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FURTHER ON UP THE ROAD
© Marc Wickert (previously published in FIGHT TIMES magazine) Prior to the 1970s, there was a handful of gymnasiums in Sydney with weightlifting rooms. But these dim little dungeons were mainly for young men trying to build up their physiques so as to be accepted into the police force. Or they were used by the odd loner, who grew a handle-bar moustache, wore tights, and was off to join the circus as the resident strongman. There was an occasional set of dumbbells hidden under the bed to build up biceps, and a chest-expander in the closet so you didn’t get sand kicked in your face at Maroubra Beach. But sportsmen definitely didn’t lift weights because everyone knew it would ‘slow them down and make them dumb’. And women didn’t even consider lifting weights for fear of becoming tomboys or looking like amazons. There were muscly men on Saturday morning’s World Championship Wrestling, but they had to be like that in case they were asked to tear telephone books in half with their bare hands: Killer Kowalski, Sam Manniker, Mark Lewin and Bulldog Brower come straight to mind. We heard about judo, because that was what you learnt at the Police Boys Club if you were being picked on by the school bullies. Karate was about guys breaking bricks and tiles in their backyards with just one chop from the side of their hands. And Jiu Jitsu had something to do with a Japanese man in pajamas, who Dick Tracy spoke to through his wristwatch. Then out of the purple haze of the late sixties’ Woodstock and early seventies’ Altmont festivals, Kwai Chang Caine emerged from the deserts of our television sets. Peace and love were still okay, but now you didn’t have to turn the other cheek. And this Kung Fu hero was backed up on the cinema screen by leaping Bruce Lee. Suddenly we had an extra reason for wearing a belt around our waists, and Kung Fu had arrived. At the same time, big Arnold Schwarz-something-or-other was ‘Pumping Iron’. Barbells, dumbbells and Bullworkers were coming out of a closet near you. But there was more! Lovely Lisa Lyon’s poster was appearing on more teenage guys’ walls than Marilyn Monroe’s or Ursula Andress’s, and not only was it okay for women to lift weights, but they even had a theme song: Let’s Get Physical. And we did – both men and women – until we turned twenty or maybe thirty, and ‘settled down’ with a family. Martial arts, weight training and generally keeping fit were all regarded as a way of life – but not for life. Then in 1983, a sixty-two-year-old potato farmer from Colac in Victoria was crazy enough to enter the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra-Marathon. Not only did he have the nerve to enter the gruelling race, but he had the audacity to win it. Forever young, Cliff Young became a household name. Suddenly people were realizing that life wasn’t over at twenty-five. And who knows – perhaps you could trust Abbie Hoffman after his thirtieth. Now three decades on, those avant-garde disciples, who forgot to hang up their weightlifting and black belts, are still training in their late forties and fifties. Some are older, as they travel further on up the road to territory previously unexplored by man. And those ‘Devils’ who refused to play Paint it Black at Madison Square Garden in ‘69 are now refusing to turn off their amps, opting to rock-on through yet another world tour. Some fresh-minded journalists are even dropping the done-to-death tag Strolling Bones, whilst the targets of the perpetual jealousy continue to conquer more generations of rock’n’roll fans. The question now is, how much can the human body endure, and for how long? Helping answer that puzzle is Tweed/Gold Coast orthopaedic surgeon Gregory R Freeman. When not off snow skiing, Dr Freeman can often be found competing in triathlons, having retired from the explosive positions of centre and breakaway for the University of NSW first grade rugby union side. "In the mid forties age group, we start to see quite a significant increase in the incidence of Achilles tendon ruptures. The males in their forties think they can still do what they used to do. The list is nearly endless; what we call degenerative meniscal tears in the knee or so called cartilage tears are quite common. Rather than having an acute injury when they’re playing football at a younger age, and tissue is torn, the older person will just squat or twist a bit too far doing something, not necessarily anything athletic, and basically their cartilage system fails to stay in one piece, and falls apart – it tears as such." Dr Freeman says that as people get older, and their tissues become more brittle, their bodies can’t cope with the same stress they used to be able to manage. If something is completely torn, there is actually very little difference in the healing process between the twenty year old and the seventy year old. It really comes down to how strong the tissue was before, but the strength of the tissue just isn’t as strong in the over-forty person. "With each decade of life from approximately thirty years onwards, the human body loses between 6 and 10 percent of its muscle mass. So you are not going to be as strong as you used to be. Therefore, to perform at the same level you have to work much harder." Dr Freeman suggests that people who remained competitive over forty, such as Cliff Young and heavy weight boxing champion George Foreman, needed to have been that much better than their younger opponents. And Dr Freeman says some people are just extraordinarily gifted. Even after ten years at the top, they’re still better than anybody else around because they have ‘the body’. And no one else has a body that has caught up with them, or their training techniques. Doctor Gregory believes there are some people who just have that very special quality, and they’re born with it. But you also have to have the brain to go with it. "There is no shortage of people who have really unfortunate accidents, especially footballers for instance, who would have been great perhaps, but we’ll never know because they trashed their knee at 19 and that was the end of their career.
