Review: Intu-Flow

In my energy bal­ance arti­cle, I men­tioned a prod­uct from RMAX called Warrior Wellness that I highly rec­om­mend for releas­ing stored ten­sion, increas­ing dynamic range of motions, and gen­er­ally keep­ing the body work­ing as it should. Specifically, I listed it as sug­gested body main­te­nance for Taido students.

Since I orig­i­nally wrote this review, Warrior Wellness has been replaced by an expanded and refined pro­gram called Intu-Flow.

In this review, I will share with you some of the things I love about the Intu-Flow pro­gram. I’m hop­ing that I’ll con­vince you to pur­chase it for your­self so you can expe­ri­ence the ben­e­fits of includ­ing it in your own prac­tice (and I do mean include; you don’t have to add any­thing, as Intu-Flow can be inte­grated with what­ever you already do — I refer here to your Taido prac­tice sessions).

Results

I know some of you are results-oriented, so I’ll start by fill­ing you in on what you can expect to notice after a cou­ple of weeks of prac­tice. If I were mak­ing a pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion to your brain’s CEO and Board of Directors, I would prob­a­bly start with some fancy title page with a cool gra­di­ent back­ground. It would be blue with yel­low block caps. The next page would be a bul­leted list of the top attrib­utes you will improve when you work this program:

• range of motion
• dynamic mobil­ity
• bal­ance
• move­ment efficiency
• inte­gra­tion of breath­ing with movement
• bod­ily awareness

After I had intro­duced each point briefly, the screen would dis­solve to reveal the words: “All in about 20 minutes”.

So maybe I shouldn’t give up a steady job to try my hand at com­mis­sion sales, but you get the idea. I’m pretty pas­sion­ate about this pro­gram, because I believe it is the best avail­able at any­where near its price point. I may as well go on and men­tion that this 2 DVD course sells for only $50. I’m pretty cer­tain that we’ve all paid a lot more than that to get much less than what I promise this course can deliver if you work consistently.

My Results

I’ve have been work­ing on Warrior Wellness / Intu-Flow since sum­mer 05. Let’s just go on and say that I was in pretty good shape when I ordered the disc, arguably the best phys­i­cal con­di­tion I had ever expe­ri­enced up to that point in my life. I have always been (prob­a­bly thanks to prac­tic­ing Taido since an early age) very coor­di­nated and basi­cally flex­i­ble. But nobody over ten years old ever looked at my move­ments and said “Wow — that’s crazy!” until I had been doing this pro­gram for a cou­ple of months.

When I went to Atlanta for the 30^th anniver­sary tour­na­ment, I had a very few brief chances to put on a dogi and prac­tice with every­one. I got a lot of wows in regard to my easy and fluid mobil­ity. I think it was Chad Gilmartin that called me “Jello-man.” I had been doing Intu-Flow for two months, about five times a week. I was feel­ing really relaxed and in-tune with my body despite the crazy sched­ule I kept for those three weeks (about four hours of sleep a day and a lot of run­ning around). It helped con­vince me that Intu-Flow was doing good things for me.

In the months after that, stu­dents at the Yokohama dojo started to take notice of my inter­est­ing warm-up rou­tine and my abil­ity to move in strange ways.

At the 2006 Asia Pacific Games in Australia, almost every­one remarked at some point on my freaky mobil­ity. Shima Sensei seemed impressed with my ideas for appli­ca­tions to Taido move­ments. It actu­ally gave us a whole new frame­work to dis­cuss power-development and tran­si­tions between var­i­ous techniques.

Actually, it should be no sur­prise that increas­ing the body’s move­ment capa­bil­i­ties should have a good deal of car­ry­over into Taido performance.

Back to the 5SRs

As I pointed out in my arti­cle about Taido’s 5jokun, Taido’s the­ory val­ues cre­ativ­ity, adapt­abil­ity, and free­dom of motion, among other things. Just look­ing at high-level jis­sen or tenkai should be enough evi­dence that Taido is very demand­ing of our bod­ies’ abil­i­ties to move in var­i­ous ways. In one of my first arti­cles on this site, I wrote:

I feel that free­dom is a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for cre­ativ­ity. In terms of motion, you are lim­ited in your poten­tial per­for­mance (your cre­ativ­ity) by your mobil­ity and strength (your free­dom to manip­u­late your body).

Intu-Flow is a pro­gres­sive tech­nol­ogy for increas­ing phys­i­cal freedom.

Teaching, or even just watch­ing begin­ners should make it obvi­ous that most peo­ple do not begin Taido with a great deal of skill in mov­ing beyond gen­eral walk­ing a other day-to-day move­ment. Our daily lives just do not stim­u­late our bod­ies’ capa­bil­i­ties to move. How many joints are there in the human body? I have no idea, but I can tell you there are a lot. How many of these joints get to move through their entire ranges of motion in a typ­i­cal day? Very, very few.

