Andy Freebird: [00:00:00] There’s animals that can do things that humans can’t, obviously. Like we can’t fly like an eagle. We can’t dive to the bottom of the ocean like a whale. But the variety of movements that a human can make, this is beyond anything else. The more that you become proficient in any way of moving your body, you’re that much better at moving your body in any other way.
It just starts to become almost a game of exploring what can your body actually do. Yeah. And there doesn’t seem to be any limit. People are always creating new movements in martial arts, new movements in dance.
Master Victor: That intuitive nature comes out. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: Because , we have so much creativity as human beings and we can use that creativity and our intelligence to come up with these new ways of moving that are just, far beyond what any other animal is capable of
doing
Welcome to the unlimited you podcast, believing firmly in the limitless potential that resides within each individual. [00:01:00] Your hosts, Master Victor Almeida, a distinguished martial arts expert and Andy Freebird, a holistic health coach specializing in calisthenics, nutrition and strength training, are here to guide you in unlocking your inner power.
Each episode offers practical knowledge from strength training techniques to the calming practices of meditation, tailored to enhance your physical, mental and spiritual well being. Join us on this empowering journey and embrace the warrior that lies within you.
Master Victor: I’m Master Victor. This is my friend Andy Freeberg.
Nice to meet you.
We are here to talk about martial arts, calisthenics, meditation, breath work, strength training, stretching, and how to create an unlimited you, a better version of yourself. Let’s get started. All right. Yeah. First, , a lot of people don’t know how to even get started.
They feel. Like, where do I go? Yeah. Like, they don’t know [00:02:00] what school to go to. There’s a
Andy Freebird: lot of information out there. It’s confusing. Yeah. People need to figure out just what’s the very first step to take.
Master Victor: Yeah. And what I guess we call them is a bunch of McDojangs. They’ve just kind of spread it out and they just want to hand out belts and take money and the fast food chain Yeah, yeah, they’re not really trying to teach martial arts.
They’re trying to pay get a patron So it’s definitely something to be wary about real martial arts schools. Nice, you know how I put it They make you earn your belts. They make you earn Your advancement and demonstrate that you’ve actually learned the material. Okay. And as far as the martial arts journey, it starts off with one of two routes striking or grappling.
That’s usually where people start, striking like Taekwondo, karate, or grappling, like present Jiu Jitsu or Judo, or even wrestling. [00:03:00] And then people eventually get into weapons. And then into energy work, learning to calm the body, to let the instincts come out, , and , the striking, that’s when you’re standing up, trying to keep somebody away, once you get a little closer and grabbing people, it becomes a grappling, take it to the ground, submissions, joint locks, all that stuff weapons, , it’s an extension of the body.
So you have like swords, stabs, right?
Andy Freebird: Nunchuck transfer force into the point of the weapon rather than your hands, your feet, elbows, knees, that kind of
Master Victor: thing. Exactly. And you usually learn those, ideally, after you learn one of the two basic forms, because weapons, you’re usually going to end up hitting yourself.
Right. Yeah. And it requires a little bit more, kind of, understanding of finesse and, mortar skills to be able to It’s more dangerous. Yeah. And then the Chi work, I guess you [00:04:00] would relate to, like, Tai Chi.
It’s kind of a
Andy Freebird: fundamental aspect of all these things like yoga included the ability to like sense and move energy through your body.
Master Victor: Exactly. You have also like all the stomping, the drills and learning how to kind of exit the mind, enter the body, and then you can actually feel, using the ground as leverage points and really channeling the inner energy.
Yeah. This kind of your specialty here, , like guard training also incorporates calisthenics and strength training, and that’s extremely important. You want to talk a little bit about, yeah, sure.
Andy Freebird: So the thing that we call strength, right? If you ask somebody to define what that actually is, most of the time, they actually haven’t thought a whole lot about how to answer that question.
So I’m going to give a really simple breakdown of what it actually is. So it’s moving energy, right? And you’re using that energy to either [00:05:00] displace. External load. It could be a person, it could be a heavy rock, it could be a barbell in the gym or it could be the weight of your own body, something like a pull up or a pushup, right?
So rather than moving something outside of the body, you’re moving your body in relation to whatever the point of contact is, right? Usually your hands on a bar on the ground, something like that. So these movements, the basis of which is going to be moving your own body. You want to master that first, kind of like mastering striking before you would start using a weapon.
It’s kind of a good way to think about it. If you can’t move your body effectively and movements like a squat, pull up a pushup, it’s actually better to start with that and then move on to using external means of resistance or weight. Like dumbbells barbell machines that kind of thing.
Master Victor: Would you say there’s a big difference in?
resistance bands versus
Andy Freebird: weights Yeah, sure. So what you’re asking about is we call strength [00:06:00] curves and What that means is that the resistance? Is going to change somewhat during the movement. So with an elastic band because it’s stretching You’re actually getting peak tension when the band is the most stretched.
