An Overview of Matrixing in the Martial Arts

The Truth about Matrixing

Great day to you!

and a GREAT work out!
Lots of sweat,
maybe a little blood,
just enough to let you know
you are more than alive.
People who walk around are alive.
Those who work out are getting more alive.

I’ve had a lot of new people to the newsletter lately,
so let me sum up Matrixing.
Let them know what they got them selves into.
Incidentally,
what I am about to tell you
I wrote in a letter to a fellow.
His question was that he wasn’t sure what he was getting,
he was studying,
but matrixing didn’t always make sense.
So I thought he needed an overview.
And here it is for you.

Before we get into it,
however,
I have a special deal
for those who have been wanting the Rolling Fists course.
I finally figured out why it wasn’t showing up on the menu at Monster.
As usual, it was one of those slap your head things.
I forgot to check a box,
and it was disappearing.
Doh! (Smack)

Anyway, stay tuned for a special offer,
after the newsletter.
I’ve got a special deal
where you can save $30
on Rolling Fists.
Right now,
however,
here is the answer I wrote
concerning an overview of matrixing.

Hi Michael, glad you are having fun with the matrixing…probably an overview would help you out at this point.

The one sticking point for most people is that they have a hard time viewing the body as a machine. This is because if the body is a machine, then what are they? And the answer: they are awareness, a point in space ‘giving off’ light. Or ‘shedding awareness.’

This point, of being a point of awareness, is actually the subject of neutronics. I’ll attach a booklet (prologue) for you to better understand that subject.

The second thing to remember, in this overview, is the example I give of Eddie Rickenbacker (pg 102 of Matrixing: The Master Text).

Eddie visualized his plane on a line through space, and he had to handle incoming forces, so he visualized himself as a center of a sphere, and then came up with solutions for every angle of attack into that sphere.

Doing this for the body (the machine that you occupy, or ‘drive’) you come up with the rules of operation for the body. There are five specific rules for operating the body efficiently. These are:

Breath, relax, sink downward, align the body, coordinate the body in motion

After these five rules for maximizing potential of personal motion of the body, which are applied through the practice of form, you get into analyzing the forces and flows (directions) of incoming ‘objects’ (fists, feet, etc.). This is where you begin to construct matrixes of blocks, matrixes of ranges, and so on.

And this is where you construct specific theories of art. Karate as a defense, or Aikido, or tai chi, and so on. Each art describes a specific range, or angle of motion, and is defined by a specific concept or concepts.

Okay, so that is the overview. But, don’t worry if matrixing doesn’t ‘burst inside your head.’ Some people, a very few people, get a blast of enlightenment, everything makes sense, they see the whole picture, etc. But most people just have to compile the art, piece by piece, and settle for becoming more and more competent, until they just know everything.

There are times when I have had ‘mystical insight,’ where everything was like a message from God, a vision, and I understood everything. That was because I had accumulated enough data, and it suddenly, in a moment, made sense.

But other times I would just work and work for a few years, would experience no enlightenment, but found that I had developed superior abilities in various areas.

In Karate I had a moment of profound vision, the world turned gold, and I understood. But in Pa Kua I never experienced that, but did find, after a few years of walking the circle, that my legs were like oaks, yet filled with a lightening like energy.

So don’t worry if things don’t suddenly open up for you, just keep going, settle for the slow but sure knowledge of abilities gained over time. Just realize that you keep accumulating data, until you have the knowledge, until there are no more questions.

Think of where you were before you started the martial arts, and where you are now, and realize that some day you will be looking back to where you are now, and be somewhere very, very advanced compared to now.

Just remember, the martial arts are a BIG field. But the concepts are simple. And the process is actually one of simply gathering and arranging data until everything makes sense and there isn’t any more mystery; it is a process of isolating the simplicities and then applying them to the larger field of chaos that is the accumulated martial arts.

Hope this helps, and thanks for getting me to sum it up. I’ll print portions of this email as a article or blog that others may understand the process they go through when matrixing.

