A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

I just returned from a two-week trip to Poland with my girl. It was awesome. Our trip took us from Vienna to Warsaw, then way up north to Dabki, which is a surfer's paradise at the baltic sea. After spending a week there, we went to Poznan for another two days. From Poznan it was back to Warsaw and eventually home. Although there's so much to say about Warsaw when it comes to the martial arts, I'll skip that for now and focus on Dabki and Poznan instead. You see, Dabki is situated in quite a unique spot: on the one side, there's the baltic sea while on the other one, there's the Bukowo-lake. Obviously, this location makes it pretty much perfect for water-sports enthusiasts. For me, too, the plan was to spend my days doing little but windsurfing and laying on the beach. Didn't turn out that way, though, as the weather had its own plans: most of the time it was rainy and cold, definately not beach-like. Wind-wise, it was either completely still or extremely windy,...

Tomorrow at this time I'll already be in Warsaw. From there, I'll go to the baltic where I'll stay for about a week or so. Since my internet access will be pretty limited, I've been more active in the last days so you have something to read and watch - ain't I nice? Anyhow, here's some clips of fights that took place at the Shinergy[battle] Summer '11. Unfortunately, I still don't have (usable) video material on every fight, but the following are pretty ok, quality-wise. Enjoy! Fight #1: Kathi VS Katrin This was the only fight in the ladies division on that evening. Very solid technique, pretty smart tactics. Not particularly explosive or agressive, but most guys that fought in that tournament can definately learn a thing or two from watching this. Fight #2: Michael VS Stan Michael's from my Dojo while Stan is a fighter from the Shinergy[zone] Vienna. Stan recently took and passed his instructor exam. In the beginning, the fight was pretty even, but ...

Since I'm currently not holding any regular conditioning classes (due to our summer break), I add 15 minutes of circuit training at the end of each Shinergy class. On thursday, I heard one of my athletes say "those were the hardest 15 minutes of my life". Seems like I'm doing something right. Our circuit follow a certain scheme: 40 seconds of strength-endurance exercise 1 , followed by 20 seconds of rest 40 seconds of kettlebell-swings, followed by 20 seconds of rest 40 seconds of some other (fixed) strength-endurance exercise, followed by 20 seconds rest repeat for strength-endurance exercise 2,3,4,5 Hence, the circuit takes 15 minutes to finish and consists of five rounds of different strength-endurance exercises (usually done using suspension trainer or bodyweight only), five rounds of kettlebell swings and five rounds of some rather arbitrary strength-endurance exercise (e.g. rope-skipping, shadow-boxing, ...) Today, we did the following circle: Atomic push-ups -...

In today's outdoor session, I explained the concept of what we Shinergy-guys call "flow sparring". Before I get into the concept, let me tell you a short story. In 2005, we had just a handful of veteran fighters (particularly Tom and Harry) on the team, the rest of us was pretty green. Still, we decided to compete in the Open TaekwonDo World Championships in Cardiff, UK. Now don't get me wrong, when I say green, I'm not referring to athleticism or technical skill. We were doing fine in those areas. However, Shinergy looked and felt quite different back then. We were doing lots of Wing Tsun Chain strikes and none of us had an idea about proper boxing footwork. In fact, those open tournaments had a great effect on our style and curriculum. That's one of the things I love about Shinergy: it's an open-minded style, we adapt when things don't work out. However, I digress. Coming back to the topic, our problem was not an issue of athletics or technical skill...

Ok, I'll admit I'm late, but hey, better late than never, right? Without further ado, let me present to you the Shinergy[battle] Spring Cup '11 :

During July and August, I'm officially taking a break. Hence, my Dojo is closed. Still, I feel a certain responsibility for my students and their training, so once to twice a week we're taking advantage of the weather and do an outdoor session. Yesterday, we warmed up with some shadow-sparring. Now I feel that shadow-sparring is a great tool to sharpen an athletes technical skills and work on his cardio at the same time. Unfortunately, shadow sparring doesn't come naturally for most students and many instructors are a little uninspired when it comes to implementing specific concepts within a shadow-sparring session. Therefore, I'd like to present some ideas on how to incorporate shadow-sparring as a coaching tool for martial arts training. Personally, I like to start out my shadow-sparring sessions with a round or two where I do nothing but stepping. I do incporporate some bobbing, weaving, blocking, etc., but no striking whatsoever. This helps me work up to an operatin...