So let’s say if I was doing a bicep curl, there’s a lot more resistance here trying to pull me back than when that resistance band is lengthened down here, right? Now with a weight, it’s typically going to be a little bit the other way around. So with a weight, typically if I do a curl here, I can kind of just relax.
It’s going to feel heaviest closer to the bottom. And then some machines provide more of like a Even resistance, it doesn’t change the cable poles. Yeah. Like cables, which is like a rope and pulley set up. It’s like one of the most ancient of all, you know, mechanical devices. One thing to keep in mind though, is that muscles, as far as growing muscles, they typically respond better to being trained at length.
So that would [00:07:00] mean that using resistance bands and elastic things is not going to be as stimulative to growing muscle versus something like a free weight, or using the same principle with your own body. Like a pull up, you have all of this resistance when your muscles are actually lengthened and that’s going to stimulate more growth.
Master Victor: Yeah. Started in that dead position. Yeah. Yeah. Being able
to lift the. Big
tree trunk off your test chest.
Andy Freebird: Yeah. And just really maximizing the stretch, really focusing on controlling that lengthening of the muscle and stretching the fibers as far as you comfortably
Master Victor: can. Okay. Yeah. That’s a good question though.
Yeah. And, that ties into martial arts too, because , you’re throwing punches. If you don’t have the muscle, you’re not going to be able to deliver as much of an impact. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Now, although there’s the element of technique where the technique can amplify the amount of power you can deliver on the strike.
Yep. Without the actual muscle, you’re at a severe
Andy Freebird: disadvantage. [00:08:00] Definitely. So it’s what they say. Mass movement moves mass and simply if you have a scale and the heavier one side of that scale is the more easy it is to move the other scale. But that technique you’re talking about, I would say that’s a very a good example.
That would be like powerlifting where you’re training the technique for this one specific movement. Maybe it’s a deadlift, right? And they’re trying to get more and more efficient with this particular movement. You can have greater, greater levels of strength, but ultimately the ceiling of how much weight you’re going to lift is limited by your own mass, the heavier that you get, the more the actual end potential of how much weight you could lift will increase.
Master Victor: Yeah. And that can relate to muscle density, the actual weight. Yeah. Yep. The trade
Andy Freebird: off is that when absolute strength increases. Your relative strength decreases. So basically, the heavier you get, the harder it is to do bodyweight things. Yeah. Because your body weighs so much more. Mm hmm. Right? But, because you overall weigh a lot, then moving something else, like a barbell or another person, [00:09:00] becomes easier.
Mm.
Master Victor: That’s interesting. I guess why a lot of martial artists don’t want to bulk up too much, because harder to throw those fast strikes. Yep. Exactly. Which is Another reason why like you see a big guy who moves fast. That’s it’s actually scary. Yeah
Andy Freebird: You see people like that sometimes in uh kind of across different sports when people tend to be taller like baseball, for example, some of those people are incredibly fast, incredible reflexes, even though they’re bigger, heavier people.
Interesting.
Master Victor: Yeah. Hit that nice medium. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: It’s a balance point. Yeah. Right. Cause like if you’re too small. Like you said, we’re not really going to generate much power even with the best technique possible. Yeah. So you want to find that sweet spot. We can get more into that at another point if you want because I’ve done a little research on kind of where is that sweet spot and how to find it.
Master Victor: Absolutely. Yeah. And then that kind of correlates to, to stretching in a sense where, you know, if you bulk up too much, you’re not, you’re going to lose some range of motion. Definitely. If you’re not stretching or in the other [00:10:00] respect, I remember I was talking about this. If you just stretch, you’re probably going to lose.
Strength because you’re lengthening the muscles without building that density. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: So we know that there is like an immediate effect of that, which is if you just stretched and then you go and you try to do some weightlifting, you’re going to be weaker because you think about the fibers in your muscles are elastic, like rubber bands.
So if you stretch a band out a whole bunch might eventually return, but temporarily it doesn’t have that same spring to it.
Master Victor: Yeah. Yeah. And that, that’s one of the things we incorporate in our training is we stretch at the end to help elongate the muscles after you’ve exercised. That’s perfect. Yeah.
Whereas, you know, in a lot of traditional schools you’ll go to and. They’ll have you sit down for a 15 minute stretching routine before you get into the exercise and then you’re trying to build the muscle and that can be counterproductive.
Andy Freebird: Yeah, so I don’t have anywhere near the martial arts training experience [00:11:00] that that Victor does.
Victor has been practicing martial arts for how many years has it been now?
Master Victor: 20, 25, something, something around there. So the majority
Andy Freebird: of his life has been spent training martial arts. So I did practice martial arts when I was younger and they did. Have us do exactly what you’re talking about the first for a long time, I would say maybe 15, 20 minutes was just all stretching and it was pretty much all very passive stretching.
