Music to My Ears
Andrew Nerlich, October 21st, 2007
If I were a gazillionaire, I’d have a house like Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO. He built a copy of a Kyoto temple in California for around 37 million, and lives there when he’s not sailing his maxi-yacht or trying to buy a surplus MIG-29 (try putting a pak sao on THAT,sucker!) from what’s left of the Russian military.
But I’d build a mini-Shaolin by the ocean. Somewhere tropical, an island off North or FarNorth Queensland. A hall full of 108 wooden dummies seems a little ostentatious even by Ellison standards, but I would have a large paved courtyard like the Mortal Kombat arena with several of these wooden monstrosities in staggered formation along one side, so the masters I flew in from around the world by private jet and helicopter could demonstrate as my friends and I followed along. Along the opposite side, a row of assorted striking bags and other training paraphenalia would be installed. The ocean side is left clear so as not to sully the view.
Every morning I’d train alone for an hour and a half, doing forms facing the sunrise over the water dressed in black pants, stripped to the waist, working on my tan as well as my tan sao. In this fabulous environment, motivation to train would not be a problem, nor would fatigue.
Well, we all should have a dream.
I’m not doing too bad – I live in a three level courtyard home, and I do my home training in a double garage. But I work hard, commute a fair distance and don’t have the hired help Larry does to maintain the home, finances, marriage, etc. About the only thing in common we have is we’ve both done a lot of database hacking, he with considerably more worldly success.
Sometimes it’s hard to get up off the couch or from behind the keyboard and go train. Believe it or not, sometimes I even get bored with it.
Sometimes you need an assist to get you up and punching … and one that works particularly well for me is my music collection. You don’t need Larry’s cash reserves to get yourself moving to the groove. A real cheapskate could use home tapes or copyright-violating MP3′s, but I’m still low-tech and budget-unconscious enough to use store-bought CD’s.
Music can stop you thinking about how long you’ve got to go to finish your workout, or this particularly strenuous round or section thereof. It stops your train of thought – money, relationship, work, the usual issues, what your plans are after the workout, blah,blah,blah … Play it loud enough, you can drown out the noise of dummy arms, sandbags, speedball, heavy bag, even the neighbours complaining 
I’ve been listening to rock since the early seventies. Hendrix, Doors, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Todd Rundgren, Clash, Simple Minds, Talking Heads, The Cult, Metallica, REM, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails. I quite like J.S. Bach too. Some of that to me is the stuff of legend and the soundtrack to pivotal life moments.
But most rock (with some notable exceptions which I’ll come to) is set to a steady beat too slow for the really serious and intense MA/fighting workout. You want something up around 120 beats a minute. If, like me, you find the soul/disco musak used in aerobics classes about as much fun to listen to as a jackhammer next door while you’re trying to sleep, you need to look farther afield.
I found dance music. Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Groove Terminator, PropellerHeads … get the CD-enabled ghetto blaster down in the garage and crank it up. But first – you need to warm up. Something a bit slower, flowing. Some of Massive Attack’s slower stuff works well, but my personal favorite is one of the world’s all-time soppiest power ballads – “Have you ever needed someone so bad”, off Def Leppard’s “Adrenalize”:
Have you ever needed someone so bad
Have you ever needed someone you just couldn’t have
Have you ever tried so hard
But your world just fell apart
Have you ever needed someone so ba-aad …
You get the idea. If, like me, you’re in a sound relationship, these lyrics make you want to laugh or throw up or both; but if your love life had suffered recent setbacks, they might cut a bit deeper. Anyway, that’s not our concern. You can get some slow to medium pace, fluid moves and stretches going to this rhythm.
Once you’re warm and greased up, it’s time to crank up both the volume and the tempo. I find the music makes me want to move, and sometimes that’s seventy per cent of the battle. But you can experiment with various rhythms and tempos; some guitar hooks and drum fills lend themselves to the practice of certain combinations; someone with more time and technology than I could probably experiment with slowing a track down or speeding it up to concentrate on various aspects of a combination, or even fiddle with the mix to emphasise the part of the rhythm or polyrhythm that interests them. You can work on smoothness and flow, or go totally staccato.
A good deal of fighting is about rhythm and tempo, and breaking it. You don’t want to be a “slave to the rhythm”, but a master of tempo and broken rhythm. Music could help you. I feel it helps me.
If you find this rave/dance stuff is too weird or you can’t cross the intergenerational divide – that’s right, baby boomers, the sixties are long gone (thirty + years in fact) – you can find some rock and roll that can cut the mustard, though it might be on album tracks and B-sides. “March of the Pigs” by Nine Inch Nails, “Nice Boys don’t play Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Guns ‘n’ Roses and “The Struggle Within” off Metallica’s black album are a few of many that work for me. Or maybe you’ll find hip-hop more to your taste – whatever works for YOU.
Last year I travelled to Adelaide to help my Dad celebrate his seventieth birthday. I couldn’t stay at his house as building work on some extensions was still being frantically finished off in time for the party, and various relatives in a less fortunate state than your physically fit,easily pleased and financially solvent scribe had occupied all available sleeping space. I was staying at a nearby hotel close to one of Adelaide’s splendid ring of parks surrounding the inner city. I had risen early to train in the park, some running, forms and footwork drills culminating in ten minutes of kicking combinations targeting a set of steel soccer goalposts. The posts actually sang when I hit them properly with a sidekick, like a big set of very low frequency tubular bells.
After, I’d eaten breakfast and showered, and found I had about half an hour to kill before fronting up at Dad’s to start organising picnic tables, the bar, etc. etc. I flicked on the tube – Video Hits, woo hoo! – while I got my stuff together in a leisurely fashion; ten minutes later I caught myself throwing punching combos to a forgettable Backstreet Boys tune. Ecch. Sometimes it’s really good to be alone, without witnesses to see how weird you really are.
Some readers might disagree with my approach, and feel that training should be approached in an atmosphere of silence and total concentration. To each their own. I like doing forms on a pristine beach overlooking azure water at sunrise as much as anyone, but I’m some way away from being able to do that except when on holiday at present. Until I get my mini-Shaolin built, if a mechanism exists which will get me training harder, longer, and with more intensity, I’ll use it.
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