Have a great work out! Al

So there it is,
an overview.
It is VERY simple,
yet the complexity of applying simplicities
in a classical martial art
can take decades,
lifetimes.
But that is why I have matrixing.
To shorten the process.
To get you there in months,
not decades.
Still,
it is not always easy to get,
sometimes you need extra.
So…write me.
Did you know that I answer ALL emails.
If I don’t answer yours
it is because it never arrived,
or I had a DOH! moment and misplaced it,
or some other stupid reason.

So just ask again.
And, I try to go in depth into any answer.
If it’s simple,
I’ll say it simple,
then throw a couple of hundred words trying to make sure
that my answer is thoroughly understood.

Now,
about Rolling Fists.

Rolling Fists is the advanced form of freestyle I teach
after someone has gotten to black belt.
Or with specific martial arts I teach.

It is based upon Lop Sau,
but it is not just a short drill,
but rather a complete form of freestyle.

You will see it in several of my courses,
but the Rolling Fists I am talking about here
is a video course of me teaching it.
38 individual lessons,
step by step, point by point,
making sure that that the student has NO misunderstanding
concerning this advanced form of freestyle.

Now,
this is VERY intense stuff.
And,
I actually thought it was listed in my courses.
BUT,
due to me not checking a box
it was not appearing in the menu.
So now it is,
and here it is…

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/rolling-fists/

You can go there and order to your heart’s content.

EXCEPT…I have a special, little offer for you.

When I was making the disks
the labels didn’t fully print.
So I’ve got five courses
and a couple of disks on each course
have faded labels.
That’s it.
That’s the big mistake.
Faded labels.

But I can’t sell faded labels.
And I hate to throw them away.
So instead of charging $49.95 for the set of disks,
if you will accept a couple of faded labels,
I’ll sell them to you for $19.95.

That’s a $30 savings.

All you have to do is go to the page offering The Punch
http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/hard-punch/
And order,
then email me at aganzul and tell me you would like the Rolling Fists faded labels.

One of the disks on this set is badly faded,
but you can read it.
And one of the others is just a little faded.
The other two disks aren’t too bad.

So,
special deal.
a fifty dollar course,
on disk,
$20.

Now,
have yourself a FANTASTIC work out!
I look forward to hearing from you.

Al

Kill Him! He’s Got Martial Arts Protective Gear On!

How Protective Gear Ruined the Martial Arts

Speaking of martial arts protective gear, I was there when it was first introduced. This was about 1968, I was an instructor at a Chinese Kenpo school, and the school owner came out and placed several pieces of protective gear on the floor before freestyle class.

We stared at the martial arts padding, and listened as the owner told us we wouldn’t suffer any more injuries, that we could really refine our kenpo fighting techniques, and the sun was going to shine in Mudville.

We laced up body protectors, pulled on shin guards, fit out fingers into the gloves, obscured out vision with headmasks, and bowed to each other.

The first few minutes were undoubtedly laughable. We were all uncoordinated under the sports padding, but it wasn’t long before we began to realize our rock ‘em sock ‘em potential.

Pow! Ooof! Punch! Kiai! Ow!

Ow?

That’s right, we quickly realized that protective gear didn’t protect. What it did was make us hit harder. After all, it wasn’t supposed to hurt, right?

So we punched harder and kicked harder, and, suddenly, somebody’s laying on the floor. Hurt.

That wasn’t supposed to happen!

But it did, and you know what the solution was?

More freestyle protective gear. Mouthpieces. Harder shielding. Bigger helmets.

And here’s the funny thing, before we got protective gear we didn’t have many injuries. Sure, a mouse under the eye, a cut lip. But nothing serious.

Afterwards? Well, I broke a toe. And then, a few months after that, I broke a finger.

Ouch!

But we kept using those pads, and for a simple reason: they cost money.