Sometimes the instructor would even push down on your knees during butterfly or, you know, kind of help you bend in and whatever. Yeah.
Master Victor: I remember doing that at our school and when I used to teach there and it’s kind of painful. Yeah. Yeah. And then the, the idea behind that was, you know, you’d be looser for the kicks and stuff, but again, you’re kind of defeating yourself in a sense.
Yeah. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: Yeah. And so then programming becomes important because there’s ways that you can kind of schedule when are you going to work on your flexibility? Like passive stretching [00:12:00] works if it didn’t work. You wouldn’t have a martial arts instructor coming over and pushing your knees down during a butterfly stretch.
Yeah. But if you can be a little bit more intelligent about how you structure your training through the week. For the month, then you don’t get this overlap where it’s going to interfere with the other stuff that you’re training, like your kicks that you’re talking about, you want power on your kicks, even though that passive stretching might allow the hip and everything to move better, might be better to work on that stuff afterwards or at a completely different time.
Yeah. And it’s just one class for stretching kind of thing. Yeah, exactly.
Master Victor: Yeah. I’ve switched over to doing dynamic stretching. Like swings, you know, squats with the leg
Andy Freebird: open side to side. Those are great for warming up. Exactly.
Master Victor: Where you’re activating the muscle, still using a little bit of the strength while lengthening the muscle to prevent injury, which is really the idea.
Yep.
Andy Freebird: And there’s a more of a neurological component there. So like in order to activate strength, like your brain has to communicate with the rest of your body, right? So when you’re doing these dynamic warm ups, you’re [00:13:00] also kind of waking up the brain Yeah, and the brain’s ability to control whatever part of the body you’re working on and generate force there So you’re doing these leg swings, for example, actually waking up the brain’s ability to activate that leg and throw a kick Exactly.
Master Victor: Exactly. It’s just like when you do a set of ten push ups After your second set, as long as you’re not completely dead and been doing your training, you’re going to be able to exert more of that
Andy Freebird: strength.
Master Victor: Yeah. Yeah. You have that heat blood moving easier to generate
Andy Freebird: that power. Yeah, absolutely.
Interesting. And a lot of times the passage of speaking anecdotally from my own experiences I should have warmed up more slowly doing whatever task I was going to do. And because I didn’t. I didn’t move as well and I feel like it was not as ideal for like injury prevention. Yeah. Yeah. Climbing comes to mind.
Okay. If I try to jump into something too difficult climbing. My fingers kind of ache like it’s like I need to kind of get blood [00:14:00] actually moving through the joints in my fingers Yeah, gradually warming up and difficulty seems to work better. I’ve experienced the
Master Victor: same in a glass blowing Just jump in there the first two pieces you make your fingers are dead.
Especially if it’s cold. Yeah Yeah, and by like the fifth piece you’re like, oh everything’s kind of back to normal. Yeah, exactly Interesting and then that kind of brings me to you know meditation and breath work where that can prepare you mentally to focus on these different tasks because a lot of times we’ll go in there either extremely emotional, exert too much strength, breath work and meditation.
I like to do often times before class, get people out of their lives, and we’re all living things happen. Sometimes we have a shitty day. And then you sit down, you meditate, you do some breath work and bring yourself into your body out of the mind. You start to be able to feel the different muscles.
Relax areas where maybe you’re subconsciously holding tension [00:15:00] and then that can actually also help, increase your
performance as well.
Andy Freebird: That’s a really good point. I mean, for one thing, you don’t want to bring all of those things you’re stressing about into the actual practice and you’re kind of preparing your mind, body and soul.
Like it’s a good time to not only like set intentions. You know, what kind of head space are you actually trying to be in? But I also think it’s a great way to reset in between efforts when you do start to get Winded or you do start to feel self doubt like you can at any point call your attention back to your breath Yes meditate a little bit before you actually exert again.
Master Victor: Yes Exactly and breathing in yoga. They say it brings in prana that life energy in martial arts As my grandmaster taught me If you can control your breathing you can control your body And then through your breath, you also control your heart rate, you can control your mind
as well.
So if your breath is racing, your heart’s going to be racing, your mind’s going to be racing, so we can bring that down to a [00:16:00] more calm level that’s going to reverberate throughout everything else.
Andy Freebird: Yeah,
that’s a great point because you don’t have control on a very specific level of a lot of the things your body. does I can’t directly say I’m going to decrease my heart rate, I’m going to speed up my heart rate now. But through breathing, a person actually can’t control those things. You start becoming more relaxed and reducing the rate of your breathing, your heart rate will actually decelerate.
So it is almost like the gateway. Yeah. Absolutely.