"And there are some people who have the right physical aspects, but don’t have the mental attributes to complement their natural gifts. Some people have beautiful bodies, but would rather sit around and have another cigarette and a beer. You need more than just pure physical talent, you need mental maturity and discipline to understand what training is required to reach the top and to stay there. You have to have the hunger and desire to maintain your position at the top. And for these people to sustain that same supreme level of fitness later in life, it requires a great deal of self-restraint and dedication. And it’s only special people who have those qualities and are able to continue training with such dedication later in life." In general terms, Dr Freeman believes for the average person over forty, because their tissues aren’t as strong as they used to be, but potentially the muscles are, their biggest danger is that they’ll rupture, for example, a tendon, through fast and explosive activities. When they are doing their training, if they’re not properly warmed up, they are much more likely to suffer an injury. "Also when they start a new exercise program they should build up at a steady pace. The theory is that they shouldn’t increase their total exercise by more than ten percent above their previous week’s workload. It’s understandable that they want to progress quickly, but it’s important that they advance gradually and let their bodies adapt to the changes. The body can be trained up quite a lot but it needs to be done at a steady pace – if this process is rushed the injury rate will increase accordingly," says Dr Gregory Freeman. Former world Kung Fu champion Mick Spinks has been involved in martial arts for over thirty years, and has adhered to safe training methods throughout his career. Mick believes that it is due to his disciplined approach to exercise that he has been able to work his body so hard for so many years, and at fifty-two, Mick is confident he will be able to continue training vigorously well into the future. "To this day, there are three principles which I am extremely conscious of, and I make sure my instructors impress them upon all new students:
Because Mick Spinks didn’t become involved in martial arts until he was twenty, he believes it took him until thirty-three years of age before he reached his competitive peak. Although Mick retired from full-contact competition at thirty-seven, he continued training at a professional fighter’s standard until forty-two years old. At forty-five years, Spinks focused on setting up a full-time martial arts centre, which resulted in his having to reduce the intensity of his training. Before reaching fifty years, Spinks noticed a decline in his fitness, which he attributed to a drop in the intensity of his training. At fifty-two, Mick did suffer two injuries. "I tore the ligaments through my instep in June 2002. It was my fault mostly: I didn’t warm up properly, and what do I say to all my students! I was not quite over that injury when I sprained one of my ribs at the spine junction. That was painful. You can’t find a comfortable position, and the worst thing is you can’t breathe very well. "These two injuries, although not too serious, have made me review my training a little. Not that I want to train easily, but in future I will plan my training a lot more, and not go at it too hard too soon." Bill Wakefield, at forty-two, says he’s never felt better in his life – with the exception of knucklebones that hurt periodically and knee joints that can cause some discomfort. Although just over forty, Bill looks to his future in martial arts with great expectations. "I’ve never been more clear with what I want to do with my martial arts career, and I’ve never looked after myself as much as I do now. I love my food and all types of food, so rather than cutting back on meals I train harder to keep in shape. I do weights regularly, and jog or walk – depending on how the knees are feeling – two mornings a week with my fitness partner Vicki, who is in her fifties and is the most motivated woman I’ve met. Her husband is sixty and just completed a marathon with me. These people really inspire me." Wakefield says that when you get older you feel things in your body and you have to listen to these feelings and train accordingly, whereas when you’re younger, your body is more forgiving. "When you’re twenty-one, you’re only doing martial arts for an ego boost, or at least I know I was. You get hurt and you don’t show it. You do damage to your hand and you keep punching the bag. But when you get older and suffer an injury, you do something about it – you rest it. "Today I’ve never felt better and I train much harder. I do weights every morning at five-thirty, and walk briskly on the beach or run twice weekly. I instruct kickboxing classes twice weekly, attend grappling classes as a student two times a week, plus I take the advanced karate classes every evening and instruct in the schools of a day." Out of necessity, Bill finds that he is sparring harder as the students keep getting better. But now he uses his mental powers more rather than just slogging it out.
"Today you have to think, and if you’re not a thinker you’re going to get beaten. Today is a thinking man’s world, and if you don’t plan ahead like a chess player, you won’t succeed. As Ken Twaddell says, ‘The older you get - the more you see.’"
