Blog

Declare Independence From Ineffective and Dangerous Workouts… Join TACFIT’s All-New Subscription Service App and Never Worry about Losing Your Freedom of Movement Again.

It could be loss of ability to drive, loss of ability to reach overhead, to play soccer, to crawl around with their kids, loss of freedom to dance, loss of ability to get a promotion or keep doing one’s job, loss of ability to travel to a new country, loss of ability to eat healthy food (or at all), loss of the ability to find shelter, loss of feeling the energy of love, loss of one’s loved one and the times they spent together, loss of one’s dearest memories…

All of these are a loss of freedom. And the most visceral, the most tangible – is loss of one’s very ability to move. It’s so insidious, the slow creep of losing function: one millimeter a month. It could be from dis-use (from lack of mobility drills), mis-use (such as strength training without compensation), or abuse (through improper technique or collision.) It’s that slow deterioration which erodes your freedom which you pine most for.

But you don’t need to experience regret. You can declare independence and reclaim your freedom. YOU CAN DO IT with TACFIT’s All-New Subscription Service!

For over 26 years our goal has been to deliver health conscious training products designed to prevent these losses of freedom before they occur. An innovative, systematic approach to training that bypasses generations of the dangerous “no pain, no gain” mentality that continues to drive mainstream exercise these days. The need to protect each other, our bodies, and our ways of life has set us apart from the competition along the way. We set the standard for functional, health-first training and continue to work around the clock to be the most intelligent training system anywhere in the world.

And after today’s historic announcement, it has never been easier to experience the TACFIT difference with the launch of our all-new subscription service. With three different options to choose from and a 7 day risk-free trial to get started:

Option 1: Daily TACFIT Workouts

$14.95 *$9.95

• TACFIT Classes Coached By Our Coaching Ambassadors
• Quick Protocol Workouts (Straight to the TACFIT Protocols for when you have just enough time to train)
• TACFIT Home Gym Workouts (Multi modality training – incorporating multiple tools from your home gym to optimize your workout experience)

Option 2: TACFIT Programs UNLIMITED Access

$24.95 *$19.95

• Unlimited access to all TACFIT, Viking Ninja, Steel Mace Yoga Training Programs Including New, Vintage, Sonnon Classics, 101’s and Future Releases!

Option 3: All Inclusive

$29.95 *$24.95

• Full access to all Daily workouts and our Complete TACFIT Library!

All Options come with the Complimentary iOS TACFIT App where you can experience your workouts like never before!

Take advantage of our Independence Day Launch Special and pay the discounted price forever (you can cancel at any time!)

Initially, you will view the best to mean: simple, inefficient (high effort) solutions to movement navigation problems. Vaulting over a fence is simpler than walking around to the gate, but requires effort and skill. These movements are simpler than the complicated behaviors of the unskilled (walking all the way around to the gate), but since they’re new, they require high muscular effort and demand higher cognitive attention.

Over time and practice, you begin to perform movement skills for their own sake, with an infatuation of your skill. You try to do ever more challenging variations. The current fitness fetish with movement looks like an Instagram debutante ball of amateur cirque performers and contortionists. At the level of expertise (but not yet mastery), your movement involves complex, inefficient solutions to problems (termed: complication), like performing a jumping front tuck to flip over the fence, instead of merely vaulting over it.

Finally, with age and experience, movement mastery evolves simple, efficient solutions to problems. The vault over the fence involves so little extraneous movement that it appears graceful and is experienced as effortlessness.

At my age, working with the very best athletes, surgeons, soldiers, pilots and agents, I define the best as those who have the simplest and most efficient solution to problems.

Why? Because they remain uninjured longer and thus get more practice than those who complicate solutions.

In neuroscience, we call skills: “neural assemblies.” The more you fire an assembly, the more branches it grows, the denser it becomes, and the more insulated it becomes (and thus, like any signal, the less cost, faster firing it grows).