Master Victor: Absolutely. Especially like running along this and start getting winded. Oh yeah. Your mouth. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: You can control that. Yeah. You got to chill it out. Exactly. Just
Master Victor: hard to do. Yeah. Yeah. And you find this kind of nice little balance of how much to exert without.
Going
Andy Freebird: over. Yeah. Like, where’s the sweet spot? Yeah,
Master Victor: I’ve experienced times where I’ve been able to train for, four or five hours at a very high intensity through being mindful of my breath, being mindful of the level of [00:17:00] exertion. Yeah, that’s interesting. And, , going back to martial arts, the different disciplines that I study go into Taekwondo, Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
And how you don’t come to, I’ve also trained some some joint locks through hop Keto, although that’s been a few years, mostly the reason those specific disciplines are trained for my own perspective is Taekwondo gives you movement. So it lets you stay away from somebody who’s trying to attack you.
And that’s the real benefit of Taekwondo is maintaining that
Andy Freebird: distance. Is that why there’s so much emphasis on kicks? And Taekwondo, it’s like kind of a longer way you can strike and keep a little more distance.
Master Victor: Yep. You’re, well, your feet are going to reach at least a foot or more depending on the size you’re into.
Exactly. And it, you [00:18:00] can generate a lot more power
Andy Freebird: through your legs than you can in your hands. For sure. There’s way more mass even just in the lower
Master Victor: body. Exactly. And one of the biggest differences between let’s say karate and Taekwondo is the movement. Where karate you do one strike and that’s supposed to be a finishing strike Versus taekwondo.
I strike and then i’m ready for the next thing to go And that’s a kind of philosophy that you can see throughout a lot of the korean martial arts that that includes haitian kendo where as in Japanese style sword fighting, they’ll do one strike and
Andy Freebird: that should, Oh yeah. Okay. I see
Master Victor: what you’re saying.
Versus hide on condo. It’s a few strikes and then you’re ready again to reassess the situation.
Andy Freebird: Okay. So would you say one is more about kind of generating that maximum force and like a one hit. And the other is a little bit more of a, like a dance being prepared for how the target is going to react [00:19:00] to what you’ve just
Master Victor: done.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. It sounds
Andy Freebird: like they both have their merits. They both have things that would benefit a martial artist then. Exactly.
Master Victor: Because if you can deliver that one, right, if it’s good
Andy Freebird: enough, you don’t really need a second one. Exactly. But you might. So.
Master Victor: Yeah. And you know, once you get in close.
There’s a lot of the kicks and the strikes from Taekwondo that kind of become, I would say, inefficient. You have back kick to use really close. You have a few elbow strikes. But once someone is within or closer than punching distance, That’s where Muay Thai or
Andy Freebird: kickboxing comes in. I see. You need shorter strikes, like a knee, an elbow, something that you don’t need to be further away to actually generate that impact force.
Exactly.
Master Victor: Yeah. And Muay Thai is, in my opinion, a lot more aggressive than Taekwondo. The [00:20:00] entire stance where Taekwondo you’re standing sideways, Muay Thai you’re more facing them in a boxing stance. Right. And aggressive to throw. the strikes and you can generate a lot more power with your punches and your kicks that way, but then you’re compromising your movement.
So that’s why I like to study them together. You stay away with tech window. They get a little bit close. You change your stance, get into the Muay Thai. Gotcha. And then to get even closer to get ahold of you, that’s where the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu comes in. Okay. You’re able to either take him to the ground, or if you are on the ground, you always want to get up and get
Andy Freebird: away.
Right. And then reestablish the distance that is going to be safest for you to, like, evaluate the next move from. Exactly.
Master Victor: Gotcha. And Hainan Kondo. It’s the way of the sword that’s what it means, and that’s where, you know, you increase your range even more. So, , in the art of war, which is what martial arts is, we’re learning.
The art of how [00:21:00] to wage war. But
Andy Freebird: kind of sword are they using? It’s essentially a
Master Victor: Katana. Okay. It’s kind of what I thought. Yeah. Yeah. I see a lot of similarities between Korean and Japanese martial arts
Andy Freebird: in that respect. Sure. I think like historically the culture kind of came from originated in Korea, right?
Master Victor: I’ve been studying this then. I found a lot of roots stemmed from India. Interesting, okay. Where there was a monk who left India and started traveling to China, then went to Korea, Japan, and you see a lot of similarities in not only the religion being spread that way, but ideology. Interesting. And if you look at the, how they came about the Korean flag, it uses the dharma circle from Hinduism.
Right. And that established the philosophy
for Taekwondo.
Okay. Where the first four Taeguk
forms
represents the, the fire, the [00:22:00] heat, the positive energy. Okay. Or this is the next four forms represents the, the colder, the negative, the yin. Energy. And then together you make the balance, you make the full circle.
