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Arthrokinetics: Biomechanical Subject Control
A
Product Review by Phil Elmore
We’ve all heard that old saying about giving
someone a fish and teaching that someone to fish. The first feeds
the person for a day, while the second feeds that person for a lifetime.
This is the intent behind Coach Scott Sonnon’s Arthrokinetics, the “science of
submission fighting.” Coach Sonnon, in the course of this seven-volume
video collection, teaches the viewer the physiological concepts of joint
manipulation as a general body of principles. Using these, it is his
hope that you like the members of the
ROSS team will then be
able to “explore, improvise, and innovate” to create your own joint locks and
submissions in the course of your own sport fighting and martial arts
training.
I’ve reviewed a lot of Coach Sonnon’s
instructional videos. What his
Fisticuffs did for upper-body striking, his
Leg Fencing
did for lower body manipulation, and his
Immovable Object, Unstoppable Force did for takedowns, Arthrokinetics
(AK) does for joint locks and submissions. Scott refers to this body of
ideas as joint manipulation, which more accurately encompasses the
scope of what he’s trying to show you. Like his
Flow Fighting, this collection seeks to impart principles rather than a
list of tricks and techniques. The AK tapes, however, are easily the
most conceptual of any of the RMAX work I’ve reviewed. This is a
body of theories built on sound (and complicated) physiological analysis that
can be used by the viewer to improvise joint manipulations no matter to what
martial art or school of submission fighting that practitioner adheres.
In this way, RMAX rightly bills its mission as “performance enhancement” for
the athlete and martial artist alike, helping everyone engaged in conflict
with resisting opponents to do what they do better.
Production values of the collection are
adequate, with good lighting in a gym environment whose polished wood floor
makes it easy for Scott to scoot and rotate and move his training partners
around while explaining AK principles. The white wall that forms the
backdrop boasts posters as needed, such as “The Amazing Hip,” “The Amazing
Knee,” and “The Amazing Shoulder.” Sound is adequate too, though I had
to turn up my television a lot to be able to hear the entire collection;
the recording level was obviously lower than is the average television’s
comfortable volume.
Scott and his instructors don’t take themselves
too seriously in AK, either. The opening credits (reproduced across the
collection there is a prepackaged conclusion that is similarly copied to the
volumes) feature his assistants poking fun at themselves. Look closely;
Coach Sonnon deliberately imitates a character from the Mortal Kombat
games. There is also some end footage of “Drunken Dwarf Gong-Fu” on more
than one tape that isn’t quite what you’d expect and will make you chuckle.
To analyze and catalog everything described on
all seven volumes of AK would result in a review so long that no one would
read it. What we’ll do, therefore, is take a look at the principles and
concepts explained in the first couple of volumes before summarizing the
contents of the remaining tapes in the set.
Coach Sonnon explains that Arthrokinetics
is the internal architecture of joint manipulation literally, the “science
of submission fighting.” What he means by this is that he intends to
teach you the physiological operation of the body’s joints, both in upper and
lower limbs, so that you’ll be able to approach the manipulation of joints
(and therefore the creation of submissions when engaged in grappling with a
resisting opponent) scientifically.
This characterizes all of the RMAX work I have
reviewed. Scott applies his considerable knowledge of the human body and
how it operates to the topic in order to produce groundbreaking results.
He speaks more than once in AK of the problems of “stylistic training” the
passive and decidedly unscientific approach of many fighting styles to
creating submissions, wrongly pushing for pain compliance techniques, and
attempting to force joint locks rather than simply understanding how
the body operates in order to bend it with its function to one’s will.
Arthrokinetics, Scott elaborates, is not
a style. It’s a map an amalgam of bodily knowledge and bodily wisdom
that will help you develop and improve whatever combat method or sport in
which you engage. I will warn you right now that if AK has a “weakness”
it is that it is burdened by a great deal of physiological and anatomical
nomenclature. Scott will hit you with an overwhelming degree of
verbiage, throwing at the viewer an endless succession of terms and labels and
theories. This turns off some viewers, who find Coach Sonnon’s work hard
to follow as a result.
