissome.”

Pliant: Yielding, as in a willow that bends against the force of the wind and easily returns to its standard posture.

[Keep that willow analogy in mind, we’ll come back to it.]

Lissome: (of a person or their body) thin, supple, and graceful.

We sometimes see this sort of physique or attribute referred to in the old literature as “willowy.”

The Two Attributes of a Pliant Physique

Attribute One-The concept was to foster a yielding-resiliency, that is, the ability to easily and ably return to posture/base after an applied force [wind vs. the willow, the attempted crank of a poorly leveraged double-wristlock, etc.]

Antonyms of “pliancy” include inflexible, rigid, stiff, stiffened. Contrast our willows with tree limbs [or human limbs] that do not yield to the force and snap, rip or tear unable to return to the prior intact form.

Attribute Two—To be Old School “pliant” or “lithe” was also to be graceful, again, willowy.

The goal was NOT to yield without strength.

To yield without strength is a willow broken at the stem unable to stand upright after the applied force. We must have the co-existing attributes of yielding to the force and the resilient strength of returning to the point of posture.

The goal also was NOT mere “I can bend when I need to”; it was to carry the embodied pliant, lithe grace into each action of the day.

To embody pliancy is to not merely execute by rote the programs that follow, but to educate the mind and body to the ways the Three Primaries [Back/Hips/Shoulders] interact and bolster one another so that we bring lissome grace to our standing, our stride, our rising into and out of seated positions.

This first volume seeks to build that pliant base and begins the journey of “thinking” of the body a bit differently than we do in today’s glut of “exercise science.”

Don’t read that to mean, the Old Schoolers were unscientific, not at all.

Read that to mean, that much of what we “understand” is often diluted through a prism of decades of marketing or single-step approach bias.

Pliancy vs. Flexibility Two

Let’s go back to our willow.

The Old School asks that we need be no more pliant than we need to be.

That is, our reed need be only as pliant as to be able to bend to the ground and back to point of posture.

The reed has no need of scalloping out a hole and “learning” to bend into the hole past what it would be asked to do in a windstorm.

Old School thought dictates that the human body also has no like need of “bending into holes” to achieve pliant and graceful results.

As a matter of fact, to many Old-Schoolers, “stretching” beyond the needs was antithetical to the associated goals of strength and stability. [Much more on these attributes in upcoming volumes.]

“Stretching” in the word itself conjures what was considered the problem with standard flexibility training.

It implies “stretching” a bit beyond current capabilities.

To Old School thought, pliancy was educated to the point of posture.

Strength was not “stretched” for, it was accrued with startlingly easy loads [“easy” being relative]; it was educated and accrued via long-honed skill not forced overtraining.

Pliancy training is likewise based on moving to the “earth” and not “stretching for the holes.”

Often what we ask of our bodies today to reap Old School rewards is eating up our progress and paving the way for accrued injury.

Yes, the Van Damme split between chairs is an impressive stunt, and a few Old Schoolers demonstrated such ability, but this was considered an outlier attribute and not a desirable goal and in no way contributed to the goal of the whole.

In Part Two we will cover:

·        The Walt Whitman Menagerie

·        “Defeating Gravity”

·        Turning Off Antagonists

·        Pumping [the whole-body pre-cursor to The McKenzie Treatment]

·        The Three Primaries

·        Recovering at Force

·        2-Minutes w/ Oak Limbs aka "Sandow over Yoga" 

·        Sexual Esoterica

·        And the Programs…

1.     The Whole-She Bang

2.     The Maintenance Program [For the Currently Pliant]

3.     Bare Bones [For those mornings when in a hurry.]

4.     Safety at the Margins [For Combat Athletes]

 

[Unleaded: Old School Conditioning Volume I: The Pliant Physique will be released in a few weeks to Black Box Subscribers.

Upcoming Unleaded Volumes include…

·        Hidden Gems: Stabilizing Muscle [Pre-Hab, Re-Hab, & the True Core]

·        The Shotgun Muscle Trifecta

·        The Shock Muscle Trifecta: Ballistic Motion for Combat Athletes

·        The Work is “Wind”: Max O2 for Combat Athletes

·        And the mammoth, Unleaded Strength with every exercise described, demonstrated in excruciating detail, Programs for Greenhorns, Hard-Chargers, and the Female Athlete.

·        [Each Program is a DVD/Booklet package.]

For a free podcast on the most overlooked aspect of training.

For information on The Black Box Project or for a podcast on the topic.

Or, visit our site to at least sign up for our free newsletter where we can let you know when Unleaded finally drops to GenPop.

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