[Below is an excerpt from the Pliant Physique Program. The
package is a 65-minute DVD & 12-page booklet detailing the Old School Principles
behind and detailing the Four Program Paths tailored to your Combat Athlete
needs.]
Pliancy vs. Flexibility, Part 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, calcified, etc.
Contrast our willows with tree limbs [or human limbs] that
do not yield to the force and snap, rip or tear rendering them 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.
[Note: This program will deal with minor force at
the extremes. The Unleaded Strength Volumes also have pliancy +
strength built into them at much greater force. Here, we address the base
building of strength while yielding.
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 emphasize, 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 into 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.
Sandow Over Yoga
The educated eye may see some similarity between some of
the postures/exercises and what can be found in some disciplines of yoga.
There are two reasons for that…
[For more information and a list of further contents, or to
start the Pliant Physique Programs yourself see here.]
Black Box Subscribers receive Unleaded Volume 1 for over 50%
off.
For information on The Black Box Subscription Service.
For ears-on support see our Podcast, Rough ‘n’ Tumble Raconteur.
Comments
Post a Comment