An example of a pulley in combat….

From Matt:

I was asked earlier in a conversation about an example of a pulley as a machine in the body for combat…
I wanted to repost the answer to give an explaination:

You have to look at what a pulley is. I concentrate more on the wheel and axel because it is more applicable. There are a number of them…first, you can look at how pulleys work in the body, with your muscles/joints/ligament/tendons around rotation points – an example is your knee. When the muscles (quadriceps) slide over a round surface (patela) then you have a pulley. If you know how a pulley works, you can make this machine function, like when you left your leg – or you can make it malfunction (break it with a kick or stomp or lock to move the muscle off the patela), or you can make it hyperfunction, by, let’s say, putting a lever between the back of the knee and the thigh and then pulling the lower leg back over, which makes it hyperfunction.

Same with the elbow – because the elbow is the knee, the shoulder is the hip, etc. It’s the same mechanical structure – so now you have the means of function – making your movements more efficient because you understand the lever system and can become quicker in your strikes or grabs….like a pulley is used to lift a weight using mechanical force. You use this same principle to lift your weight (hand, foot) quicker and faster through biomechanical efficiency….

You have compund levers where you can attack two at a time to f/m/h (function, malfunction, hyper function) to cause maximum lasting damage – OR you can recruit two of three (shoulder, elbow, wrist) to create a much more powerful strike.

Example is making the shoulder and the elbow h/m at the same time…

A lot of people laugh at diagrams, etc. But, think about this way – if you can only learn 300 techniques in your life time, and can really only do well 150, but in combat you can only have neurological access to around 70….

So, you make your body as efficient in movement as you can, and you make those techniques as efficient as they can – then you are approaching physical combat (which is mechanical interaction) with a very efficient machine already….and you understand the mechanics from a book basis…then those 70 are multiplied exponentially.

They become like 150. In Pramek, that’s what we do.

We move beyond technique using that method so the student is bound by learning 300 techniques – they are simply applying principles
They are efficient, their understanding of mechanics is efficient….

So they are applying a wedge on anything – not just a strike, then it’s kick-wedge – it’s just a wedge, just a pulley.

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