A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

I wish you all a happy new year. Photo by camera slayer, found on flickr.org For me, the year won't start particularily good, I guess. On january 7th, the doc will put my foot into plaster again. This time, it's 4 weeks. After that, we shall see further. Now on the one hand, this is significantly screwed up. Gone are my plans of doing a max strength program to begin the year. Also, as a professional trainer, not being mobile at the beginning of the year means a serious handicap to my marketing actions. Novembet through February are, after all, the best months for any sports school, finance-wise. Also, I need to make up for all the losses my second studio has produced over the last year anyways. Instead of recovering financially, I'll now have to pay an instructor to teach my classes. Great. Not to mention all my plans of offering more classes at my Dojo. They're most definately put on a halt at the moment. As you can see, from a business point of view, my situation is s...

It's Sunday, December 27th. Why am I wishing you a merry Xmas today? Well, although I did plan on writing an article on christmas, family, togetherness and the like, I was far to busy celebrating the holdiays with my loved ones. So, here it goes, albeit 3 days late: Merry Xmas and a happy new year. May 2010 be injury-free and successfull for all of you.

Sometimes it's so simple. Still, we fail to think of it. Afterwards, it's quite awkward to think such an obvious thing didn't cross the mind in the first place. But then it just didn't. I had a situation like that today, while teaching my conditioning class. Now "class" is a bit of an overstatement here, it was more of a personal coaching with one of my advanced students, Doris. Usually, the conditioning class quite full. Today, however, with christmas being just two days away and the streets being covered in ice and snow, most of my clients chose to stay at home. Not that I was really surprised. This gave me the opportunity to tailor the session specifically to Doris' needs and address some points I sometimes have to leave unattended. When it came to strength training, we basically did a modified version of Charles Staley's EDT (escalating density training). In a nutshell, the idea of edt is to do two exercises alternatively over a certain time period...

On Friday, December 11th 2009, Mariusz Pudzianowski, polish strongman with an impressive record of 6 european titles and 5 won world chmapionships, made his MMA debut at the "Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki", or short KSW. Pudzian, as Mariusz is called in Poland, was facing Marcin Najman, a professional boxer. There'sa good intro on both fighters on youtube, for your convenience I've posted the video here: As you can see, Mariusz is obviously the bigger, stronger fighter. There's a weight difference of approximately 25kg. Although Mariusz is a strength athlete, he's been doing Kyokushinkai Karate and Boxing for years (according to his homepage boxing for 7 years, karate for 20+ years, see http://pudzian.pl/mariusz.php ). Also, the guy was practicing BJJ with Miroslaw Okninski, propably the number one expert in poland when it comes to the brazilian art. You can look it up on their homepage, www.valetudo.pl , all that training is no urban myth. Of course, there's a...

Last saturday (I know, I know,... I'm always a wee bit behind when it comes o posting), some pictures were taken during my adults class. So, here's a "premium selection". Enjoy!

This weekend, my partner Chris took a break from teaching, so I held all classes for him. So on Friday, I was doing a children & youth class in our Aspern-based dojo ( www.shinergy.com/aspern ). At some point near the end of the class I noticed one of the kids was missing, so I told the rest to wait and went to look for the boy. When I saw him standing in the anteroom, I told him to immediately go back to the others. Thereupon his mother, who was watching the training, explained to me he told him to drink something and that he was only 5 and I'm too strict by far at all. She insisted on discussing my teaching methods after class. Now I can handle constructive criticism, however, criticising me in front of the class is something I just can't tolerate. All that does is wear down the discipline - something that was lacking at that particular class from the beginning. Quite frankly, I don't care how old or how special someone is, as soon as he sets foot in my class, the sam...

Today, I've been down all day. I failed at doing even one single repetition of whatever exercise. I'm not exactly sick, but everything's aching and my body just feels heavy. Altough I've already devoured loads of food today, I'm still starving. My motivation to do just about anything is on an all-time low. That's all classical signs of overtraining. Seems like my HFT is beyond my current possiblities. As mentioned in my previous post, training volume has to be put into a proper relation to everyday life. For me, personally, everyday life means teaching martial arts 7 days a week (since my partner, Chris, is taking friday and the weekend off, I have to teach on friday and sunday as well). That is, besides stuying at university and writing an exam or two every week. I spend a good portion of my day on the way, going from one place to the next. That's an additional source of exhaustion. Despite the above said, I'll stick to the plan for now. In any case, th...