How Do You Knock Someone Out?

So how do you knock someone out? This is a very misunderstood subject especially in the fight world. If you ask a number of fighters how you knock someone out you will get a bevy of answers ranging from speed, brute strength, accuracy, timing, explosiveness, kinetic linking, penetration and follow through – and the list goes on.

And yet I’ve dropped someone to their knees with a couple of taps on their head. This doesn’t seem to fit in with the above list, doesn’t it?

In order to understand how to knock someone out I believe you must understand the knockout process – what is going on inside that person. Only then can you apply yourself effectively and achieve that knockout you desire.

There are two ways of knocking someone out – concussion, or by inducing the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS, commonly and in my opinion incorrectly termed the fight or flight response.)

For concussion you need to literally rattle the brain around inside the skull, causing damage to the cell structure, resulting in shut down to protect itself. This is trauma within a fight at its most brutal. To effect this trauma on the brain you need to create movement in the head, allowing the brain therefore to crash and rub against the skull and the deviations in the internal surface of the brain, damaging cells, breaking neurology, creating bruising – not very nice!

This movement can be achieved two ways. The first would be sheer force of violent impact, displacing shocking and moving the head through pure force of impact. Here power development and the application of this behind a shot is paramount.

The next way would be through identifying the mechanical weaknesses in your opponent, in particular how the head sits on the neck. A hook to the side of the point of the chin could create a much greater twisting movement in an opponent’s head. Compare this to just hitting the side of the opponent’s head with a hook where his strong neck may absorb and prevent the required violent movement.

Concussive blows are accumulative – the more times you hit someone with power and create the violent movement in the head the more damage and the closer to a concussive knockout. Of course, this is the one element of our fight sports that no fighter should forget. If any of us get hit concussively in training or competition we must monitor ourselves and take precautions, including no alcohol or returning to impact too soon. If in doubt, any doubt, seek appropriate medical attention. Actually, if you take a concussive blow seek appropriate medical attention anyway – let’s play safe hey?

The next way to effect a knock out is by inducing the GAS. This response prepares for the freeze-flight-fight (fear-faint) response, which happens in that order. When we suffer a shock we freeze. If this doesn’t release the stress we know this response is not working, and we quickly move to flight directly away from the source of the stress. Again, if this doesn’t remove the stress we increase our response yet again, now to the fight response. If this doesn’t resolve the stress then we enter a state of fear, similar but different to the freeze. And when we come to the last of the body’s defences there’s nothing left to do but to shut down everything apart from our life support systems – we faint.

And it is possibly for the shock to be so great that we can almost instantaneously shoot through the responses to the faint response. This is what happens with a ‘flash knockdown’.

To induce the flash knockdown stress has to be induced, and rapidly increased. This is why the ‘shot we didn’t see’ can create the stress and therefore the reaction.

Stress is much easier to induce in a novice or intermediate fighter than at the higher echelons of our sports. With the novice and intermediate fighters in training I often set up what I term the ‘limbic loop’ (the limbic system creates the GAS), inducing stress gradually, hitting once to increase stress and the freeze, then again to get them to move away with flight, once more for fight and reading their physiology to instantly hit them as they respond again inducing fear, then tapping them on their head to induce the knockdown, usually a drop to the knee.

Sometimes, as its training, the stress doesn’t quite reach the fear as I keep the contact light, instead sometimes trapping my partners in a never ending limbic loop of rotation through freeze-flight-fight.

So that’s how you induce a knockout. Either by concussion or by inducing the GAS. Hopefully now you’ll be better placed to get the knockouts you desire – and I’ll have to watch out for you in sparring and competition! I'll better blog on evasion and defence pretty soon...

Listen To Yourself – You Know What You Need To Do!

I’ve had several hypnotherapy clients recently that have wasted their time. They haven’t wasted mine, as I’ve been paid, and have got some great learning from working with them too. And this is the reason I’ve written this blog post, so other potential clients might not waste their time either.