“Martial art,” Scott explains, “in its highest
form must be a study of anatomy and physiology.” He goes on to say that
“AK is for those brave enough to step outside the box… Emancipate yourself
from slavery to stylistic training.”
Don’t let the complexity of the narration put
you off. Over successive viewing of the tapes, you’ll come to understand
just what Coach Sonnon is trying to teach you. Initially, however, it
isn’t vital that you understand every term or try to memorize every anotomical
definition. SImply follow along as Scott explains, watch him demonstrate
and elaborate with his training partners, and absorb the physiological
principles he is explaining. That is what all this verbiage comes
down to, after all: moving the body in ways that make the
opponent submit or neutralize his intentions.
Scott goes on to explain what he means by the
“somatic engineering of combat.” You are, in applying the principles of
AK, hoping to achieve the intentional disintegration of the opponent’s
breathing, movement, and alignment. Viewers of some of Scott’s other
work (or readers of my previous RMAX reviews) will be very familiar with that
trinity breathing, movement, and alignment. Working together, they
make you the most effective physical and mental operative you can be.
When disintegrated, their disharmony leaves you vulnerable to your opponent.
Scott explains in detail how breathing works
and how to control it. He demonstrates how to disrupt respiration, too.
We then look at alignment, at controlling the opponent’s structure, at
length. Those who’ve seen Immovable Object, Unstoppable Force
(IOUF) will find the discussion of controlling the opponent’s center of
gravity (to distort his natural alignment) very familiar. Scott talks
about the solar and lunar plexii, explains the difference between open and
closed kinetic chains (kinetic chains figure prominently in his recent book,
Body Flow), and the means through which we increase our ability to
predict what the opponent is doing or will do by sensing his intent through
his body.
Capping the trinity by discussing movement,
Coach Sonnon explains that our strategy in terms of AK is biomotor
interference. We are interfering with the ways in which the
opponent’s body operates in order to manipulate him by manipulating his
joints. Biomotor interference is the process of closing the kinetic
chain, making the opponent’s movements more predictable.
The somatic engineering strategy, Scott says,
is to use the opponent’s intention to control his structure (which is his
launching platform and therefore his “opportunity”) to control his ability
(his “movement”), which is why biomotor interference is closing the kinetic
chain. Scott completes this discussion by describing six degrees of
freedom and how these six degrees figure in AK.
Scott illustrates his points using a simple
table on a chalkboard.
|
The Somatic Engineering of Combat |
||||
| Complication increases top to bottom | Control This… | …Through This… | …to Rob This | Sophistication decreases top to bottom |
| Intent | Breathing | Will to Fight | ||
| Opportunity | Structure | Launching Platform | ||
| Ability | Movement | Offense/Defense | ||
Through this grid you can apply the “ROSS way”
to everything you do, which is the “performance enhancement” goal of RMAX and
Coach Sonnon’s body of work.
These explanations, which Scott does without a
script and without prompts (which I consider an impressive display of
physiological knowledge) continue as Scott demonstrates with his training
partners the physical principles he’s been discussing. (I should pause to
insert a final production note here, which is that Scott intermittently wears
the striped Spetsnaz t-shirt for which I criticized him in previous reviews.
The tight vertical stripes of the shirt are a little visually distracting on
camera.)
“Accept the offering, don’t seek the bounty,”
Scott quotes as the first tape comes to a close.” This is about flow
not technique.
In the second volume of AK, Scott explains the
four strategies for manipulating joints. These are:
-
Hyperfunction: active infliction of
kinetic energy. -
Immobilization: infliction of pain only
when the subject resists. -
Submission: infliction of pain
-
Dysfunction: active infliction of
injury.
Hyperfunction, as viewers of IOUF will recall,
is the manipulation of anatomical or “true” axes, rather than mechanical axes.
It is a means of manipulating joints in the ways they are meant to operate.
