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| Clive Girdham |
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Marko Vesse
Master Marko Vesse, founder of the Wu Xing Dao (‘Invisible Master’) kung fu system, has trained players from all football codes — Aussie rules, rugby league and rugby union — as well as boxers, cricketers and golfers.
His first foray into the world of contact sports was back in 1999, when he helped Sydney University’s rugby union team win the minor premiership. Although he’d originally approached Sydney Uni on a whim, word got out after he was featured in Inside Rugby magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald, and the following year he was enlisted by NRL team the Penrith Panthers. He helped Penrith reach the top five of the NRL ladder through training players in ‘top secret’ sessions. “I’d take them through the ‘steel-body’ warm-up in locker rooms, and they’d put tape over the cameras,” he recalls.
Since then, league teams have become increasingly open to having martial artists on their coaching staff, and Vesse has added to his résumé a stint with South Sydney Rabbitohs, where he was employed in 2006 to harden up the physical runts in the perennial NRL underdog’s recruitment litter. Vesse first contacted Rabbitohs’ conditioning coach David Boyle and explained how the Wu Xing Dao method — the product of Vesse’s 10 years training in Pak Hok kung fu, followed by 12 years with the Yang Mian system — could be effectively added to their existing training regimen. Wu Xing Dao’s specialties are its ‘steel hand’ and, of particular interest to rugby clubs, ‘steel body’ training methods.
Vesse then gave Boyle a demo that he couldn’t forget.
“He put in a pole, smashed them and some logs… he backed up everything he said he could do on his website,” says Boyle. As a result, Boyle then introduced Vesse to Rabbitohs coach Shaun McRae, who so liked what he saw that he requested a demonstration for all of the senior staff. “We put on quite a show, demonstrating body-impact drills where two men would take a full run at each other and heavily collide,” says Vesse. “The power of the impact actually shook the whole room.”
Although recovery and injury-prevention are key aims of Vesse’s training, it appeared even to the rough-and-ready Rabbitohs that it might court injury rather than cure it. “The coach was concerned and asked if his players would be required to train and strike each other at this level right from the beginning,” remembers Vesse. “I replied that six weeks of training would be needed before they could safely perform at that standard.”
At the end of his demonstration, Vesse gave the team’s staff members a chance to test the results of Wu Xing Dao training by inviting them to throw their best punches at him and his assistants. “I told them not to hold back but to give each punch their best shot — believe me, they tried really hard to shake us up!” says the kung fu master. “We had only been gone from the club for about 30 minutes when I received a phone call asking me if I would be willing to coach their entire team.”
In the end, Vesse was offered a one-month trial during pre-season training, working with a dozen players, ranging from reserves to first-grade, who the coaches felt would benefit most from Wu Xing Dao’s methods. His trial successful, Vesse was then enlisted to train these players through the season. His main aim was to condition them to withstand higher degrees of impact in defence, and to improve their penetration while running the ball in their hit-ups, as well as improving their focus and recovery.
“It’s a dynamic body-conditioning process that works from the inside out, rather than developing core strength from weights,” explains Vesse.
A routine training session would begin with exercises to loosen players’ muscles and strengthen their tendons in preparation for impact conditioning. According to Vesse, these sessions also reduced players’ fatigue, promoted greater body-awareness and focus and improved their blood circulation and endurance.
They then began explosive body-work, designed to lock the body into one solid unit. “This type of training increases the body’s internal pressure and develops explosive force and fast-twitch muscle fibres,” Vesse reveals. “It protected the players from injury during repetitive contact and results in delivering force naturally and without strain.”
Players would line up for body-contact work, beginning by gently colliding the sides of their bodies together and then working right around the entire torso, gradually increasing the impact. “We focused on impact timing and transferring explosive momentum to condition the body for higher impact tolerance,” explains Vesse. “The players were then ready for serious collisions. I had them running into each other at medium stride, making strong contact to various parts of their bodies. Afterwards we formed a 10-metre circle and players ran at each other in full stride while carrying a ball. I taught them how to target each other while imagining breaking the opponents’ line as they smashed through, and then passed the ball on to an adjacent team-mate who would repeat the cycle.”
As well as heightening players’ sense of impact timing and increasing their explosive momentum, Vesse taught them to conserve energy until the moment of contact.
“The impact training techniques enable the player to have an explosive control of internal pressure and muscle reaction. It gives the players a resilient strength and a rebound effect, which can deliver severe strikes to their opponents and even multiply the force of a received strike and direct it back into the opponent. The feeling of striking someone who has been trained in this technique is analogous to striking a fully inflated car tyre,” explains Vesse. “There is an enormous rebound, which increases the harder the tyre is hit, and without damage to the tyre.”