These clients came to see me with problems that were definitely real. And they left without their problems. So why did they waste their time? Read on and all will be explained.

And then you may not be surprised when I solved all of one of these client’s problems with three words. Yes, literally three words.

When a client talks with me I listen to the words and structure they use, the way they say those words, and the body language that they use as they tell me. With the body language I look at everything, from their overall posture down to the smallest of undetectable movements, the pupil dilation, even the skin tone and colouration. I swear I know one of my peers that see pores actually opening! All of this tells me more than you could possibly imagine.

So in a session when I ask a client to tell me how they do their problem, I receive an incredible amount of information. And, being lucky to have had (and continue to have) some good mentors, I’ve learned that a client will always make my job easy. All I have to do is listen with my whole body, listening to their words, listening to their body, and listening to their eyes, and of course listening with my intuition.

And through listening to them I realised that they weren’t just telling me how they did their problem – they were also telling me exactly what they needed to do to solve it.They literally told me in their own words EXACTLY what they needed to do to solve their issues.

A recent depressive told me that he “couldn’t see” what he needed to do. So as he told me how he did his depression, through listening to the message he was telling me, he was also telling exactly what he needed to do to lift him from everything that caused his depression. I made lots of notes, and showed him these notes. He could then literally ‘see’ exactly what he needed to do. The realisation on his face was, well, just special. He always knew what he needed to do. He couldn’t see it. Now he could.

Though my best one was a stop smoker – forty a day plus for thirty years. Lung problems, health problems, complications, asthma – the smoking was literally about to drop him dead. And then he told me exactly what he needed to do. “I just need someone to tell me to stop smoking!” he said, exasperated.

So I held my nerve, and obliged.

“Stop smoking, now.”

Priceless!

Pain Management – Hypnotherapy

This carries on from my last two posts on pain, and here I will give a ‘general’ approach I often use when working with clients who have pain. Please note that every client is an individual, and as such, deserves an individual approach relevant to them. This is just a general approach I may utilise.

Hypnosis and the management of pain have a long documented history and hypnosis is commonly used as an analgesic and an anaesthetic during operations – and has been for centuries. Yet this is just one aspect where hypnosis (and other tools that a hypnotherapist has) can be used to work with pain.

Of course, the first thing in respect to working with pain is to ensure the client has appropriate medical attention. The last thing you want to do is remove a person’s migraine pain is if the pain is actually a signal from a growing tumour! It doesn’t matter whether it is knee pain, migraines, joint pain, back pain – I want to know what I am working with, and ensure that my client is actually getting the right medical attention where necessary. I know I am not a medical doctor – I know my limitations.

I also get a list of any drugs, painkillers, or any other treatments they have been having, together with a history of the pain. I want to know whether the drugs are preventing the process of nociception (the pain signal from tissue damage or risk of tissue damage), or are working inside the neurology of the brain, or even whether they aren’t working at all. The history will give me a great starting place too and let me know the origins of the pain.

If it is ethical and morally right to continue, and the client is happy with the process, I then start work on the emotional and learned behaviours behind the pain. Examples of these I am often presented with include:

“I’ve had a rear end shunt so I must have whiplash.”
“I pulled my back bending down and now every time I bend down I get a pain.”
“I only get my knee pain on the way to training.”
“My migraines started around the time of a severe emotional trauma.”
“Even though the doctors say nothing’s wrong, it still hurts.”

All these are clear examples to me of psychosomatic pain. The first task I undertake is to educate my client to what pain is, and that by paying attention to the signals of pain then there is no need to feel the pain. I also explain the origins of pain. Often, this is all it takes. It seems this is quite usual with sportspersons who train hard or are competitive. They tend to have ‘niggly’ pains on the way to training but at no other times. Educating them about pain often removes the problem immediately.

Actually, according to people like Dr Sarno, a medical doctor who is a leading pain specialist, if an injury is not getting worse and is not being aggravated and the pain has persisted for more than 6 weeks then it exists at the psychosomatic level only. And he includes amputees in this category too.

