A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

On Monday I've torn my inner ankle side band. Basically, the Judo instructor performed an Ouchi-gari, I stumbled and ruined my foot. Great. Doctor told me it's going to be 6 weeks out, at a minimum. Now, I'm at home and can't even walk to the kitchen or the bathroom without my girlfriend's help. The foot is all swollen and blue. Needless to say it's hurting badly. I guess that's it for the British Open in november. In 6 weeks, all the endurance I've built up during the last two months will be gone. Also, from what I heard it'll take even longer than that to regain full ankle stability and mobility. As soon as I can place enough weight on the foor again to walk a bit, I'll see if I can make up some neat upper-body HFT program. Since I'll be spending a lot of time at home in the near future due to my immobility, I'll have the time to put in a short seesion each hour or so. Obviously I can't change the situation - being injured - so I ha...

Ok, just returned from Greece. There's been positive and negative sides to that journey. The good On a positive note, following the warrior diet is easy in Greece, as people there apparentely seem to live by it anyways. We were told by our hotel manager that " we never eat breakfast ", and when we had our main meal at something like 10pm, the taverna was filled with locals. We quickly found ourselves a decent place to eat, called Nikos Souvlaki, which I can strongly recommend to anyone in the area of Plakias. Due to the heat and the nearby sea, I've decided to substitute swimming for my usual running. This proved to be a great idea. Swimming will definately play a part in phase 2 of my current program, which will begin in September. Not only is swimming easier on the joints than running, it's also a full-body activity as opposed to roadwork. In Greece, I'd do HIIT swimming with my Polar on, stopping time intervals. For one minute I'd crawl all-out, after t...

(image taken from en.wikipedia.org) Today I'm leaving for Crete, Greece, to spend a week of my holiday there. Basically, I'll try to keep the same training program up I follow here, only I'll exchange the power work for bodyweight exercise. It'll be fun trying out new exercises on the beach. For me, a trip to Greece is something of an educational journey, after all, most of our western civilization, values and knowledge originates there. Most important of all, however, is the fact that all the martial arts as practiced today probably have their roots in greek Pankratio. I tried looking up Pankratio schools in Iraklion and Plakias, to no avail. Maybe I'll find out about a club once I'm there. Now, I have to hurry to get to the gym the last time before my departure, as always I'll keep you up to date. So long, take care

Warsaw is a warrior city. Life here constantly revolves around the idea of heroism and dying for freedom. After poisoning myself (I suspect I had ice cubes made from tap water. If you stop in Poland, beware of the tap water.), I've decided to accompany my father and go to an air show in the Mazuria, approximately 5 hours away from Warsaw. Tough luck the car didn't start up. Apparentaly, the alternator is broken, so we had to stay in the city. Which, as it turned out, wasn't no bad, since August 1st is W-day (with "W" standing for Warsaw", obviously). The whole city was on its feet, celebrating the 65th anniversary of the warsawian uprising ("Powstanie Warszawskie"). If you're into history, you probably know that Warsaw was completely destroyed in WWII. Their so-called old town is about 50 years old, everything was rebuilt after the war. After being reduced to rubble, Warsaw was invaded by the Germans. Now what you might not know (especially if ...