And once you learn all eight, then you go into your black belt, the maturing of the student. And that’s where, in my opinion, the real fun, the real journey begins. And you start understanding more about the self, refining techniques, and you’re not so much of having to learn the basic, you’re finding them and learning where and how to apply it.
Andy Freebird: Okay. Yeah. So would you say there’s kind of like, a fusion of philosophy, theology, martial arts that all together kind of migrated, I guess, from, from India to Korea, to Japan. Yeah, I would
Master Victor: say so. Because the, if you look back in ancient times, you [00:23:00] have, The royal families in India, they would train, , their sons, all the princes in a lot of martial arts.
So they would learn striking. They would learn grappling weapons. They would learn she work.
Andy Freebird: And that was just normal.
Master Victor: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That was in the culture. And, Siddhartha became
Buddha. He started out as a Prince who learned the exact same things. He took the path of the warrior and eventually, wanted to rid himself of his pain and saw the, the other route.
Interesting. That’s essentially how that was spread. So those, princes. Yeah, I can’t remember his name. I’m gonna put it up on the podcast here. Yeah, but he had two older brothers and he was a prince. His dad was the king and he was the youngest one yet had the claim to the throne and he [00:24:00] didn’t want anything to do with politics because of how his brothers treated him.
They wanted to be kings and all that and he left. He went to Northern India, he eventually went to China and you can see there’s statues of him in different Buddhist monk temples that he essentially helped create what is, Shaolin Kung Fu today. Interesting. Huh. And that exact influence then spread to Korea and then Japan.
Huh. And the biggest difference. In the striking of those martial arts is out a fluidity where Kung Fu is a lot more
flowy versus
Taekwondo, which still has some flowiness to it, but is a lot harsher. And then you go to karate. It is all harshness. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: Okay. So I hadn’t noticed that. When I did martial arts when I was younger was Shaolin style Kung Fu and the strikes are [00:25:00] extremely flowy like some of them are just it seems like you’re just trying to be able to reach out with your fist as far as humanly possible like drop super low to the ground and just to extend out as far as possible.
Which is probably not a very, like, defendable position. Yeah. That flowiness, yeah, and some of those kind of windmill movements with the arms as well. Hmm.
Master Victor: That’s interesting. I haven’t studied Kung Fu myself, but I know a lot of the philosophy of it, and What we’re kind of taught is, like all martial arts, there’s only, there’s very limited possibility where all of your strikes can only come from nine different directions.
Pretty much like anywhere you go. In the world, all the different martial arts, you’re only going to have nine possibilities of where the strikes can come from straight, four directions up and down, left and right, and then all of the [00:26:00] diagonals got you. I mean that we’re very limited with our limbs and how we can strike, right?
Yeah. Our head and all elbows, but they’re going to come from one of those nine directions, of course, and that’s where Bruce Lee’s ideology, where. Have no style. You train yourself to understand your body, pushing the limits, to leave the mind, and then you, you lose the style. Because the style then at one point becomes very
Andy Freebird: restricting.
It’s almost like music. Yes.
Master Victor: Yes. You, you connect to a deeper part of the art where when you learn each one of these disciplines, you either, , you develop your own style and you start to have a cadence and things and it becomes pretty predictable. When you fight somebody, you can start to see these patterns that they’ve gotten into.
And someone who has truly mastered themselves, you won’t see a [00:27:00] pattern because they’re completely, in a sense, reflecting you and being able to go around you. It becomes I guess, un understandable from, a normal perspective where, Oh, they put their hand down. Oh, you move around here. You can’t anticipate
Andy Freebird: what they’re gonna do.
Exactly. It’s like their creativity. Is now completely intuitive, responsive to what you’re doing. What’s going to evade your attacks. What’s going to maximize the openings that you present.
Master Victor: Just like an off cadence beat
and music.
Andy Freebird: Yeah. Improvisation, versus just learning one style and saying, Oh, I’m only going to play.
, folk music or something like that. If you learned every style, every time you play music would be, it all sounds the same, no style. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you only learn one style and would get, it’s just going to sound the same as perhaps predictability the same way. Actually, I remember, watching, I think it was a video on YouTube.
So there was a UFC fight. I’m [00:28:00] not going to throw any names out here, because it’s kind of all getting wrong, but they were analyzing the footage of the opponent, trying to figure out how they could predict what he was going to do, and using that, they developed a kick that they were going to specifically use on this guy, when he presented this one big opening, that was just going to be the fight ending kick.
They did it, and it worked, and they won the fight, yeah. Let’s go back, if I can get the information on that, we can throw that up on here too. But, I mean, just imagine that by just being able to predict someone’s movement, by analyzing how they fight, they were able to come up with one fight ending move.
Yeah. That KO’d the guy and, cemented the victory. Yeah. Yeah.
