A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Today was the last day of the fight-fun-fun camp - at least for Elias and me. The only thing scheduled for tomorrow are a sparring session, which most likely no one will attend and some rafting. Now obviously the rafting is meant as some kind of social event, an opportunity to come together and get to know each other. After spending 4 days of hard training together, I'm pretty sure I got to know the guys and girls I grappled with far better than I could ever possibly in those two hours on a boat. Hence, I don't really see a point in staying and spending more money. My goal was to train and learn as much as I could, and that's exactly what I did. My joints ache from all those submissions. My neck is killing me. I'm feeling like I haven't slept in days. In a nutshell: I'm happy. I started the day rather easy today, taking a class on agility training with Daniel Gärtner. That guy is a sport scientist at the technical university of Munich so he's pretty much ...

The third day of the fight-for-fun camp has just ended. Today, I took a kickboxing class with Mr. Zaar and two MMA classes with Andre Reinders . Just like yesterday, the total training time today was 6 hours. My plan was to take Mr. Mack's class for the morning session, but I ended up on the wrong mat and so took another class with Mr. Zaar instead. Looking back, I really don't regret that twist of fate. Now I have no idea what Mr. Mack did with his students - I'm sure the class was great - but Mr. Zaar's topic today suited me just fine: we practiced kicking on the inside and outside lane as well as the corresponding counters. Coming from a TKD background, most of that stuff appeared rather basic to me, at least in technical complexity. Anyhow, obviously the kickboxers do things in a different way than we do, so I learned quite a bit from a tactical point of view. Most important, Mr. Zaar told us to secure every single kick with a technique from the lead hand, someth...

It's my second day at the fight-for-fun camp in Ötztal, Tyrol. Yesterday, everything was too stressy to post, so I'll quickly wrap up yesterday's events before going into detail about today. First off, what is the fight-for-fun camp? Well, basically it's a training camp sponsored by Budoland GmbH, a martial arts supplier. Now while most camps pretty much focus on one fighting art, here they offer lessons for virtually any striker. Check out the schedule HERE. The trainers here are top-notch, the best of the best. Living legends in terms of kickboxing. Also, there's quite some former and even reigning world champions from all kickboxing disciplines amongst the ranks of students. Definately a place to learn and grow. I'm here with Elias, a friend of mine who's also a Shinergy[instructor]. He's taking the semi-contact classes while I'm rather into MMA and Muay-Thai. This is great, because back in Vienna we can exchange ideas and share what we'...

Again, this post is going to be a rather short one. As I'm currently spending quite some time on perfecting my technique on the olympic lifts, I'll try and share some ideas and insights. First off, who should do the olympic clean? Well, probably you should. I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you're a martial artist. If not, I'm not exactly sure what you're doing on this blog (although I'm happy if you like it!). Generally, explosiveness ist more important in the martial arts than raw strength. Consider a kick: All that muscle doesn't make a difference if you're slow to build up strength. After all, you don't want to push the opponent (yeah, I know, sometimes you do), but rather hit him at full speed. So, acceleration is crucial. The same holds true with a takedown: You tackle someone, you don't have the time to slowly lift him up. It's about explosively ripping him from his feet. In both of the above examples, what you need are ...

In Vienna, while doing our 5x5 program, Chris and I usually incorporate the exercises Chad Waterbury presented in his article HERE . We usually start our sessions with an hour of padwork and/or sparring. Therefore, we're not doing the core exercises in a circle before the workout, as Chad suggests - that would prolong the whole thing too much. Also, the core's already pretty active due to all those kicks and punches. Hence, we stick to doing the pallof press and stir the pot in between our heavy sets. Personally I feel that it's those two exercise that offer the biggest benefit in terms of core stabilization. Now in the Gym in Dabki where I've been working out for the last two weeks, the cable station is pretty crappy (no adjustable heights, just the to and bottom position), so the pallof press was really inconvenient. Also, there were so balls whatsoever to stir the pot (insert your own bad joke here - I'm too tired to think of one). So, the core work I usually do...