But repetitive performance of a skill isn’t the only way to practice a skill. There are two other ways:

1.Cross-Referencing Neural Assemblies:

Because your brain is conservative, skills co-occupy portions of the same neural assembly. In other words, they share space, or portions of the same network, when they fire. Take a wrestler and place him in a jiujitsu match and his stance will remain like wrestling until he chooses to practice them differentiated.

But to the point, if the foundational elements of skills are the same, when you practice one skill, you’re refining the components of many skills who share the same assembly. If you’re practicing Judo, and your stance is always consistent, you perfect your stance with every throw that you practice.

This is the advantage of training in a system of motor education versus training in a collection of skill “variations.” When MMA first appeared in the early 90s, there were no systems to train in it, so development was slow compared to established systems of movement like Judo, Jiujitsu, Wrestling and Sambo. Today, systems of motor education have appeared, and although MMA is not one approach, there are developmentally consistent approaches to the movements; although MMA is still more vulnerable to poor programming than traditional systems.

The more widely disparate your skills are, the less total practice you perform. If there are no elements that are common, you’re not cross-referencing neural assemblies. For example, if when you strike, you use a boxing stance, kick – you use a kickboxing stance, grapple, you use a Judo stance, then there are three skills that must develop, rather than one. If you have a new stance which can be performed when boxing, kicking or grappling, then that stance receives three times as many rehearsals.

When you don’t practice a system whose foundational elements cross reference similar/same neural assemblies, you practice skills less, you develop more slowly, AND you suffer more overuse and misuse injuries (that result since less practiced skills have significantly greater injury rates).

People who dabble in many styles of movements cannot develop strongly and in a sustainable manner. They burnout frequently, are in pain and injured more often and with greater severity and never achieve personal mastery. You can identify them by the complication of their performances. Social media is full of these complicated movement acolytes who are all too willing to share with you their complicated movements which got them them injured and provided them with mediocre “success”.

Masterful practice involves a system of cross referencing simple and efficient skills. In motor science, this is alluded to as Virtuosity (common simplicity performed uncommonly well) and Elegance (graceful effortlessness).

Cross referencing neural assemblies allows you to develop virtuosity and elegance faster. There’s also another way…

2. Accurate, precise visualization

In addition to cross references skills in a system so that you “mass practice” it’s core competencies, you may accurately and precisely visualize a skill, not as a movie of someone else or yourself performing it (called disassociative visualization), but as first-person, through your own senses, what you see while performing it, what you feel in your hands and feet and through the changing pulls of gravity as you move across objects and space (called associative visualization).

Firstly, if you accurately and precisely visualize your skills, your brain cannot tell the difference between it and physical practice, because it must fire the neural assembly in the same way. You “mass practice” when you visualize.

Secondly, neuroscience shows that you decrease performance errors when you accurately and precisely visualize a skill before you subsequently execute the physical skill.

The more errors and deviations/variations you perform, the less you practice a common neural assembly. The less errors and deviation, the more you strengthen the same neural assembly. (And considering #1, the more you “mass practice” all of your core competencies).

Those who poorly practice versus those who masterfully practice can be concisely differentiated as: those who want to “do their best” at whatever they’re doing, versus those who strive “be better” at everything they do. The expert wants to be a better boxing when striking, a better kickboxer when kicking and a better wrestler when grappling. The masterful learner wants to be better at MMA, and so the must build consistently across all of the common core competencies of movement in the system.

Whatever your activity, you can try to do better at “it”, but inevitably, it’s your brain that learns and plastically changes (or doesn’t) because of who you “are”.

Everything you do is performed by the same brain, the more elegant and virtuous your brain becomes, the better you become whenever you move. So my advise to you is: don’t just go out there and try out whatever looks cool, as it’s probably over-complicated and high-cost.

Instead, practice a system of movement that lets you mass practice the foundational components of all movement, so that you become better at everything you do, and every way you move.

Don’t just do it. Be it!

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

Hello Friends,

Why do you plateau, backslide, and regress into pain and injury doing the same workout?

How may your workouts be working AGAINST you, rather than FOR you?