Yep. We paid good bucks for that stuff that didn’t work, and the school owner was quite happy about that.

Fortunately, not long after my injuries, I went to a karate school that didn’t use protective gear. Thank goodness. i was tired of getting hurt.

Tired of getting hurt? Matrix your martial art and you will cut down on injuries. Go to MonsterMartialArts.com.

How to know somebody in the martial arts

Newsletter 707
How to know somebody in the martial arts

All right!
Another perfect day!
Perfect for martial arts, that is.
Everything else is okay,
but martial arts are…THE BOMB!

To know when somebody else is going to do something,
that’s good martial arts.
Not to have reaction time,
but to be intuitive.

I was in a forum the other day,
and this fellow said you couldn’t know somebody,
that if you thought you did you were prideful.
He had lots of fights,
and based his opinion on that experience.

Look,
in a fight there is give and take.
It is a game,
somebody wins and somebody loses.
Martial arts are not about losing,
so you don’t want to train in something
that will teach you to lose some of the time.

What you want to do is train in a method
where you learn to win all the time.
Where you see the fight coming
and learn to avoid it.

So you take turns being the attacker,
you learn to analyze what is happening
so that you can know what is happening.
The key here is called awareness.

To train in forms Will make you aware of what your body can do.
To train in applications Will make you aware of what the other body Can do.
Then freestyle will make sense; then fighting can become a learning experience.
Without forms, Applications, drills,
And all the other tools of karate or any other martial art, freestyle is just fighting.
It is just fighting and there is only marginal increase in awareness.

So what this fellow was telling me,
When he said you couldn’t know anybody,
was that he could not become aware.

Is there anything other than awareness in this world?

Your time from birth to death,
and before birth and after death,
Is nothing more than the sequence of you being aware.
Every experience you have had or will ever have,
Is nothing more than the track of your awareness.
Right now, The whole universe is nothing more
Than what you are aware of.

There is nothing more than awareness.

So why not use the martial arts to train that awareness?
Will that not only enhance your existence?
If existence is only what you are aware of,
Shouldn’t you use whatever tool you can
To increase that awareness?

Okey-dokey,
If you want perfect form,
If you want to be able to make any application work,
If you want to actually become aware in freestyle,
And not just A fellow who trades wins and losses,
Try the master instructor course.

Your awareness depends upon it.

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/4-master-instructor-course/

So, great to be back,
Have a fantastic workout,
And I’ll talk to you later.

Al

A New Way of Fighting with Martial Arts!

There are many modes of freestyle,

and I want to tell you about one,

 it’s one of my favorites,

and I use it when I want to make a point,

make a student think,

or just to end the contest

in a way that is so unspectacular

that it is spectacular

and everybody goes  ‘ooh!’

It is simply so short and sweet,

so quick,

so concept oriented.

First,

there are only four blocks.

The back of the wrist horizontal.

The palm horizontal.

The back of the wrist vertical.

The palm vertical.

I’ll leave it to you

and a little practice

as to how to use these blocks.

Now,

the strike is a simple vertical punch.

You start it with the hand held open

 in front of the body

fingers pointed towards your opponent.

you simply block,

then punch.

That’s it.

A little practice,

and you would be shocked

at how well this works.

And,

it works in freestyle.

Now,

there is more to it.

I figured this out

from doing Pan Gai Noon.

That’s one of the three complete arts

offered on

Evolution of an Art.

I did Pan Gai Noon,

analyzed the blocks and figured how the matrix of the art,

and saw what was possible.

But,

in doing the Pan Gai Noon,

I learned how to drop my weight

fix myself to the ground

without appreciable change in stance.

The most I do is point the feet in,

sink an inch,

and that’s it.

And,

I learned different things about

the tightness of the fist.

I had been doing the finger touching close the fist punch thing

for a long time.

Now i had to do it out of palm blocks and back wrists.

Most of all,

I learned different things about timing.