If the pain persists following education I then look for learned behaviours or unresolved/repressed emotions behind the pain. I often use hypnosis for this although often the client can present the signal behind the pain immediately – pain is a great inducer of hypnosis! I use all the tools in my hypnotherapy kit as appropriate to reframe the learned behaviour or resolve the emotions – I work with the client to pay attention to the signal.

With recent clients this has immediately removed or reduced pains from backs, shoulders, necks and knees. More than that, with pain just being one form of psychosomatic signals, this afternoon I worked with a stop smoking client who also has severe psoriasis. Interestingly as I was paying attention to the emotions driving him to smoke, the psoriasis started to considerably improve. Whether the psoriasis has psychosomatic origins here or not is not really important – what is important is the clear and tangible change for the better has taken place and exactly at the time of dealing with an unresolved emotion.

Of course, not all pain is psychosomatic, from learned behaviour or unresolved emotions. Some pain is obviously from tissue damage. Two of my recent clients have had pain almost across their entire bodies. Their consultants haven’t known what pain to attend to medically – there was so much of it. So together we are working first on the emotional pain, then the learned behaviours – so all that should be left is pain from actual damage to tissue, giving the medical consultants clearer signals to work with.

Once the medical practitioners are paying attention to these signals of damage, I can then work with my clients to turn down the pain. This pain is an important signal, and one that needs to be paid attention to. However, where it is interfering with a person’s recovery from that injury, such as prohibiting good sleep, then it is appropriate to turn it right down – or even off for certain parts of the day. As all pain is a perception within the mind, and again let me assure you that all pain is very real, I find that hypnosis is a great tool with which to do this.

Some damage to tissue is also untreatable. Think about certain long term conditions here, degenerative orders, or worse. Here whatever the signal there is no attention that can be paid to the source of the signal. Hypnosis is well documented in assisting these persons have a much more comfortable time.

I have had some good experimentation with control of pain (switching on and off), and regulation of pain (extent of the perception of pain) with my fighting friends. Last year on the Combined Services Judo Course I would often get a shout of “Gary, another one!” from the coaches. Often a twisted knee, impact trauma or the like was the source of pain. I’ve also carried out similar experimentation with my fight training partners.

This experimentation has often centred on their ‘perception’ of the pain – after, of course, I check that they will be paying attention to the signal. I ask them to visualise the pain. What does it look like? How big is it? What colour? Is it moving? And as they visualise it and experience it, I get them to change their experience by shrinking it, moving it away, fading it out, ‘sucking it out’ of the body. This is a surprisingly quick way of regulating, and often controlling, pain. Give it a go – after you make sure you’ll be paying attention to the signal that is!

So there we go – a three post journey through pain. So that’s a few thoughts, a few bits of my study, and a few thoughts all thrown into the mix. I wonder how many of you who read these three posts find that just by understanding pain a little better, your own pain becomes easier to manage?

As always, I welcome all feedback – please feel free to add comments!

Pain - Control, Regulation and Management

In my previous article I had a look at what ‘pain’ actually is - the signals and the neurology behind it. So now we have a better understanding of pain this blog post introduces approaches to control pain, as well as the management and regulation as to when, and how much we feel.

In summary of my previous post pain is the result of a signal, a signal that says we need to pay attention to something. The source of that signal could be tissue damage or risk of tissue damage, learned behaviour, or unresolved emotions. These signals are passed to our brain where we interpret the signals and pain is perceived. This process is there to protect us from harm – pain is in our best interests for our health and safety.

Some quick definitions for you. Control is a digital switch, a switch on, or a switch off – black and white. Regulation is an analogue scale, the amount, the extent, and timing of pain – shades of grey. Management is the process of allowing life to continue with pain and the process of control and regulation. The good news is that a hypnosis approach can help with all three of these, and my next post will explain some of the methods that we can use.