Use it, or Lose it

If we do not move our joints through their full ranges of motion, that range dimin­ishes. I’m not going to get med­ical, but this is not just an empir­i­cal obser­va­tion — it has been exper­i­men­tally ver­i­fied time and time again that the body gets tight and move­ment gets “clunky” unless we make use of our bod­ies. This results from mechan­i­cal, neu­ro­log­i­cal, and bio­chem­i­cal fac­tors that are far beyond my abil­ity to explain. For our pur­poses, the key point is that if we do not move our bod­ies, they get stiff.

When your mind doesn’t get the stim­u­la­tion it craves, you get bored, com­pla­cent, and depressed. When your body doesn’t get the stim­u­la­tion it craves, you get sim­i­lar results. I assume that most peo­ple read­ing this get some phys­i­cal stim­u­la­tion through their Taido prac­tices, but I think that you can do better.

The Three Levels

I said above that this pro­gram is a “pro­gres­sive tech­nol­ogy for increas­ing phys­i­cal free­dom.” You already know that I advo­cate incre­men­tal devel­op­ment, so let’s look at the three lev­els of the Intu-Flow progression.

Since we don’t typ­i­cally use our full ranges, we can safely assume that most of us are at less-than-optimal mobil­ity right now. To address this, the first level of the Intu-Flow course is focused on recov­er­ing range of motion in each major joint. “Recovery” because we all have lim­i­ta­tions that are induced by our habit­ual move­ment patterns.

Once we have worked out some kinks and freed up our joints, we will find that we are able to move through a wider range of motion. This wider range equates directly to greater free­dom in our move­ments. That’s good for Taido, and I was just start­ing to see the pos­si­bil­i­ties when I vis­ited Atlanta in 2005. After recov­er­ing range, Intu-Flow helps us to refine the move­ments around each joint.

The sec­ond stage is about this refine­ment. The move­ments become a lit­tle more sophis­ti­cated and the focus is on absolute smooth­ness. If the first level is move­ment reha­bil­i­ta­tion, this is move­ment reed­u­ca­tion. The sec­ond level starts us on a process of build­ing greater effi­ciency of move­ment by learn­ing how to use our joints in dif­fer­ent ways.

The third level is coor­di­na­tion. At this stage, you should be able to move pretty freely in just about any way you can imag­ine. You’ll def­i­nitely feel the dif­fer­ence in Taido prac­tices and likely dur­ing other activ­i­ties as well. In the coor­di­na­tion stage, the course is focused on build­ing our abil­ity to use many joints together in… coor­di­na­tion. While the exer­cises look very sim­i­lar to those on the first two lev­els, they are much more dif­fi­cult to per­form with any level of grace.

How to Practice

Many Taidoka will find the basic level “too easy” at first, and it is if you only look at the sur­face. I watched this video the first time and thought to myself “I already know how to move my arm in a cir­cle.” But then I real­ized that my cir­cle was not very big or smooth, and I was hav­ing to cheat by bend­ing my elbow at a cer­tain point. One of the most dif­fi­cult keys to grasp at first is that Intu-Flow is an intro­verted activity.

To get the most out of this pro­gram, we need to reduce out­side dis­trac­tions and shift our atten­tive focus within. Instead of sim­ply swing­ing the arm in a cir­cle and think­ing “I’m doing it just the way that guy on my screen is,” the real ben­e­fit comes from per­form­ing the move­ment while ask­ing our­selves these questions:

• How does this feel?
• Is this the most effi­cient motion I can make?
• Where do I carry tension?
• Where do I feel pain?
• Is one side of my body less-mobile than the other?
• What other joints want to recruit when I move this joint?
• Does my breath­ing mesh with my movement?

And et cetera. One of the valu­able ben­e­fits of doing Intu-Flow for me has been learn­ing how to “lis­ten to my body” in a very sub­tle way. I was already very bodily-aware and spent a lot of time think­ing about move­ment effi­ciency, but my daily prac­tice of this course has really increased my posi­tion sense, coor­di­na­tion, and sensitivity.

Western TaiChi?

All of these things are often cited as ben­e­fits of tra­di­tional mov­ing med­i­ta­tions, such as taichi and qi-gong, both of which I hap­pen to have a lit­tle bit of expe­ri­ence with. I can say for a fact that prac­tic­ing Intu-Flow can develop many of the the same attrib­utes, and it does so with­out hav­ing to believe in chi/ki or prac­tice semen retention.

Just as in taichi, it takes a few ses­sions to mem­o­rize the rou­tines and inter­nal­ize the move­ments, but after that, I find that I don’t spend a lot of time think­ing dur­ing my prac­tice. Instead, I am focused on feel­ing — sens­ing my body and breath. This inter­nal focus and relaxed aware­ness is exactly the men­tal state I would achieve dur­ing a good qi-gong session.