The answer is because we lack effective tactics for being healthily fit the way we were genetically designed to “Survive and Thrive.”

As a matter of fact, most people exercise in such a way that 50% of what they’re doing causes more harm than good, and even creates pain, injury and illness. Since the launch of our TACFIT comminuty over 25 years ago, our goal has remained the same, to enlighten people to come around and ask, “is my exercise tactical enough for my health and performance goals?”

Ask yourself, how can you exercise so you can:

• minimize time invested to 20 minutes/day
• maximize results in not just one aspect of fitness, but all aspects (power, strength, stamina, endurance, flexibility, agility, flow)
• increase available energy, not just for your workout, but throughout the day and restfully through the night.
• become pain and injury free, by removing the emergency brake before stomping on the accelerator.
  regain a powerful, graceful physique by training as we were evolved to move: the “fighter’s shape” without ever throwing a punch.

“Tactical fitness” has erupted across the fitness industry, and many disciplines believe exercising how we were evolved to move, delivers optimal fitness. But few experts present a rational theory as to how our movement evolved. We have proven ourselves both on the mat and in the ring winning world championships in multiple combat sports, as well as on the drawing board, being implemented into institutes and agencies worldwide.

But don’t take our success as reason alone. Let’s look at the hard science.

Neuroscientist and TED keynote speaker Daniel Wolpert, Ph.D. asserts, “our brains evolved for one reason only: to produce complex movement.” All activities, from feelings to thoughts to communication are physical actions designed to drive or suppress future movements.

Exercising “complex movements” becomes a compelling, rational argument for an evolutionary approach to fitness. As we were genetically designed for our “Paleo” hunting and gathering, our brains evolved specifically to enable complex movements which we find in our ancient and modern martial arts, as well as through tribal dance expressions such as b-­‐boy break-dance and urban “locomotive” disciplines like Parkour.

How we were designed to survive is precisely how we have evolved to thrive. If you want to excel in your fitness, you must tap deep into your genetic makeup, into the “symbolic” movements as Joseph Campbell describes, or the “archetypes” of Jungian psychology. Or as an increasing number of cutting-­edge neuroscientists are revealing, your nervous system evolved to support your survival, so your health best benefits, or “thrives”, when you move with that primal heritage in mind.

“Tactical Fitness”, or “movement which derives from and supports our primal heritage” allows you to: Move to Survive so you become Fit to Thrive.

So what key ingredient has been missing from fitness approaches, and prohibiting people from tapping into their physical flow of empowered mastery? Incremental progression. You begin with the simple and move to the complex in such a way that never frustrates, confuses or halts progress. That is why the complete TACFIT suite of programs breaks down movements into their simplest components, only then building them step-­by-­step in an error-less process.

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

The great failure of fitness programming is that it judges the effectiveness of an exercise prescription by your achievement of a target result, rather than your success at functionally adapting internally (hormonal lot) and externally (neuromuscularly).

Popular fitness makes the goal of the workout that you DO the workout. Unfortunately, the MEANS of exercise is adding mechanical stress to create physiological (and biochemical) adaptation relative to YOU, not relative to some belief in an arbitrary number (an “END.”) The end is not the means!

The best case scenario is that it assumes a linear progress. However, most programs don’t even include any form of intelligent progression for you to incrementally (functionally not dysfunctionally) adapt.

But this is not the worst atrocity committed by popular fitness programming. The primary danger and ignorance in exercise design is that it assumes you are a blank slate which can be built upon.

But we are not some mechanistic collection of gears and cogs which are fashioned into larger and larger engines. You don’t build a bigger engine through exercise.

Proper exercise allows you to become a more efficiently integrated ecosystem of potential responses to external (mechanical) and internal (chemical) stressors.

We are swimming ocean of biochemistry with storms of changing hormones shifting from day today and moment to moment. A properly designed program can be up shifted or downshifted EVEN DURING your workout, so that you supply the appropriate type and degree of stressor to cause functional adaptation (and not dysfunctional).