See, here’s the thing,

every art has different modes of timing

you have to figure out what each mode is,

and,

you do enough modes,

you enter mushin no shin.

Cool, eh?

never thought it would be so simple.

But it makes sense.

Mushin no shin means mind of no mind.

But the mind is memory,

memory is time.

And that’s why I frequently refer to mushin no shin

as ‘Time of no time.’

Do without the memotyr,

and you are doing without time

and pereceiving things directly

as awareness

as they are happening

with no memory filters.

Now,

here is the kicker.

It takes time to accumulate enough techniques,

enough arts,

especially if they are going to have

different modes of timing.

So you matrix.

you pick up karate.

You pick up kung fu and blinding steel,

whatever you happen to like,

the timing modes are different

so mushin no shin happens faster.

The courses are logical,

easier to do,

faster to make intuitive,

faster to know.

So somewhere in there,

sooner than later,

you’re going to mushin no shin.

These guys with LOTS of experience,

all they have to do

is read the data,

they already have the arts.

The arts get made logical,

everything makes sense,

and

zingo bingo,

they are there.

New guys have to start from the beginning.

And,

the terrible misfortune with new guys,

they don’t have the platform of experience

to understand what I am saying,

so they read about

instead of do.

Old guys have already done.

New guys tie into the old ways,

but that’s okay,

I’ll see them in twenty years,

and we’ll make sense of their arts then.

Too bad.

They could have done it in a year or two.

Instead…twenty years.

But,

what you gonna do, eh?

Anyway,

that’s about it.

I’m not really pushing mushin no shin this week,

that just sort of snuck in there,

popped out while I wasn’t looking.

I was more interested

in people accumulating more arts.

Evolution of an Art

http://www.monstermartialarts.com/Evolution_of_an_Art.html

It’s a massive amount of work,

three arts,

books and videos,

gives you a tremendous amount of data.

And it’s fun.

It is just a blast

to work through these forms,

get some friends and play with the techniques,

and get better.

So,

hope I see you on that page,

and you guys and gals have a great week,

and a great work out,

and I’ll talk to you later.

Al

BTW, if you want to learn the fastest, mot efficient method for learning how to freestyle in literally DAYS, check out How to Fight!

The Right Way To Learn Martial Arts Freestyle

My favorite part of the martial arts is Karate Fighting. Sadly, nobody knows the best way to do martial arts freestyle. They keep insisting on teaching the stuff that ends up in pain and bruises and body injury.
Check out the video, then I’ll tell you more.

I know, the reason for Karate, or Kenpo or Taekwondo, and martial arts in general, is to hurt somebody, correct? Sorry, it isn’t. If you think that, then you’ve got it wrong…totally and dead wrong.

The real reason is to control an attacker, and modern martial arts freestyle methods do not teach you how to control, only to hurt. Interestingly, I was there when the freestyle scene went bad. Further, there are methods which teach one how to freestyle easily and without the pain within a couple of hours.

In my first lesson in kumite my kenpo sensei beating the stuffings out of me. The theory was that martial arts were a rite of passage, you had to go through pain, that was the only way to get better. While I survived the lesson, and even thrived on it, other students quit, and now you know why so many people quit the martial arts.

Towards the end of my kenpo training the school owner began making us wear (buy) protective gear. Instead of offering protection, however, it just encouraged us to strike each other harder, and we actually suffered more injuries. I quickly realized it was just a way to increase dollars for the dojo.

I then went to a traditional karate training hall, and, with no protective padding, stopped getting all the injuries. I still got a some bruises, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, but no more broken bones. The sensei was teaching us how to control control, not to destroy.

This lesson, the benefits of control over destruction, stuck with me, and when I opened my own training hall I played with all sorts of methods to teach Kumite effectively, without the pain and trauma. And I finally understood a basic truth…people stop perceiving when you strike them. Isn’t that an interesting concept to come to grips with after years of beating people up?