But first, pain is a perception in our minds, although very real, it is a perception created in our minds. And as such we actually control, regulate and manage pain on an every day basis. This is a usual every day occurrence. Have you notice your pain coming and going, varying at different times and in different circumstances?

Let’s start with pain from nociception – the pain that results from damage or risk of damage to tissue. The two ways of regulating the pain are ‘afferent regulation’ and ‘descending regulation’.

Afferent regulation is the process that can most easily be explained by rubbing your shin after bruising it to reduce the pain. The ‘let mummy rub it better’ approach. This can be explained by the ‘gate theory of pain’ where the neurology is both excited by the nociceptors detecting the pain and inhibited by the signal of rubbing it. Perhaps it could be simple put that by rubbing the injury, further signals from the rubbing are sent to the brain as well as the nociceptors signal that results in pain, therefore giving too much information and dulling the nociceptors signal – and therefore less signal for pain is received.

Descending regulation is something that as a fighter I use on a daily basis. Especially when we compete, and often in heavy sparring, we have to ‘switch off’ from pain. This is common in athletes and soldiers where injuries are incurred but no pain is felt. The suppression of the pain is thought to be carried out in the brain including the area known as PAG (periaqueductal grey matter). This area of the brain sends signals down the neurology effectively depressing the nociception signals coming up.

Pain from learned behaviour has a slightly different approach. Here we have been hurt in the past and therefore our minds look to protect us in the present by giving us a pain signal – often, though not exclusively, from the source of the original pain. I work with many athletes who have pain from old injuries on the way to training, but at no other times. To regulate or control the pain we need to work out what the signal is that the pain is telling us, and pay attention to it in order for the signal to not be necessary. And then we can switch off as it’s not needed.

The final source of pain is unresolved emotions. Dr Sarno is a leading name in the field of psychosomatic conditions including pain coming from unresolved emotions. If you are suffering from long term pain I would definitely recommend reading his works – just by reading his books many people become pain free as they understand the sources of their conditions. I regularly am helping people turn off and turn down long term pain by paying attention to unresolved emotions. Often this pain is first experienced around the time of emotional stress or trauma. As the emotions from this time are repressed by our unconscious minds the pain is a reminder that we need to process or resolve these emotions, even though we are mostly not consciously aware of them. Resolve the emotions, and then there is no need to feel the pain.

It is interesting to note that in my studies I have come across numerous reports as to the use of placebos in pain relief. A patient may be given sterile saline instead of an analgesic and report relief from the pain despite having no drug. A belief that the treatment will work can be enough to cause activation of the pain relief systems of the brain.

In my pain control/management/regulation I work with an understanding of all of these methods, the processes by which we experience pain. And by understanding these methods I am better placed to ethically assist people in living free from pain. In my next blog post I will explain some methods that I use, including some that you can try without a hypnotherapist, to control, regulate and manage pain.

What is Pain?

I’ve been working with several patients in respect to their ‘pain’ lately, including in conjunction with their consultants at their Pain Clinics. In this blog post I thought I’d explain what pain actually is, and how we experience it. (Everything here is put as a generalisation to enable simpler understanding.)

In later posts I’ll talk about pain control, management and regulation, together with the uses of hypnosis in the same. But first, what is pain?

Pain exists to keep us safe. It is a response to an alarm signal, our body’s way of saying ‘pay attention’. And this response helps us to avoid harm. Pain and withdrawal reflexes help us to keep ourselves safe. Pain makes us rest injured parts of the body which assists in recovery from any damage. It also reminds us to keep away from situations where in the past we had pain, or to pay attention to emotions that are not yet resolved.

Pain is a ‘somatic sensation’, in other words, it is a sensation felt in the body. But how is it created? Pain is a response to a signal. That signal could be from tissue damage, risk of tissue damage, learned behaviour, or unresolved emotions.