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

---

Have You Seen Our Expanded Line of TACFIT and Viking Ninja Apparel?

New Styles Are Arriving Weekly!

Zealous fanatical cults that, overtly or covertly, demand unquestioning obedience and absolute fealty to a headman feel threatened by the nature of mutually supporting communities like TACFIT. We’ve seen these groups lash out with extreme hubris at our members because we bravely dare to follow our own unique path. Such freedom, and its resultant self-mastery, shakes the very foundations of hierarchical cults.

Throughout my years in the martial arts I did not bounce from one style to the next. I carefully worked my way up the ‘ladder’ of three separate organizations, and I became the elected leader of each one. I had great hope that I would be able to fix things from the inside. I was mistaken. Hierarchies by their very nature transmit myopic expectations of internal relationships — in martial art: guru – disciple; in fitness: drill sergeant – plebe.

I found it as impossible to effect significant change when ‘leader’ of these organizations as I did when I was a ‘follower’. With the hierarchical model firmly in place, only razing it to the ground and rebuilding from scratch holds any chance of success.

I chose to start from scratch. I composed a daily health practice of the most fundamental biomechanical movements. I created a training approach to sophisticate these movements into flow, and to strengthen these dynamic ranges with weights. I sought to empower individuals so that they could experience their own unique movement potential and reclaim autonomy over their faculties.

I crafted an approach that uses progressive drills to control the tempo of interaction between participants. That tempo is the thin-sliced time framing which operates in the intuitive and emotional centers of the brain. These drills don’t just allow members to create their own unique solutions to physical riddles. The ability to improvise solutions carries over to all spheres of living, because the brain operates in practice in the same way that it does in an actual crisis.

Despite how sophisticated TACFIT is, it’s as simple as that. It amazes me that such an uncomplicated technology could be so revolutionary. It’s revolutionary not because of its content, but because of its radical departure from traditional models of physical education – the outdated memorization of the technical and tactical edicts of self-appointed gurus.

We have proven through member after successful member that there is no need for rehearsal, no need for memorization, and as a result no need for subordination. Sure, you can choose to be a follower if for some reason that suits you, but it is a choice and not a necessity.

TACFIT is a deliberately created approach to uncovering and refining your own unique truth. No matter how much vitriol this may elicit from the sycophantic followers or the untouchable gurus, every individual is born with the right to find their own light and to follow their own path. I believe that we have a duty to support anyone who sets out upon such a daring personal odyssey.

When I started this community I first set out to magnetize those like-minded spirits who possessed the strength to support others in the daunting task of escaping the asphyxiating yoke of hierarchies. It was an enormous challenge, because even good-natured, well-intentioned martial artists and fitness enthusiasts seem never to have considered such a radical notion before TACFIT.

Can you believe how far we’ve come in such time? Our numbers continue to swell around the globe. Wayfaring travelers marooned by the traditional hierarchies that infect every culture can now find an oasis of relief from oppression in our community. ‘Merely’ continuing as we are, supporting each new member in the pursuit of the dreams they hold precious, is ‘enough’. Once on that individual road to self-mastery, the freedom they experience is impossible to relinquish. We know to the core of our being that we will never go back to that tiny prison. We see the universe of possibility that has opened up before us. We know that, Heaven forbid we should err, we have a community to support us with the mirth of empathy — for we’re all here together laughing at ourselves and at our silly, wonderful journey on this spaceship Earth.

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

---

I hear many people say that they’re worried about the performance levels as a result of recovering from an injury, and facing the ominous tick-tock of our aging.

Sometime along the way, I had to prioritize training smart over training hard. Some would say that it’s a critical distinction. It’s a maturation process which we either face, or likely life gives us the opportunity to face it in the form of recovering from a traumatic event.

One of the most difficult decisions I ever faced was changing my perspective that training had to be hard in order to be quality. Don’t get me wrong, I train myself and others very hard. But the manner, the frequency and the duration are not as inefficient as when I was younger.