Master Victor: That’s where, like, studying your opponent comes in really handy. And sometimes they call this fight IQ, where it’s your ability in the moment to be able to do that, to witness , somebody, they throw a big, right, they leave this [00:29:00] open.
Well, next time they throw it, , it’s going to be there. You just dip and they’re knocked out on the ground.
Andy Freebird: Yeah. I’ve heard this term before. Fight IQ. Yeah. I think that this principle probably applies to a lot of things. It’s like I was saying a minute ago It’s like a creative Intuition so like in the moment without really thinking you’re able to problem solve So if the problem is I don’t want to get hit in the face You’re able to solve that problem a little bit more efficiently through observation and just reactively.
Master Victor: Yeah. Right. And this kind of plays into that whole flow state where if you’re in your head thinking, Oh, I’m going to throw a right hook. I’m going to throw a right hook. That right hook is going to be slower. It’s going to be seen. You’re going to start. Change your body posture that
Andy Freebird: preemptively show that you’re going to throw that exactly
Master Victor: where if it’s you know, that creative instinct It’ll come out exactly what it needs to land exactly where it
Andy Freebird: needs to be and if it isn’t going to be effective And something else is going to be [00:30:00] you’re going to do that other thing exactly
Master Victor: and yeah This is where I think like combining a lot of these practices can really help somebody Ascend and understand that where like let’s say if you Just practice taekwondo.
You’re not going to, you know, or exercise your body. You’re not stretching, you’re not eating right. You’re not going to see that same growth as the person who is, you know, taking the values of, I call it values of martial arts and integrating it into your life. Yeah. Taking good care of yourself, sleeping well, eating right.
Andy Freebird: Just holistically from every possible Avenue, trying to upgrade. themselves.
Master Victor: Exactly. Because like you don’t focus on one area, you’re going to see something go wrong in a sense in the training.
Andy Freebird: Yeah. Because
the skill is super important, but some athletes only focus on skill. Yeah. They don’t focus on these [00:31:00] other elements.
Master Victor: Exactly.
Andy Freebird: And I brought up climbing before and I was surprised in talking to people who rock climb. That most of the people I had talked to didn’t really do much to optimize themselves as climbers outside of simply climbing. So obviously the skill of climbing is the most important aspect to this, but then, they would be complaining to me about the shoulders hurting, hips hurting.
I’m like, well, do you do any sort of mobility training? Do you do any resistance training outside
of climbing? They
said no. And I’m like, well, what do you think is going to happen? You’ll actually climb better if you focus on everything. Like you said, sleep for example, you need to recover.
Master Victor: Yeah.
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Master Victor: and one of the big pitfalls in martial arts is, you know, Some people not, not to down MMA cause MMA is wonderful.
It’s like the application of all of these disciplines together. You get to actually see it at work. But one of the pitfalls of it is a lot of those MMA gems don’t practice a certain discipline and understanding how to deal with the emotions. Kind of deal with the mind. So then you get a lot of people who are angry.
You got a lot of people who are coming into that training [00:33:00] environment with a lot of angst and not the right mentality. Do you think
Andy Freebird: that there is a. Sort of a temptation for people who are struggling with those darker emotions to gravitate toward martial arts as a
Master Victor: potential outlet. Yeah. I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me saying, I want to learn how to fight.
I want to be the best fighter go somewhere else. So that’s not what I’m teaching. If you want to be the best version of you, if you want to, really unlock yourself and understand yourself. Yeah. Then. Then I’m the right teacher, but if you’re going out there and you just want to be UFC champion, go to MMA gym, , you’re going to, you’re going to be exposed to a lot of different people throwing different strikes at you.
And you’re going to get this impressioning sense that you’re going to be able to defend yourself at that level, which you’re also going to learn through, our training as well, but you’re going to get a lot more out of it [00:34:00] in, in learning the meditation, the breath work stretching. Yeah. Which you can do through MMA, but a lot of the times that environment is very
different.
Andy Freebird: Yeah, that makes sense.
Master Victor: Like, if you go to a boxing gym, you’re just learning, usually, punching.
Andy Freebird: I’ve heard a lot of people make this comment about practicing yoga in the West, versus more, I guess, traditional yoga practices, that it’s kind of like more become an athletic thing in the United States, and less about the meditation and like spiritual
components of it.
Master Victor: Yeah, so yoga in itself means unity. To become one with everything, right? Yoga stems from the breath. So bringing ourselves into the breath to essentially. Allow the, the instinct, the intuition to read, and so when you just make it about the stretching, you’re losing all the other aspects that are really important to yoga.
Andy Freebird: Yeah.
It’s like you’re treating your body like it’s just a machine at that point. Exactly. [00:35:00] And you can become
Master Victor: really flexible, but , what about all the other things
Andy Freebird: that come with it? I see what you’re saying. And correct me if I’m wrong, I think Kung Fu actually means Like the direct translation, I think it’s like mastery of skill.