Thus, I teach freestyle in stages, and I use methods which do not close the eyes of the student, but rather opens their awareness. It’s incredibly real and effective, and I guarantee my students will survive on the street better than most. Simply, they haven’t been trained to shut down their perceptions, but rather to open their awareness, and the shocker is that using my methods people can learn Martial Arts freestyle within a couple of hours.

Find out the right way to learn freestyle within a couple of hours! Go to Monster Martial Arts and check out the Three Month Black Belt Course.

The Kumite Technique I Never Expected and Which Blew Me Away

I was learning how to freestyle at the Kang Duk Won in San Jose some forty years ago, and I was having a  ball. Hit and kick, takedown, wowzer dowzer! And that was when I learned a nasty, little Kumite Technique that really floored me. Check out the video, and then I’ll tell you about it.

Suddenly, the instructor, Bob Babich, stepped in and faced me. The class gathered around to watch the instruction.

“You’ve been forgetting something,” Bob said. Then he leaped in, grabbed my belt and pulled, and punched me in the face.

What?  You can grab the belt? But, that’s…that’s not…”

He grinned.

We’re trained to see the belt as sacred, the ultimate goal. He thought of it as a tool to order the class, and something to use when beating people up.

Well, that’s the way it goes, you learn something new every day, and…he grabbed my belt! Waa!

And that was the Kumite Technique which really floored me. Broke my belief system, it did. Try it, and it works for you, then check out the old Kang Duk Won at Monster Martial Arts. It’s on the Evolution of an Art page.

How to Get Hurt in Kumite Class…and Make Money.

Would Chuck Norris Use Gloves?

I walked into the Kumite Class and everybody was putting on pads. Shin pads, arm pads, one guy was even figuring out how to wear a pad around his whole torso?

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Latest thing,” the instructor told me. “Wear these and you won’t get hurt.”

Now, this was weird, because we didn’t have any problem with getting hurt. We took a few bruises, split a lip,but nobody was getting hurt. So this was going to stop us from something that wasn’t happening. Curiouser and curiouser.

So, I put them on, and used them, and I found out that people got hurt. In fact, they got hurt more. Because people had pads on their fists they figured they had to hit harder to make effect. We actually had a lot more injuries with pads than without. Simply, we weren’t as careful, and we weren’t trying to cultivate control because, doggone it, loss of control meant you could get hurt.
And here’s something interesting to think about. Boxers use big old gloves, and people get brain damaged and killed. I think over a 100 boxers were killed in the ring last century, and it is continuing.
But, MMA, which uses skinny, little gloves, has no deaths.
Hmmm.
So less padding causes greater control. And greater control causes more art.
Double Hmmm.
But, forget that, and just remember something my instructor told me after class. You see, I talked to him, told him how I felt, and he told me, “We can sell these to every kid. The parents, you see, they don’t want their kids to get hurt.”
Money. Profit. Death of Art.
Well, disagree or not…I know there will be a lot of opinions out there…but I think the art died a little in Kumite class that day. Drop by Monster Martial Arts for some grest articles, and the best (and most economical) martial arts method in the world.

Now,

Most Fun Cheapest Freestyle Training Device!

I wanted to freestyle, try out moves, work on techniques, but I had no one to play with. Wah!
So I asked my wife to beat me up. She said she’d love to, but she didn’t know Karate.
That’s cool. I had a great and cheap freestyle training device. I’ll tell you about it right below this video.

I took a towel and wrapped it around the end of a pole used for push brooms. I duc taped it tight. I then had her whap me.

Man, did I have fun. I blocked to my hearts content, tried to close with the evil B**** having such a good time. Snapped kicks and punches, and pulled them with a few inches to spare.
She finally got tired of hitting me, she wasn’t getting through.

What? I was supposed to let her hit me? Ha!

Anyway, I got a great work out, and all the freestyle my heart could handle, all with the cheapest and greatest freestyle training device you can make in two minutes.

Got a free book on the home page at Monster Martial Arts. Come and get it.