Dan Harden Internal Power Seminar 1/29/16 – 1/31/16

 Dan Harden from Body Work Seminars, came down for a seminar at Randall Smith’s dojo Aikido of Palm Beach County. By now, anyone reading this blog knows Dan and Randall. Two awesome martial arts guys.

So yea I am late in posting again. It’s turning into my norm. Its not for lack of going over my notes. It’s just being busy running a law practice.

This was an interesting seminar. And there is one big thing I took away from it that will be the focus of this post. That is the rowing exercise.

The rowing exercise is extremely important and often overlooked because of its simplicity. But training in this exercise will increase your centeredness and stability.

I do the rowing exercise daily and have been for many years. It was good to go over it and assess how I have been doing it, which has only been slightly correct.

Dan was explaining that when you do the rowing exercise you want to be saddled evenly over your hips. This gives you stability and center.

The stance is to have one leg forward, one leg back and hips evenly displaced. You want your weight evenly distributed through out the movement.

The movement is to push your hands forward, closing your body and then pulling your hands back, opening your body. Breathe out on closing and in on opening.

On the forward row, the closing movement, you want your knee slightly passing over your foot and your rear leg stretched as if forming a solid beam from your foot up through your spine and out your crown.

On the rear row, the opening movement, you want your hips in line and balanced over your pelvis and hips; the pelvic shelf and femural heads. You also want your your chest out and expanded, laying your scapulars flat across your back and rolling your shoulder muscles back to make that happen.

You want to move as a unified body.

This is essential to understanding the concept of bowing. Rowing out bows your back and rowing in closes that bow.

Bowing is one of the ways to generate power for your overall movements.

The most common mistake when rowing is to sit back on your hips. This occurs on your open motion when you are rowing back into your chest. Your body naturally wants to sit back on the most rear hip. This would be the hip of the leg extending back.

The problem with doing it like this is that you automatically put your self out of whack. You go to an unstable position.

Where you want to be is centered over your hips and feeling the rear leg going up through your body and head. You want to feel the connection going from your rear leg foot, up through your spine and out the top of your head.

Sitting back on your rear leg interrupts this connection. You want the connection.

By the way, your body naturally wants to rest on the hip. So you need to train yourself to move correctly. Its not easy.

I have been doing the rowing exercise with a jo. I find this helps me center my hips over both my legs.Its like the jo is a guide for positioning my pelvic girdle over the femural heads.

Which is surprisingly hard to do since each femural head and hip socket joint moves separately. I visualize them as a chameleons eyes twirling around independent.

I had three good pictures to post this time. So here you go.