FURTHER ON UP THE ROAD © Marc Wickert
In Part One of this article, we stated how in the 1970s many people took up martial arts, pumping iron and other forms of exercise as part of the healing process to get over those wild 60s, or merely to just get physical and into shape. Now, three decades on, some of those avant-garde disciples who forgot to hang up their weightlifting and black belts are still training in their late forties and fifties. Some are older, as they travel further on up the road to territory previously unexplored by man. And we looked at how some noted martial artists have adjusted their training and outlooks towards the arts over the years. The men featured in Part Two of this article are all veterans of doormanship. A former doorman for over ten years at some of Melbourne’s toughest nightclubs, Mick Nicholls is 47, and says his training hasn’t changed that much. But he has had to ‘soften the blow’ with his classes, because he feels that the younger people these days aren’t as hard as they used to be. Renowned for his all-too-realistic, hell-fighting sparring sessions, Mick has recently toned these bouts down. "We were losing too many people from the classes. Younger people are bigger these days, but I think they’re softer. We had to moderate the training because people were getting up around the black belt level, and they’d see the intensity my senior belts sparred at, and they’d give it away before they graded. Plus I knew that eventually someone was going to get hurt and sue our arses off." Mick says that years ago practitioners accepted bumps and bruises as part of the activity, regardless of whether they were involved in football, martial arts or any other contact pastime. But now he feels that when someone gets injured they instantly look to sue somebody. He believes this is proving to be detrimental to martial arts today. "One thing I have changed with my own training is that I make sure I stretch every day. It’s something I didn’t do a lot when I was younger. I’ve always done some stretching, but now I’ve found I have to stretch out of necessity. And I’m only doing weights once a week now. Instead I’m doing body-weight exercises – such as deep Hindu squats, Hindu push-ups, wrestler’s bridges, chin-ups from four different hand positions and dips." Mick describes the Hindu squats as a movement where he comes up on the balls of his feet, goes into a full squat, runs his fingers along the ground, before returning back up onto the balls of his feet, and then rests flat on his feet to conclude one repetition. With the Hindu push-ups he has his feet and hands wide apart and snakes through with his hips dropping to the floor, then snaking back. When Mick does go to the gym, he concentrates on strength training and focuses on core exercises. In his dojo, he works on kick shields and focus pads to avoid hyperextending the joints, rather than midair striking. And Mick’s techniques are all based on street-effective systems.
"You have to make up your mind why you train and why you teach. I train for the combat effectiveness, and I teach people how to look after themselves. I’d feel like I was ripping people off if the style I taught wasn’t effective. This is my thirtieth year of training in martial arts, and prior to that I did five years of boxing. I have no intention of giving martial arts away now. It’s a way of life," says Mick Nicholls. For Geoff ‘Tank’ Todd, his career spanned two decades on the door of some of New Zealand’s most notorious establishments. "I first started in combat sports at age eleven, and this later led to my working at discos and pubs as a bouncer, while still at high school and for the next twenty years." At 42 years, Tank has reached the highest rank achievable in military close combat – Master Chief Instructor, and he still instructs every day, conducting group and individual tuition. He was a first generation exponent, trained and instructor-qualified by evolutionary pioneers of military close combat: Col. Rex Applegate of the Office of Strategic Services, Charles Nelson of the United States Marine Corps and Harry Baldock of the New Zealand Army. "All three of these pioneers were military chief instructors, and all continued to instruct and work in close combat until they were between 85 and 90 years. "Harry continued to weight train into his late eighties simply by reducing the poundage he pushed and maintaining the sets and reps. He taught me Ju Jitsu before he would agree to teach me unarmed combat, because after the war he thought unarmed combat was too violent for civilians. He even partnered me for my fifth degree black belt grading whilst in his mid eighties." With there being few other special operations, close combat master chiefs world wide, Tank’s capacity schedule has had to be pushed to overload. And he believes the high demand for such skilled instructors internationally is due in part to the events of September 11. But thus far for Geoff, the road to martial enlightenment has been relatively kind. "The only injuries I have sustained that haven’t healed - unlike the many cuts and fractures that are part and parcel of the trade - are the old hip and ankle joints being a bit worse for wear after thirty years of training. I did the ligaments in my ankle twice before going on my Special Forces Combative Instructor Qualification course in Thailand, and on the Q course, right at the end, not only did I damage the ligaments, but I also had tendon problems, making the last two days more difficult. "I hope to one day soon reduce my work load and focus on the many close combat related projects that have had to be shelved until time is available. I would also like to have more time for my own training rather than just instructing others, and to pursue additional pastimes that I have not had the time to take up due to my career." Tank has clocked up over 100,000 hours of close combat work as an exponent and an instructor. He has also been editor and publisher of Fight Times magazine for the past 9 years. For Geoff ‘Tank’ Todd there is no other way but to ‘Hang Tuff’.