Scott goes on to describe the four
characteristics of joint integrity brittle, ductile, resilient, and tough
before discussing the structure and operation of joints themselves. He
states that joint manipulation tactics derive from the type of force we can
apply to the joint and goes on to define four of these: tensile force,
compressive force, shear force, and torsion force. He differentiates
between stress (what is induced) and strain (what is produced by stress).
He then contrasts uniaxial, biaxial, and triaxial joint structures.
There are two types of joint operations, Scott
teaches. These are “close-packed” and “loose-packed.” The first is
what we associate with “joint locks,” while the second involves sinew
separation and facilitates the manipulation of other joints.
It is the rotary nature of the loose-packed position that lends mobility and
makes the manipulations possible; a joint in its close-packed position
is more stabile and less susceptible to being manipulated.
Understanding these theories, Scott explains,
bringing together what he has been trying to teach the viewer, we can
improvise our own joint manipulations at a technical level. He
states this rather casually, but it’s the whole point of Arthrokinetics.
By learning the principles of joint operation as explained in AK, you can
create your own joint manipulations and therefore your own submission when
engaged in whatever type of grappling you do.
In the following segments we learn about the
three types of muscular tension, the concept of active insufficiency
(the diminished ability of a muscle to maintain tension the more you bend
your wrist, for example, the less your fist can clench), and using “active
insufficiency” to capitalize on the length-tension relationship in muscle
tissue. Scott explains the three types of muscular action, progressing
from most energy cost to least, as eccentric, isometric, and concentric.
Eccentric involves a lengthening of the muscle, while concentric involves
shortening of the muscle.
Isometric becomes very important, therefore,
because it is in this muscular action that tension keeps motion at zero, at
equilibrium. In the remainder of the AK volumes we come back to this
concept again and again as Scott explains how to use isometric muscular action
to defend yourself against joint manipulations. (The term he’ll use in
discussing this is reciprocal inhibition.)
To sum up the three types of muscular action,
Scott states plainly that you can hold more than you can resist and you can
brake more than you can hold. To lift, then, requires the most energy but
develops the least tension. He explains the relationship of speed
and tension and its implications for what we’re trying to learn.
The following segment is a discussion of
nerves, the receptors in muscle tissue, and the fact that a percentage of the
population is largely unaffected by pressure applied to nerves. Scott
demonstrates this on one of his training partners, who is largely unmoved by
Scott’s efforts to affect the partner’s nerves.
The tape concludes with a discussion of the
four simple mechanical operations of the body’s limbs: the lever, the
pulley, the wedge, and the screw. Those “four machines,” as Scott calls
them, are the last of the formula you’ll need to improvise joint manipulation
techniques infinitely.
The remainder of AK’s volumes five of them,
in fact are devoted to detailed explanations of the functions of the lower
limb and upper limb architecture. The three volumes on lower limb
architecture (which, judging from the graphic labels on the tapes themselves,
were at one time divided a little differently than they are now in the
seven-volume AK collection) explore the function and composition of the hip,
knee, and ankle. The two volumes devoted to upper limb architecture do
the same for the shoulder, elbow, and wrist. The discussion of the
function of these joints and the ways in which they work together is followed
by what Scott refers to often as a “blizzard of technical demonstrations.”
The demonstrations of AK are not meant as
techniques to memorize. That would be antithetical to the philosophy of
Arthrokinetics specifically and Coach Sonnon’s teaching methods
generally. No, these are examples samples of the principles explored
in AK being put into practice.
I was greatly impressed by Arthrokinetics.
Anyone who finds value in “joint locks” or “grappling” in general can enhance
both what they do and how they approach what they do by exploring AK.
This is conceptual teaching, a philosophical and physiological
exploration of how the body works and how we can exploit this operation to
bend other human beings to our wills. While it might at first seem
complex and even a bit impenetrable, AK is not inaccessible and it is
not difficult to apply. While you may not find “submission
fighting” to be of use, I’m willing to bet you do see the utility in
manipulating another person’s joints. That’s the whole point and
that’s what you’ll be able to do conceptually when you’ve absorbed this
set.
This is the science of behind
submission fighting and it is worth your time.