I don’t know. We’ll look into this. Yeah. I’m pretty sure though. But yeah, so like mastering the self, I suppose, is really like the essence of martial arts. Yeah. Like fighting is an aspect of mastering yourself. Yes.
Master Victor: Yes. And, it’s essentially a science of learning how to learn and how to grow people in a sense.
You’re learning how to deal with the dark parts of yourself. You’re learning how to control your emotions, your breath. How to push yourself and also how to learn. So in learning martial arts, you’re learning how to pay attention to something. You have to do it visually. And then you have to then replicate it through your own body and then you can take that and you can go learn anything else through that same
Andy Freebird: respect.
That is a really valuable skill, just the ability to mirror somebody, what they’re [00:36:00] doing physically with their body. And if you want to learn how to dance or skateboard or anything, you’re going to be way better at actually controlling your body and mimicking what they’re doing.
Master Victor: And you’ve spent that time getting to know how to move this little toe to get the balance right, pivot a certain way, and again, that transcends to other areas of life.
Yeah.
Andy Freebird: Let’s usually think about you know, there’s animals that can do things that humans can’t, obviously. Like we can’t fly like an eagle we can’t dive to the bottom of the ocean like a whale. But the variety of movements that a human can make. This is beyond anything else. The more that you become proficient in any way of moving your body, you’re that much better at moving your body in any other way.
It just starts to become almost a game of exploring what can your body actually do. Yeah. And there doesn’t seem to be any limit. People are always creating new movements in martial arts, new movements in dance.
Master Victor: [00:37:00] Mm hmm. That intuitive nature comes out. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: Because you know, we have so much creativity as human beings and we can use that creativity and our intelligence to come up with these new ways of moving that are just, you know, far beyond what any other animal is capable of
doing.
Master Victor: That’s another kind of aspect that gets really unlocked in martial arts is the confidence, because a lot of people go out to, you know, say like a music show and they’ll be all in their minds. What if I look weird? What if everybody’s making fun of me? But I feel like with dancing, I used to
Andy Freebird: be that way. I couldn’t
Master Victor: dance in front of anybody.
When I met you at 2019 that was the first time I had really danced in front of a
Andy Freebird: large group of people, you were like just so in the flow state, which I was too, but I would never guess based on my observation that you hadn’t. Had former experience just letting loose like that dancing. Exactly.
Master Victor: Yeah. And that just came from like the martial arts [00:38:00] aspect of it. Like you tried this. Oh yeah, no,
Andy Freebird: totally. It’s like your body almost becomes an instrument and you’re just articulating different pieces of it at different moments to different notes, different beats in the song.
Master Victor: Yeah. And now dancing to me and.
Fire spinning as well has become a channel of emotions of an outlet, a creative outlet that lets me put, , whatever I’m feeling into it and it allows that to go out in a healthy manner rather than me holding it in.
Andy Freebird: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Master Victor: That’s another real big benefit of martial arts. Like, you’re angry?
Well, go punch a punching bag, you know?
Andy Freebird: You can’t just eliminate something.
Master Victor: No.
Andy Freebird: Right? And this is the most basic aspect. Of physics. It’s like you can’t destroy or create matter or energy. So if you do have those kinds of emotions in you feeling anger, you’re feeling grief, whatever it is, you’re going to have to move it out.
You can’t just [00:39:00] ignore it and have it vanish. It just doesn’t work like that.
Master Victor: And if you do store
Andy Freebird: it, it’s going to come out some other way. Yeah, absolutely. In ways that you don’t necessarily anticipate. Can’t control and they’ll be a lot uglier can destroy things that you know Otherwise would have been healthier like friendships your professional life all that kind of stuff.
Yeah partnerships loved ones Yeah,
Master Victor: you can end up hurting people you really care about because
Andy Freebird: yourself. Yes yourself. That’s the
Master Victor: big one Because like all that you’re doing is you’re not accepting that, that pain that you’re feeling, right? And you’re putting on something else and you’re just making it worse.
Yeah, it’s just gonna blow up. So when you are forced to confront it and sit there with it, that’s when it starts to, oh, I can live with this. And I can find a way to channel it that it’s not going to stay in there. Yeah.
Andy Freebird: Yeah. And I think that also becomes its own practice. Like you get better at doing that over time, [00:40:00] but if you never work on that, it’s just builds up and it builds up and it builds up.
And I think like the older that we get, if we don’t actually face that, the more it’s like stuffing everything into a closet and thinking that your place is clean. And one day the door falls open, avalanche of all these things you put in there falls on you. Yeah. Yeah, it would have been better to deal with it just one piece at a
Master Victor: time.