The wonderful thing about aging is that it demands that we learn balance, patience, persistence, humility, and respect. We can still push the envelope, but under the auspices of training smart. Sounds like a negative? It’s not. Intelligent, efficient training is the gateway to mastery.

We can’t afford the all-out, willy-nilly exertions of our more youthful counterparts. With age comes the increasing need for deliberation, precision, timing, rhythm, sensitivity, and accuracy. Fortunately, balance, patience, persistence, humility, and respect unlock these virtues… if we let go of the belief system that more work is better. The truth is less work to accomplish the same goal is preferable.

You’re already effective, so you can stop working towards that end, and focus on becoming increasingly more efficient – or as you’ll hear around here – “Efficiently Effective”: the ability to do the right thing in the right way at the right time.

Very Respectfully,

Hello Friends,

Practice something daily better than the day before, and mastery becomes inevitable. Nothing can resist this self-evident law of conditioning. Not even imperfect practice can withstand that maxim, fortunately for me. Swimming upstream from the shallow end of the gene pool, I am no accident. I’m not gifted, advantaged or privileged. I was forged out of tenacious resistance to quitting, and the fortune of brilliant coaching.

I may be a good fighter and a great grappler, but there are those better than me. However, I am a master of intelligent human performance. It’s really what has allowed us to thrive above all other species. We’re relatively weak for our bodyweight, and small in stature, lack any ostensible weapon advantage (no claws, fangs or horns), lack any protective covering (no scales, plates or even fur). We’re just naked, weak, short and unarmed. Except for our brain: that beautiful paradox which on one hand makes us painfully aware of our short existence, but on the other hand lends rise to our incredible use of tools, both obvious and abstract.

And yet, facing my physical and learning disabilities as a child, I relied upon our greatest gift, our mind, to condition the limitless excellence within us… to both unlock and refine the greatest power on the planet: our capacity for increased sophistication, beyond the snail’s pace trudge of genetic evolution. We evolve at the speed of our imagination…

And I’ve always dreamed BIG. I’ve always been the one who’s annoyed the status quo, the people who believe that I’m too big for my britches, that I think I’m better than they are. They’re right in a way: I think I’m better than myself (my current self). I think I’m bigger than the restrictive definitions I currently hold for myself. And I believe the status quo is the stagnant genetic cesspool of complacent mediocrity.

As I continue to refine with age, I continually rediscover that personal development isn’t a matter of more (of bigger, faster, stronger), but a matter of tighter discipline and deepening practice. The former dreams of our knuckle-dragging ancestry thumping through adversity; where the latter intuits that greater mental agility, more focused emotional control and supple physical grace outmaneuver, out-cycle and out-live any would-be competitors who remain gilded with the ever-obsolete game of “catch-up.”

Fitness is no different. Fitness is the gateway to personal development through physical exercise. This is why I was drawn to martial art; Fitness and martial art are in essence absolutely no different: they both serve the goal of increased sophistication through physical exercise.

Yet, as always there are those who seek to dumb-down the lightning speed of our conscious evolution by begging to our Stone age roots: to live primitive, primal and feral. But again… what advantage have we held over predators to our species, but our mind. And through romantic notions of long-lost gladiatorial eras, we regress.

Win the Battle – Lose the War Fitness

If you’re fit to face the next challenge, but then through emotional erosion and mental fatigue cannot recover, you’ve won the battle but lost the war. You should be better prepared than the challenges you’ll face, not merely fit to face them. That requires increased sophistication, not mere increased attributes. Bigger isn’t better, neither faster nor stronger. Only better is better.

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

Hello Friends,

The word “fitness” is thrown around a great deal. Every gym, martial arts school, aerobics instructor, personal trainer and even your mailman probably have their own opinions on what it means. The truth is, before you can say that someone is fit you have to identify what exactly they are fit for.

The way that a person trains will dictate what that person is in condition for, or in other words what they are fit to do. A marathon runner could do 1000 push-ups with a cow strapped to their back – but how would that make them fit or conditioned for a marathon?