Actually, the Intu-Flow pro­gres­sion is very sim­i­lar to the basic stages one goes through when learn­ing taichi: begin by learn­ing the move­ments and build­ing the bal­ance and mobil­ity required to per­form them. Remove imped­i­ments to easy move­ment by relax­ing into your ten­sions. Build smoother motion by focus­ing on the tran­si­tions between each “part”. Integrate breath­ing with move­ment such that the body tells you when and how much air to take. Eventually, the move­ments will do the breath­ing for you, with­out effort. Done prop­erly, a twenty-minute ses­sion leaves you with more energy than you had when you began.

As a daily health prac­tice, I rate this course highly. It takes only a short amount of time and pro­vides con­crete ben­e­fits as well as sub­tle ben­e­fits. One can receive all the ben­e­fits of any mov­ing med­i­ta­tion prac­tice and beyond by prac­tic­ing this rou­tine, in whole or in part, for a few min­utes each day.

Application to Taido

Personally, I feel that this rou­tine is far supe­rior to any warm-up I have ever seen in a Taido prac­tice. I rec­om­mend that every Taido instruc­tor view this prod­uct and at least incor­po­rate var­i­ous aspects into their rou­tines. In a per­fect world, I would be begin­ning every class I lead with a con­densed ver­sion of this rou­tine. It is far more effec­tive (and safer) than the stan­dard of jog­ging, half-assed cal­is­then­ics, and sta­tic stretching.

I’ve already noted a lot of the gen­eral ben­e­fits in terms of health and and mobil­ity. I also men­tioned how this rou­tine com­plies with Taido’s 5SRs — the core val­ues of our art. Now I want to list some specifics about how prac­tic­ing these move­ments can ben­e­fit our Taido performance.

• It increases mobil­ity in all joints, which directly trans­lates to increases flex­i­bil­ity for kicks and strikes as well as grappling.
• It builds bal­ance which helps with kick­ing and other uni­lat­eral (one-legged) move­ments. The improve­ment in your bal­ance also has car­ry­over to improve your hengi and tengi.
• It teaches body aware­ness, allow­ing us to have a bet­ter sense of how we are moving.
• It teaches breath­ing inte­gra­tion. By tying our breath to our move­ment, we will find greater effi­ciency, endurance, and power.
• It’s a great warm-up.
• It’s great for releas­ing ten­sion after prac­tices as well.
• It may help to reha­bil­i­tate injuries sus­tained dur­ing practice.
• Lot’s of other stuff. There’s about a mil­lion other things I could say here that I feel make this pro­gram an ideal addi­tion to everyone’s Taido practice.

Logistics

Routine Time

About a half hour for the first week. Once you basi­cally mem­o­rize the rou­tine and learn the exer­cises, it takes a lit­tle over twenty min­utes for the begin­ners’ (“recov­ery”) level. The inter­me­di­ate and advanced (“refine­ment” and “coor­di­na­tion”) lev­els are shorter, as they grad­u­ally remove the redun­dancy built into the first level.

As your pro­fi­ciency and effi­ciency increase, you will find that you are able to mix and match lev­els to suit your own pur­poses and time avail­abil­ity. I do por­tions of each level at var­i­ous times through­out the day.

Unfortunate Title

OK, so I think the name of the course is a lit­tle dumb. I know lots of other peo­ple do too. You know what, it doesn’t mater — this could be called Sausage Party 4: Extra Mayo, and I would still prac­tice it every sin­gle day.

Contents

Three pro­gres­sive rou­tines for full-body inte­gra­tion of move­ment, breath­ing, and struc­ture as increase of range of motion and dynamic mobility.

International

My friend, Ryan Hurst, is a CST Head Coach who lives in Osaka (and often works out at the same budokan as the Osaka Taido group — small world). He has cre­ated a Japanese ver­sion of Intu-Flow that is avail­able now. When he released his prod­uct, I made refer­rals to many instruc­tors over there. Ryan’s move­ment is pretty damn impres­sive, and I think Taido instruc­tors will really be able to see a lot of appli­ca­tions for his mate­r­ial beyond what I am capa­ble of demonstrating.

And Finally

So that’s my “brief review” of Intu-Flow. I know I’m usu­ally pretty long-winded, but I really tried to keep this as short as I could while still con­vey­ing my high regard for this pro­gram and its poten­tial for Taido stu­dents. I know that three bul­leted lists in a sin­gle arti­cle may look like overkill, but Intu-Flow really deserves it. I looked back over this arti­cle sev­eral times, but couldn’t find any­thing I felt I could really remove with­out sell­ing Intu-Flow short.

I really love this pro­gram, and I’m immensely con­fi­dent that you will love what it does for your Taido, your gen­eral feel­ing of phys­i­cal well-being, and your health. visit RMAX to buy Intu-Flow.