A world-renowned veteran of the door, at 43, Britain’s Geoff Thompson has turned his focus to finding more spirituality and balance in his life, in an attempt to serve himself and his fellow man better. "I do a lot of running and practise yoga every day. My life no longer revolves around training for a fight that may never happen. I let go of everything and just go with life. The cleaner I can make my body with my diet and my thoughts, and everything that I ingest physically, mentally and spiritually, the better a conduit it is going to make me for this huge energy that spins the planets. I’m just training to become a better conduit, so that I can move mountains and part seas and do whatever I want to do. And the best way I can do that is to help other people to do it. The best way for me to serve myself is to serve others." Geoff still trains with weights, but does slow and deliberate repetitions, listening to his body for balance, to not over-train or under-train, but to keep it in tune physically. He treats his body like a vehicle that needs to be respected and serviced regularly. It is this attitude that sustains Thompson’s peak physical and spiritual condition. "I realize that this machine that has taken me thus far through life needs to be kept in tip-top order. And to do that I do anti-gravity training to keep the skeletal muscles tight, and to keep my internal organs tight, because as we get older, gravity tends to drop everything. And because I want to do so much with my life, I have to train this machine and keep it well oiled. The only way I can maintain this condition is to do my yoga, running, weight training and wrestling. So I train an hour a day as an investment for a young and healthy body." Originally Geoff Thompson took up ‘working the door’ to overcome his self-doubts of being able to handle himself on the street, and eventually conquered those fears in a dramatic fashion before finding inner peace and retiring from bouncing. As he states in his bestselling autobiography Watch My Back, "I became a doorman to fight my demons, and in doing so I became the demon. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that my path became dark, at times black. I went on the door for salvation, but in the end it was redemption I sought. I found that only the intervention of providence saved me from the downward spiral to murder, or my own patch at the local cemetery."
56-years-old Ken Twaddell served over a decade on the doors of some of Sydney’s most frequented nightclubs and discotheques from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. Ken first started bouncing at a disco in Castlereagh Street called The Bowl, then worked at Uptight in George Street, followed by a stint at The Union Jack in Kings Cross. Then he was back down to Jonathan’s at Broadway, before working the door at John Henry’s near Central Station. "The Bowl was run by Iva Damon from Melbourne - he used to bring up all the top singers at the time, like Normie Rowe and Masters Apprentices. I also used to help run a security firm at the time, which was handled by Dal Miles who managed Uptight and The Union Jack. I was the head bouncer and did all the hiring and firing, and Dal had a firm called DMI Enterprises. As well as the discos, he also provided the bands for a lot of concerts around Sydney and the Northern Beaches, and I did the security. I was doing Goju Kai Karate and Ju Jitsu then." Ken adds that in those days as a bouncer you worked ‘one out’ – you didn’t have a team of doormen to back you up. But in the sixties, he helped to re-establish the role of the bouncer. At the time, most of Sydney’s doormen were retired boxers who had a tendency to ‘job’ anyone who looked the wrong way. Ken found that through applying a bit of psychology, he was able to talk many people out of causing trouble. And the bosses often gave him bonuses for running things incident-free. "One night at Jonathan’s, a guy was playing up, so I grabbed him to settle him down, and he started going on about how he was going to do this and that. I asked him what sort of work he did, and he told me he worked at a particular jeweller’s shop. So I said, ‘Okay, mate. You do what you like, but you’re not going to win. And tomorrow, I’m going to come into your shop and I’m going to play up’. He said, ‘Oh no, don’t do that. You’ll get me the sack.’ And I said, ‘Well what do you think happens to me if I let you play up? I get the sack. He said he didn’t think about that. And I said, ‘Well f**kin’ think about it!’" Today, Ken Twaddell notices that he doesn’t have the endurance he once had, but believes that through training, he has retained a lot of the explosiveness. Because he doesn’t have the long endurance he used to have when he was younger, Ken makes sure that what he does do works quickly. "I train towards that. Whatever weight-training exercises I happen to be doing, I perform just one set of each lift doing 100 explosive repetitions. I usually select 10 exercises per session. That way I’m putting a lot of mental focus into the workout, and I’m utilizing my breathing and locking all my muscles together as I explosively exhale."
Ken Twaddell -
Muscle grabbing & Artery
press - used to expose the neck points Twaddell does his weight training twice weekly, Kung Fu twice a week and Qi Gong five times weekly. He balances his Qi Gong between iron-shirt training and medical Qi Gong in order to employ both hard and soft styles. Ken says that if a student only practises hard training, he will eventually suffer injuries know as energy disbursements. "Some common symptoms of energy disbursements are: fast degeneration of the torso, joint pain, high blood pressure and lower back problems. In my early years I just focused on power and strength – I just concentrated on the yang. I didn’t look at the yin side. And I’m paying for it now, but it has taught me to balance things." As stated earlier in this article, the journey the above martial artists undertook was into unfamiliar territory. Most of them, when they first set out, probably didn’t expect to still be training at the respective ages they are at today. It’s fortunate these martial arts pioneers have been such an inspiration as they’ve travelled further on up the road.
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