A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Disclaimer: This is the first part of a new installment on sparring. In this first post I'll outline the general idea and make an introduction. More specialized and practical posts will follow. Everything comes at a cost. This can be an increased risk of injury, unfavorable anatomical adaptation, or simply a missed opportunity of doing something more sensible. As a martial arts trainer, it is my job to make each of my  rip to the Dojo my fighter's trips to the Dojo worthwhile. Biggest bang for buck, so to say. I'm a teacher, after all, not an entertainer. Therfore, before jumping ship on anything I do in my classes, I ask myself the following : "What is the purpose of [insert activity]? What is the cost of that? Is it worth it? Is there a way of achieving the same result at a lower cost" In general, that last question boils down to finding something that is more time efficient or comes at a reduced risk of injury. What is the purpose of sparring? W...

So over the course of the last weeks, I've been dealing with all kinds of counters to standard attacks in the classes I taught. Countering goes well beyond the defensive side of things, though. Even and especially pressure fighters need to be able to counter any potential counters (here, fighting becomes a game of chess, huh?) and quickly regain initiative - otherwise, they might get beaten at their own game. So, without furter ado, let me present to you a short series of drills I use with my fighters to boost both their offensive and defensive skills. Enjoy! Going through each of these for a three minute round, followed by 30 seconds rest gives you a 22 minute workout. Alternate with a partner (each does the whole thing) and you're at 44 minutes, in the best case. Toss in some proper warmup, for example, the [Warrior Warmup Routine] , and you've got a structured, highly specific class all laid out. Feel free to use as-is or adjust to your needs. If you'...

Today, after a gruelling marathon T & T* session, Chris and I hit the gym to finish our last [5/3/1] cycle for quite some time. Over the course of the last 9 weeks, we did three such cycles. Since our version of 5/3/1 is [quite a modification] of [the original program] , we decided no skip de-load and perform our cycles back-to-back. In retrospective, that probably wasn’t such a good idea. In a [recent T-nation article], Wendler talks about how he has clients perform two 5/3/1 cycles before de-loading. Guess we’ll shoot for something similar, too, when we hit the grinds** again. Anyhow, the figures and tables below illustrate my strength process during those nine weeks (all weights are given in Kg). Session 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 DL H1RM 154,32 154,32 155,2 155,2 142,95 142,95 166,62 166,62 167,18 167,18 159,7 159,7 ...

So I've been here in Poland for two days now. Didn't yet have a chance to do any training whatsoever. So I compensated by eating lots of food, mostly sugar and fat. Great way to begin a deload week. Anyhow, today I met Jakob, chief instructor of the Ronin TeakwonDo group here in Warsaw [ www.ronin.waw.pl ]. Spent about two hours discussing rather random martial arts related topics. Here's what I consider to be the most important topics: Don't take blackbelt gradings lightly. If you think about taking your black belt exams, aks yourself honestly: "What have I done to deserve beiing a black belt?". Jakob told me that he refused to take that exam for quite a long time, because he just didn't feel worthy of wearing a Dan. Only after he won the european championships did he decide to finally test for the black belt. A black belt should take a long time to achieve, too. Receiving a Dan grading after two years of training is a joke. Obviously, a black belt only...