Pain as a result of tissue damage or risk of tissue damage is through a process called ‘nociception’. This starts with the nerve endings, or nociceptors, detecting the damage or risk, and sending this signal through our neurology to our brain. In the brain the signal is received, interpreted, and the synapses within our neurology fire accordingly and often produce the sensation of pain.

It is worth pointing out that the process of nociception is not in itself pain – it is just a signal that we can interpret as pain.

Pain can be as a result of learned behaviour. In the past we may have incurred injury and experienced pain, so if we are about to do that behaviour again, or are doing that behaviour we may experience pain, telling us not to do so. It is also well documented that current social norms also influence pain, and we can learn to feel pain as a result of other people’s behaviour, or even just hearing about it.

Unresolved emotions are also a source of pain, especially those with chronic pain. It has been documented that unless an injury is getting worse or being aggravated pain shouldn’t be felt six weeks after the injury – if it is, there is very likely an emotional element to that pain. Often repressed emotions become a source of pain – the pain being the signal that we need to pay attention and process that emotion through to resolution.

Pain is a cognitive process and it is due to this that our perception of pain can vary. Pain can come and go, may be intense, or just in the background, or we may just not feel it at all. And we can also experience pain whilst having no tissue damage or risk of damage to that tissue. We can control it by turning it off or on, or regulate or manage it to lessen or increase its intensity. And we can do all this because pain is created in the brain.

Now, whilst it is true that all pain is a perception in the brain, whether from tissue damage, threat of tissue damage, learned behaviour or unresolved emotions – all pain is most definitely real. And we all know how real that pain can be. So in future posts I’ll describe pain can be controlled, regulated and managed, so when we experience pain, we know how to pay attention to it.

Coming Off Caffeine

Coming Off Caffeine

This Blog Post follows on from my previous Post ‘Help, I’m Addicted To Coffee!’ So if you haven’t read it yet, please do so!

In my last blog post I explained in simple terms what caffeine is and how it acts on the body. Now I’m going to take this further and show how to safely cut back and remove the addiction.

If you drink a lot of coffee and suddenly cut it out you WILL have problems. If you remember caffeine affects us by ‘blocking’ the calming effects of adenosine in our neurology, allowing our neurology to run at faster speeds.

However, if you consistently take caffeine the neurons become adapted to the smaller amounts of adenosine, and therefore just work slower. Your whole neurology will slow – the brakes will be permanently on.

Without caffeine the neurons fire too slowly, slowing the brain, resulting in the fatigue and the headaches.

So there you go – caffeine can actually slow you down. And that’s not a good thing.

If you want to limit your withdrawal symptoms my suggestion is to not go cold turkey – instead gradually reduce your caffeine by say, a cup a day, giving your body an opportunity to increase the adenosine as the caffeine intake decreases. You need to allow the body to adjust its chemical balance once more.

Something else happens when we take caffeine though, and this is the source of the addiction. We have a reward pathway in our neurology that helps us to form pleasurable associations when our body’s needs are met – and that involves the production of dopamine, which makes us feel good.

And when we don’t take caffeine our bodies desire that dopamine hit – and therefore we get the coffee cravings and the withdrawal symptoms.

How do we increase our levels of dopamine? Fall in love, get good (and flavoursome) nutrition, carry out healthy activities – anything that is an activity which promotes our survival. We are hardwired to reward ourselves for doing this, and this leads to production of dopamine. We reward ourselves for being good to ourselves.

So the first way of removing cravings and the addiction is to replace the dopamine from caffeine with dopamine from being good to yourself. The second is to slowly cut back on caffeine bit by bit allowing the plasticity of the brain to re-adjust to normal levels of dopamine.

Another way is to change our ‘perception’ of the cravings. Allow yourself to have a go at this. The principle works with headaches, cravings, pain too – it works on anything that is a perception within the brain – of which these three are. It takes a bit of practice, much easier to do with a coach or hypnotherapist like me, and it really, really works.