Though it may seem like common sense, many people miss the forest for the trees when it comes to defining what fitness means.

The coach potato is more fit than a triathlete!!

Everything you do is training. Everything! Everything that you do produces a training effect, regardless of how you value that effect. A person who goes to work, sits behind a computer, comes home and clicks on the TV is fit. They have conditioned their body so that it is in the best possible state to sit on the couch or to slump over the computer screen. Their daily grind has caused a training effect. While we would all agree that this effect is not desirable, have no illusions that couch potatoes are fit. They are fit for the task that they have prepared themselves for.

Everything that we do produces an outcome, regardless of how we value that outcome.

This is why TACFIT promotes systems and programs that are HEALTH-FIRST. The health first approach is not based on a preconception of what fitness is. Health first means many things, but variables such as physique, how much you can bench, how far you can run and how fast, and how many times you can lift, squat or swing whatever are all secondary to health.

When people misunderstand what fitness is, it creates a problem. Often they unintentionally walk into a situation where a workout is challenging, and they walk out believing that they must be “out of shape” because the workout wore them out. They aren’t in shape — not for that particular workout.

There are two paths that diverge from this point. On the first path you can view your training program as an end unto itself. People do this all the time. They end up training to train. They work out to improve their performance in their workout. If that’s your thing more power to you. Be aware, though, that the adaptations your body is making are specific to your training and will not necessarily cross over to another venue. The body responds very specifically to the demands placed upon it (SAID Principle).

The activity that you want to be fit for should determine your training regime. When the 400 pound strongman fails to press the 800 pound barbell for the 10th time, he never says “I wish I would have done more running”.

Likewise, the marathon runner who is narrowly beaten at the last second never says “If only I would’ve spent more time on the bench press”.

This is why TACFIT always encourages asking questions of yourself to identify your goals as you set out to find an appropriate training program or exercise.

• What are your goals?
• What is your performance goal for your exercise?
• Along with the benefits of a particular exercise or program, what negatives will come along for the ride?
• How do you intend to address those?

As mentioned above, fitness means nothing without first defining what it is that we need or want to be fit for. An exercise is only as good as the results that it produces and how directly those results apply to the attributes or skills of your chosen endeavor.

So…how “fit” are you?

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

Hello Friends,

“If I look like THAT, then I shall be healthy,” blips through the mental radar a thousand times a day. We each experience the bombarding rain of marketing spear-heads hoping to penetrate your defenses, pierce your Fear-Reactivity and activate your submission to purchase a product or program.

“If I look like THAT, then I shall feel good,” echoes through our viscera as our organs, muscles, even our brain aches from the merciless onslaught of stress. We pine for the fading memory of pain-free movement, pain-free digestion, and endless energy, that physical exuberance marking the life of every child!

“If I look like THAT, then I shall be happy,” screams through the anguish of a mundane existence. In the “adult world” we feel like we’ve somehow lost something precious, that ineffable quality of bliss we each experienced as a child at play, in awe of the world, and hoping the day would never end so we would never have to sleep and miss another moment of PLAY!

We are each an incomplete puzzle piece. Our unique characteristics hide from our view… because our tensions, fears, and traumas conceal our actual nature. If and when we remove our Fear-Reactivity, not only would we immediately know our unique form, but we would also immediately appreciate how we “fit” into everything and with everyone else in the world.

People constantly attempt to shape us… to place us within the box of their expectations. They express the sheer audacity to be surprised when we defy their attachments to an “image”… a “shape” that they craft in their minds of who they think we are. Anytime we feel imposed upon by conventional fitness rhetoric, we ought to reject their attempts to impose their “shape.” Continue to reveal your own true form, and in doing so, gain the ability to help others reveal their form.

One of the most impacting quotes I had ever read was from Horace Mann – “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” For some reason, that resonated with me… Sometimes, honestly, it nearly drove me insane with the uphill struggle building a radical business founded upon play and community. I thank God for my family’s support to endure these trials, and for the blessing of being able to see today’s thousands of members as a result.

