Indigenous Ability

  [Best consumed with Part 1 of this discussion Combat Abs: The Negative Injunctions, #1.]     Old school thought [and you and me I wager] loved the aesthetic ideal, pursuing the Greek statuary standard but carved by present day living flesh. To pursue this standard though, they sought energistic simplicity laser-focused training and a gimlet eye on how and why each portion of the anatomy functioned in isolation and in concert with the whole. Anything less was [and still is] mere dilettantism. “What is the arc?” One of the questions of the Old School way is asking What is the Arc? or What is the Range or Spectrum of Performance for each functional movement. Once that questioned was intelligently answered then one could go about training with better intent and better results due to only tensioning the targeted musculature in its working arc. Moving beyond this arc in either direction takes tension off the targeted muscles thusly… ·    ...

  Six-pack abs, washboard abs, slim and trim waistlines—these colloquialisms reflect the aesthetic side of abdominal training. Old school thought [and you and me I wager] loves the aesthetic ideal, pursuing the Greek statuary standard but carved by present day living flesh. New School thought admires this aesthetic just as much—perhaps more [we’ll get to this mistaken disparity.] Old School thought valued internal function   as highly as the outwardly realized aesthetic presentation. They felt [correctly] that the hidden “guy wires” of unseen muscle, tendon and ligament were the levers and pulleys behind the curtain of flesh that fostered the performance and show that was visible to the naked eye. Here, New School thought falls down a bit. Here we have our disparity. New School thought gives primary place to visual presentation, internal stability is an afterthought that moves to the fore once an injury rears its head. Even then, these “internal stability” exercis...

  [Expanded with Old Man Film Recommendations.] For some it was Bruce Lee. For others, Chuck Norris. For those of a more recent vintage it may be Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, or Tony Jaa—all excellent by the way. Me, as a 58-year-old man and child of the 70’s, sure I had my Bruce Lee poster phase but, the real filmic influences, the ones that grabbed by my eye, my imagination, my soul, my aesthetic were two icons grounded right here in the grand ol’ American tradition—yeah, yeah, Billy Jack Korean Hapkido, Bong Soo-Han and all that…we’ll get to that. My youngster eye went to Charles Bronson and Tom Laughlin’s character of American Indian half-breed, Billy Jack. But, even here I am specific—it was not the Billy Jack of the increasingly hippie-dippie self-indulgent sequels, it was the original Billy Jack, even here less the Billy Jack of the 1971 film titled Billy Jack . I was smitten, captured, held by the 1967 quasi-biker flick, The Born Losers . In this version w...