Close your eyes, and focus on the feelings of craving. Give them a score of 1-10, 10 being really bad! Notice where they are in the body. Really notice them. Make them real by putting your hand on where they are. And as you do so, start to notice exactly what these feelings feel like. The physical aspects of the feeling. My bet is that there is movement in them, if only at a minor level. So concentrate. Usually the feelings reconnect with themselves, ‘spinning’. Notice the speed and direction of the spin. Apply your mind, and make it spin faster. As you spin it faster your headache/craving will probably get worse. The same will happen if you make the feeling physically larger using your mind. Very much worse if you spin it faster and make it larger as well.

So do the reverse, and slow it down. Use your mind to change your perception by slowing the spinning…and once it has stopped…spin it slowly at first in the other direction. This is now a different feeling, so spin it faster. And as you spin it faster and faster in the opposite direction, make it smaller. Shrink it down to a size of a pea. Notice how the craving is reducing all the time you slow and reverse the feelings, and shrink them down. Notice what the cravings are like now on a scale of 1-10.

If you want them to go down still further ‘dissociate’ yourself from the feelings. Again, apply your mind (this is all working on the level of perception), and float the feeling out of your body. Float it further away, and then as far as you can so you can’t feel it any more.

Give it a go, and trust me, it works a treat! Certain things are experienced only through the brain’s perception, and these include cravings, headaches and pain. Yes, there will usually be a root underlying physical cause behind it. Often pain which only exists on an ‘emotional’ level as its roots in physical cause – even if the physical cause is long gone, or created by the mind/body connection in the first place. But how we ‘perceive’ those feelings is purely in the mind. And we can change them…

And this will lead me into a future series of articles on pain – what it is, how it works, and what we can do to either control it (switch it on or off), regulate or manage it. And doing this with clients is something I am passionate about, building good experience of freeing clients up from the burdens of chronic pain.

Help, I’m addicted To Coffee!

I’ve been known to take a wee bit too much coffee. With my will to give my Personal Training clients the best sessions I can, quite often I’ll take a coffee before each one to ‘pick me up’ and check I’m on form. I regularly do blocks of 7 PT clients in a row – that’s a lot of coffee going down me!

Whereas a little caffeine buzz can be a good thing, not many people know what caffeine is, let alone what it does. So this blog post sets out to give you some information.

We can take on board caffeine through coffee, tea, stimulant drinks, chocolate, and a few other sources as well. Interestingly, the average cup of coffee has 100mg caffeine, cup of tea 50mg, 10-50mg in colas, and Red Bull has around 80mg.

Yes, that’s right; the average cup of coffee has more caffeine than a red bull. Interestingly, tea has more caffeine than coffee, but when we take them as a drink we directly ingest coffee whereas tea is infused. Therefore there is more caffeine in a cup of coffee than a cup of tea.

And now a quick science bit.

Caffeine is found in plants as a natural neurotoxin. The plants use it to protect themselves. It’s a defence mechanism against certain bugs.

With us, it plays havoc with our ANS (Autonomic Nervous System). In our neurology there is a chemical called adenosine which has the job of slowing our nerves down. Caffeine blocks it from doing its job, by taking its place, and therefore the nerves are free to work faster. This puts a perceived ‘emergency’ reaction into the body and the sympathetic system kicks in, starting the preparations for the GAS (General Adaptation Syndrome, or the Freeze-Flight-Fight (Fear-Feint) reaction). Voila, you are awake.

In simple terms, caffeine takes the brakes off.

And with the brakes off our neurology runs fast, and creates an increased level of dopamine activity in the brain – just like cocaine and other stimulants. Your body starts to look forward to the caffeine hit.

And the more caffeine you take, the more the body becomes desensitised to it, meaning you need more caffeine for the same effect. This is why you end up taking more and more caffeine to get a ‘lift’.

My caffeine intake levels are too high – and I’ve started the process of weaning myself off the coffee and caffeine. How do you do that? I’ll be posting another blog post soon explaining exactly what happens to cause the addiction, the affects of withdrawal, and of course suggesting some simple ways to handle it comfortably!