Stay focused upon the REAL GOAL, our true purpose – find your form… and help others find their own. That is what will make the world better… no matter how you express it, no matter what your vocation, no matter what venue.

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

Han Suyin wrote: “There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.” We often hear people in the fitness industry say that ‘strength is a skill’. They then attempt to muster as much strength as humanly possible to perform the simplest of tasks, rather than make the task more efficient. They remain ‘stuck’ in the SISS mentality (Stuck in Simplistic Stupidity) instead of allowing grace and poise to naturally flow from skill development.

This is how our nervous system adapts to conditioning. If conditioned only to maximal tension, we begin to react in all situations with maximal tension. In many cases this elicits a stretch reflex and actually causes an injury! Did you know that about 40% of sidelining knee injuries in the NFL are non-contact related? They are caused by lack of kinesthetic sense, agility and resilience.

Research demonstrates that most injuries and impediments occur not because of a general or high-tension deficit, but because of a lack of ability to absorb and retranslate force, especially at extreme and unexpected ranges. We must learn to apply appropriate force to each situation. To do this we must specifically condition our nervous system.

The TACFIT principle of Selective Tension holds the following imperative: “Apply tension specific to the degree required to accomplish the task.” In other words, we want to train our nervous system to use ‘just enough’ force in whatever we’re doing.

When first learning to use a Clubbell®, Kettlebell or a Steel Mace, many people simply grip hard and hold on. But this grasp must become intelligent, and it must vary as these tools are moved through diverse ranges of motion. Each digit applies independent tension that varies throughout each phase of the movement. This teaches our hands sensitivity WHILE strength training. It teaches us to select the appropriate tension, not only to the exercise but also to each component of movement within it.

Although some may tell you that the body acts in isolation, we all intuitively know that this is not true. It defies empirical evidence and it contradicts what we know of biochemistry, neuropsychology, and psychophysiology. HOW you train, HOW you become and remain fit, affects everything about you! When you transform yourself, take care to decide in advance the MEANS of that transformation, because that vehicle remains with you. You will become HOW you train.

We’ve all heard the old saying: Do not mistake gentleness for weakness. And yet, on average we hold the sangfroid, measured response called ‘proportional force’ in martial art / tactical circles with some disdain, and we romanticize the image of the hero charging in, abandoning his senses and neglecting care. There’s a time to fight, but with gentleness we find the strength to inoculate harm without standing in its gale.

How can one aspect of our life exist in isolation – and why would we want it to? If we condition ourselves to respond to any movement with maximal tension we will begin to respond to all things with maximal tension – disagreements with our spouse, conflict with a coworker, road rage, negative self-talk, et cetera. When we practice Selective Tension we practice Gentle Strength. We learn how to discern the appropriate force to resolve whatever situation is at hand. This teaches us how to prevent force escalation, how to inoculate threats, and how to overcome hardship without making it more difficult than absolutely necessary.

Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon

*** Are you ready to incorporate selective tension training in your health-first toolbox? Check out 4 New Steel Mace Training Programs just launched this past week! The Steel Mace is one of the most effective tools for applying the selective tension principle and to take your fitness training to the next level! ***

Hello Friends,

You have to back up and get a running start at any problem. That applies to musculoskeletal issues as well. Every push needs a pull. That seems easy to understand when it is said in that linear way, but many get lost as what to do about their functional balance when rotation enters the equation.

And besides the 3 degrees of linear movement (the 3 translations of heaving up and down, swaying side to side, and surging front and back), there are 3 degrees to human movement in rotation: twisting right and left (called yaw), bending right and left (called roll) and bending front and back (called pitch).

Every twist needs its counter-twist.

And yet, to make life harder, no movement happens in isolation. There is no full bodily movement that only involves a single degree of motion. A full body motion always has multiple degrees. Only individual joints have individual degrees of freedom.

