Why Systema Teaches Breathing and Relaxation Before It Teaches Fighting

There is a moment in every new student's first class at FightClub where I ask them to do something that seems to have nothing to do with martial arts: I ask them to breathe. Not to punch, not to grapple, not to defend against a strike — just to breathe, slowly and deliberately, while I press gently against their shoulder. Almost without fail, they hold their breath and tense up. And almost without fail, that tension is what makes them easy to move.

This is the first lesson of Systema, and it is deliberately taught before any technique that most people would recognize as "fighting." In East York, where I've spent years teaching this Russian martial art out of our Danforth-area studio, I've watched this same moment repeat itself hundreds of times. It never stops being instructive.

The Question Underneath the Technique

Why breathing first? Why relaxation before striking, grappling, or weapons work?

The answer isn't mystical, though it can sound that way out of context. It's mechanical, physiological, and — if you'll permit me the indulgence — philosophical all at once.

Systema breathing is the foundation because breath is the one function that bridges the voluntary and involuntary nervous system. You can consciously control your breath, and in doing so, you gain indirect access to processes you cannot otherwise touch: heart rate, muscular tension, the fight-or-flight cascade that floods your system with adrenaline and narrows your thinking to a single, panicked channel. A punch is fast. A breath is slower, and that slowness is exactly the point — it's the lever long enough to move something as heavy as your own nervous system.

Fighting technique layered on top of a body that is holding its breath and bracing against fear is fighting technique built on sand. It collapses under real pressure. This is why, in Systema, breathing and relaxation aren't a warm-up before the "real" training. They are the real training. Everything else — the strikes, the falls, the work against a knife or against multiple attackers — is breath and structural relaxation applied to increasingly difficult circumstances.

What Tension Actually Costs You

When a student tenses up under pressure, several things happen at once, and none of them help:

• Movement slows. Contracted muscles fight against themselves; a tense arm takes longer to move than a relaxed one asked to do the same job.

• Structure breaks. The body's ability to absorb and redirect force depends on connected, adaptable structure — bone alignment, joint mobility, soft tissue that can lengthen under load. Tension locks that structure into a fixed, brittle shape.

• Perception collapses. Fear-driven tension narrows attention onto the perceived threat and shuts out everything else — the second attacker, the exit, the follow-up. You stop seeing the whole situation and start seeing only the part that scares you.

• Recovery time increases. A relaxed body that absorbs a hit can reset almost immediately. A tense body that absorbs the same hit stays rattled, physically and mentally, for much longer.

None of this is unique to violence. It's the same mechanism that makes a stressful email spike your shoulders toward your ears, or that makes a difficult conversation tighten your jaw before you've said a word. Systema simply uses physical confrontation as the training ground because it's an honest, immediate teacher. You cannot fake calm under a real strike the way you can fake it in a meeting. The body tells the truth.

Systema Breathing as a Skill, Not an Instinct

It's worth being precise here: everyone already breathes. What Systema teaches is breathing as a trained skill — the ability to keep breath moving, low and continuous, exactly when every instinct says to hold it.

In practice, this looks like:

• Breathing through effort, not just before or after it — continuing to breathe while performing a push-up, absorbing a strike, or holding an uncomfortable position, rather than gasping in preparation and holding through the hard part.

• Diaphragmatic, low breathing, which keeps the chest and shoulders free to move rather than locked in the raised, shallow pattern that stress produces.

• Matching breath to load, using longer exhales under greater physical or psychological pressure, since a controlled exhale is one of the few direct switches we have for calming the nervous system.

• Breathing through fear itself, treating the urge to freeze or brace as information rather than as a command to be obeyed.

None of this is abstract wellness talk dressed up in martial arts language — though it does map cleanly onto both. The same breath control that lets a student stay structurally sound under a strike is the one that lowers cortisol, supports better sleep, and keeps the fascia pliable rather than chronically braced. Systema was never only about self-defence. It was always about training a nervous system that doesn't waste itself on unnecessary tension, whether the threat is a fist or a Monday.

Relaxation Is Not the Absence of Effort

The word "relaxation" causes confusion, so it's worth being direct: relaxed does not mean limp, passive, or soft in the sense of weak. A relaxed structure in Systema is fully engaged — muscles doing exactly the work required and no more. Tension beyond what a task demands isn't strength. It's waste. It's effort spent fighting yourself instead of the actual problem in front of you.

This is why so much early Systema training looks deceptively gentle from the outside. Students crawling, rolling, breathing under light pressure from a partner's hands — it doesn't look like fighting. It's teaching the nervous system what unnecessary tension feels like so it can be recognized and released, in real time, under real pressure. You cannot let go of a tension you've never learned to notice.

Systema Breathing at FightClub Toronto

Training This at FightClub

At our East York school, this sequencing isn't a curriculum quirk — it's the whole method. New students spend real time on breath and structural relaxation before we introduce them to strikes, ground work, or weapons defence, because that foundation is what determines whether everything built on top of it holds up under pressure or collapses at the first sign of real resistance.

This is also why Systema tends to attract people who never expected to walk into a martial arts studio — people managing chronic stress, recovering from injury, or simply looking for a way to feel less at the mercy of their own nervous system. The fighting is real. But the breathing is what makes the fighting sustainable, and it's usually the part that changes people's lives outside the studio, long after they've left the mat.

I explore this relationship between discipline, breath, and what it actually means to live well in Eudaimonia: The Highest Human Good, if you'd like to go further into the philosophy behind the practice.

If you're in Toronto and curious what this looks like on the mat rather than the page, our Danforth-area classes are open to complete beginners — no prior experience, and no assumption that you'll be ready to spar on day one. You'll be breathing first. Everyone is.

— Emmanuel Manolakakis FightClub Toronto – Martial Arts & Archery www.fight-club.ca