And that’s where I really like meditation and breath
Andy Freebird: work, where,
Master Victor: , it provides, like, breath work really allows you to release a lot of that. You wouldn’t think it’s just, oh, you’re just breathing, but like, trying to say things really well.
Andy Freebird: does, yeah. And that has a lot to do with just Sort of that fight or flight state.
You’re feeling some kind of anxiety or panic state. Mm hmm your heart rate increases Cortisol levels, which is your stress hormone Increase makes you feel more alert This is why it’s hard for people to fall asleep sometimes at night and they’re stressing about what’s going on in [00:41:00] their personal lives Yeah, exactly.
It’s like this chatter just keeps talking away in your mind When you actually start to bring your attention to your breath Breathe more slowly. Not only does the heart rate decrease, but that shatter in the mind starts to decelerate. It starts to get a little quieter. You start to realize that everything is actually fine.
It was just that tornado of thoughts in your mind that made you feel like it wasn’t. And it actually started messing your body up. Yeah. That’s something weird to think about. It’s like, what’s the difference between a thought and an emotion? And this is, I spent most of my life not actually thinking about.
The answer to that question. So emotions, we also call feeling, right? Emotions live in the body. It’s some kind of disturbance in the body, right? Like we talked about cortisol levels increasing, making you more alert. Adrenaline, heart rate increasing. These are all physiological things. There’s [00:42:00] actually something going on in your body.
As soon as you notice that your body’s doing something that doesn’t feel good, that’s the time to bring your attention to your breath. Because that’s your reset. And,
Master Victor: you know, meditation essentially can help rewire that by training yourself to not be in the thought, to bring your awareness to the breath, to the moment.
You’re actually helping rewire and create new connections in your brain that will facilitate those situations. Yeah,
Andy Freebird: totally. There’ll be further. Fewer and smaller when it actually happens. I heard somebody talking about sort of like a snowballing effect that takes place almost immediately. So if you can catch this disturbance taking place.
In your body immediately, the actual amount of effort it takes to get back to your baseline and center yourself is very minimal. It’s sort of proportionate to the time that it takes you to actually act and bring [00:43:00] your awareness to your breath. Start calming yourself down, addressing what you’re feeling.
The longer that time is before you actually address it, it tends to snowball further, much harder, much harder. Eckhart
Master Victor: Tolle talks about that in his book. It might have been Eckhart
Andy Freebird: Tolle, which I read I think it was A Powered Now and A New Earth, also. Which I
Master Victor: really enjoyed both those books, too.
Read that. Highly recommended, 10 out of 10 for sure. Yeah. And you can just see by us talking how, , all of these different disciplines, and combining them together, you see this grand effect that just, it not only affects your training. It can affect, , your work performance, you become more productive, more focused, you’re able to achieve more, you’re able to push certain limits that you weren’t able to before.
And, , when you get to that situation where you’re feeling stressed, you’re feeling tired. You know how to care for yourself. Yeah. , you’re able to handle it better so that you can come back the next [00:44:00] day. More ready to go. , you’re more present, ready to show up in a way that before you would have been completely defeated in a sense.
Andy Freebird: Yeah, you start to realize what you’re capable of as far as having your own back, having your own ability to become calm and to get your mind out of these dark places where maybe in the past you used to stay. I used to struggle with depression and it would take me much longer before. I actually did anything about it because I didn’t realize that I could and I had to build confidence over time through meditation, through breath work, through a whole bunch of things that I now have in the bag of tricks to deal with stress, anxiety, and these negative emotional states that people experience, I’m confident in my abilities.
Yeah. If I do feel horrible, I feel like life is awful. Why even try?
Know now that I just have to do X, Y and Z. And in a very short period of [00:45:00] time, I’m not going to feel like that anymore. Start
trusting the process.
Master Victor: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I feel like that’s a good stopping point for today.
Andy Freebird: Yeah, I think so.
I mean, we’re calm obviously, but yeah. And
Master Victor: we’re going to go into pretty much each one of these topics throughout the podcast from, you know, touching into speed. The flow state, meditation, breath work, strength training, stretching, and really go into depth and talk about not only ways that you can do these things, how it affects you, and especially free work here, we’re going to provide like a scientific data that we’ve researched our own personal experiences and kind of show you all, , why this stuff is so important that a lot of people neglect.
That they’re just sitting there that you sit there all day on your computer You watch a movie you go to bed and there’s all this stuff going on [00:46:00] inside of you that you’re not paying attention to That affects you at such a level that you wouldn’t imagine until you bring that awareness. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so stay tuned Subscribe sign up and you can check out us on fairacademy.
com And we’ll see y’all. See you next time. Yeah
Thank you for joining Victor and Andy on The Unlimited U. Make sure to visit our website, www. faraacademy. com, where you can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, or via RSS so you’ll never miss a show. If you found value in this show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes. Or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show, that would help us out too.
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