As a result, says Vesse, the players developed extremely high tolerance to impact and built a level of self-confidence that translated to fearlessness on the field. “This also helped their mental clarity and alertness for secondary play or offloading the ball during tackling attempts,” he says.
When training players off the field, Vesse would invite them to his kung fu studio to use a training aid he’d designed out of springs and a car tyre, which allowed them to condition their bodies more repetitively and with greater control of power output. When training the Penrith Panthers, he designed and built 12 machines that were lined-up along a wall outside their club and used by all the players in their conditioning program.
Former Rabbitoh Ray Moujalli, now a front-row forward for the Sydney Roosters, is one of several top contact-sportsmen who train privately with Vesse. Although injured at the time and needing some work on his legs, Moujalli was not selected for inclusion in Vesse’s program but saw an opportunity to improve, so he went directly to the Master himself. When Vesse’s contract at South Sydney wasn’t renewed due to in-house politics, Moujalli stayed with him and has been at it for three years now.
“It helps a lot in the game — it’s been amazing actually, and he’s taught me a lot. That’s why I stuck with it; it’s lifted my game and my personal life,” says Moujalli. “It helped me to be clear with my priorities and helps me to focus. I really get in the zone a lot quicker… it’s made it much easier to do everything, really.”
“The power, speed and explosive nature of the training transfers beautifully onto the field, making it completely game related,” spruiks Vesse. “It developed higher levels of impact and penetrative ability and increased resistance to injury [in players]. It improved endurance, mental focus and recovery after games. It also lent itself to all other aspects of training, such as using weights, running and their on-field drills. It was also an excellent way to increase team camaraderie amongst players, their captain and coach.”
That said, Vesse has found that changing the way players do things isn’t always an easy task. “What I teach requires you to become soft and elastic, to develop a natural release of explosive power. Footballers have spent years trying to toughen up, which usually causes them to become a little too rigid. They are more inclined to push a punch rather than throw it,” he explains. “In the game when we see fights erupt between two players, they always end up in a scuffle, trading blows with no real effect. It looks powerful but there is no real damage and no-one seems to get hurt. Two footballers that I have trained have had quite different results: Rabbitohs’ Jaiman Lowe and the Panthers’ Craig Greenhill ended their confrontations with a single knockout blow — they both knew how to throw their punches!”
It’s not something he recommends though — “They were both reprimanded and benched for several games,” he adds.
However, when trying to convince a coaching board to take on a kung fu master, this might conceivably be the big question on their lips: considering that martial arts were originally designed to maim and even kill opponents, in an uncontrolled environment such as a rugby game, isn’t there a real danger to players if certain techniques are used? This issue has already arisen in recent years, with some players applying tackles that are damaging to the neck and spine — and thus potentially lethal — as taught to them by submission-grappling experts.
Vesse, though, is quick to dispel any notion that he’s teaching similarly dangerous skills. “What I teach is perfectly legal within the sport and its purpose is to break lines and improve impact ability,” he reasons. “Although it has the potential to cause injury and even render a player unconscious should they come into contact with someone’s head, these things happen anyway and the benefit of my training is to break lines, hold defence and protect the players. Hopefully it will also extend their careers.”
The other issue that could conceivably dog anyone teaching fighting techniques to NRL players is the notoriously wild off-field behaviour of some, due to some uber-egos and aggro demeanours within the professional ranks, and not helped by an entrenched drinking culture. But despite the hype, Vesse says he’s always found the players a pleasure to coach. “They have taken their training seriously and were very competitive. In many instances, footballers I have trained became more self-disciplined than my kung fu students,” he says, citing Ray Moujalli as a prime example. “He is extremely disciplined, is very passionate with his sport and has a strong desire to succeed at everything he does. Ray has overcome adversity through a range of injuries caused by playing hard prior to my training him. In earlier seasons, injury had forced him out of the game for weeks at a time. It is inspiring to see someone pick himself up, dig deep and face his demons to fulfil a dream.”
Moujalli, in turn, sees a strong future for martial arts in rugby codes. “Most definitely — if someone is smart enough to give it a chance and open their minds to it. Most give wrestling a go now, but most don’t give other martial arts a go. The body impact and explosiveness you get is invaluable,” he attests. “When South did it they only got a little group going, and it was just for a bit of fitness; they didn’t stress the importance of it. I most definitely emphasise the importance and value of it. It’s something that really needs to be introduced to rugby league. It’d make a big difference to the game. Just the way Marko teaches it is amazing as well. Without him, I wouldn’t be where I am — I’d probably be on the sidelines injured.”
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From a old friend...