PROBLEM 1:

For every single movement you do, whether an exercise in your workout or a repetitive motion at your job or a fixed position in your lifestyle, you create a specific adaptation. If you don’t compensate for that specific adaptation, you will always (repeat: always) create imbalance. For every push you need a pull, and for every twist, you need a counter-twist.

PROBLEM 2:

No movement you do is with perfect form (alright, maybe you’ve executed perfect form a couple times in your life, but they’re rare events). If perfect form is a 10 on a scale of 1-10, even with very good technique (let’s call that an 8), you’re still accumulating SOME imperfection: you’re still collecting those 2s. Just as you adapt to those 8s of near-perfect repetition, you’re also adapting to that small margin of imperfection.

DOUBLE SOLUTION:

What solves #1 also happens to solve #2: whatever you do that causes an adaptation, you must undo in the opposite direction. In the parlance of Circular Strength Training within the TACFIT system, the first biomechanical system of functional balance, you must use “Compensatory Movement.” For every push you need a pull and every twist, its counter-twist. Moreover, for every degree you’ve moved with poor technique, you need to move in the opposite direction to undo it.

Compensatory Movement involves the strategy of training the functional opposite of that to which you’ve adapted: good technique and intentional or bad technique and unintentional. You must consider all 6 degrees of freedom: 3 in translation and 3 in rotation, and both directions of each of those 6 degrees.

It sounds like advanced science (and it is), but it’s actually simple to apply, especially by a certified TACFIT Coach. However, if you don’t have a TACFIT Coach, decades of research have been invested into creating an incremental approach that allows you to regain your functional balance, called Progressive Yoga.

Progressive Yoga uses a signature method of removing each “part” of a movement and regaining each degree of freedom methodically. You may be on level one in one movement for only a couple days, but on a different movement, you may be on level one for a couple weeks to months, because you had been severely adapted, and THAT happened to be the exact movement which was unwinding it.

Each of the six degrees of freedom are addressed, and each degree of freedom of every joint. Fortunately, you don’t need to know what they are, you don’t need to understand the science, and you can do it completely on your own. If you want to increase comprehension, attention and memory, MOVE. And move in all degrees of freedom.

When you’re foggy, groggy, unclear and cranky, move in each degree of freedom. You will discover that those chemicals stabilize, your brain will optimize, and your muscles will activate. That is rocket science, but not mine. That’s the intelligent design of the most sophisticated organism every created: the human brain.

Very Respectively,

Scott B. Sonnon

Progressive Yoga Program

Hello Friends,

Freedom isn’t free; keep things in good order. The physical body is the perfect model for the political body. The healthiest nation is the one which balances freedom and order; too much freedom results in anarchy, too much order – in tyranny. In between, nudging to one side or the other dependent upon the issue, the longest surviving nations with the greatest quality of life.

Similarly, fitness should be a balance between mobility and stability. Too much mobility and ruptures occur; too much stability, and movement becomes impossible. Either pole creates low quality.

The parts of the body which should be free, can only be free, if the parts that are stable, remain stable. If a joint meant for freedom becomes restricted, the body robs freedom from a stable joint.

Destabilizing a joint, meant to remain in order, creates first vulnerability, and then collapse at the first collision or sudden shift. Likewise “stretching” a stable joint, because it’s believed to be “inflexible”, causes mobile joints to limit their freedom because of the threat to the entire body.

Unfortunately, mobile joints have the motor-belief that more movement is always better, so they’re in a constant state of “encouraging” stable joints to join the movement.

Contrarily, stable joints have their motor-belief that mobile joints should assist in the positional security of the entire structure, and seek to impose stability and prevent “unneeded” movement.

You need to be the executive office in charge of these two big babies. You can’t afford to favor one or the other but must look at the whole picture. How is the body AS A WHOLE gaining greater function for all of its constituent parts balancing safety and quality of life?

A sound fitness philosophy and a sound political philosophy aren’t balanced at any point in time, but in a constant balancing act. At the apex of that philosophy is a commander in chief with no ulterior motive; only the ostensible compassion to keep both babies healthy, but not cave to the tantrums of either.

Very Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon