A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Over the last years, I’ve worked relentlessly at creating an S&C training system for my students. The system I came up with was nothing new, at all – rather, it was the adaptation of known ideas and methods to our (i.e., martial artists) needs. The basic premise was that each session needs to improve all the physical attributes a fighter needs to display: speed, power, strength and endurance. Note that I’m not listing anything like ‘mobility’ or ‘flexibility’ here. [Science tells us] that eccentric strength training is one of the best ways to improve flexibility. Still, I believe that the best way to train the type of functional mobility needed for any given martial arts style is, well, to practice that style. Practicing all attributes in a single session follows a [holistic] line of thought. Personally, I prefer to call that an ‘organic’ training form (a term I picked up from [Ronny] ) in that the smallest element (i.e, a single session) contains everything the whole program ha...

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 ...

For me, personally, the rear roundhouse kick has always been a rather difficult technique to counter directly. You see, although I’m originally from a TKD background, the idea of kicking below the attacker’s leg has never worked out for me particularly well. On the one hand, I’m shorter than most guys in my weight class, so my range tends to be limited. Therefore, most times, I just can’t match a good kick’s distance. On the other hand, the whole thing only works if an unoccupied straight line exists from the defender’s hip to the attacker’s belly. Consider the image below, where Chris and I demonstrate the concept: This counter works by dropping the center of gravity below that of the attacker and then bending the torso backwards so that the attack misses, while the counter hits the lower belly. Naturally, this becomes an issue when the original attack is aimed low, e.g. at the hip or slightly above. Dropping beneath that attack is... inconvenient, to say the least. Hence, I was...

Next fight’s up: this time, we’ll go to Cestochowa and take part in the [XX Open International Polish TKD Championships] . So far, the team consists of Chris, Frank, Alex and me. Now Frank and Chris are veteran, it’s the same guys I went to the [Open European Champions] with last year. Alex on the other hand is one of my students. He’s been with us since September, so he’s still a bit green. Nevertheless, he already competed twice: first, in the [Shinergy[battle] Autumn 2012] and immediately after that in the [Shinergy[battle] Winter 2013] . Never fought under any other rules than Shinergy rules, though, so it’s going to be his open style debut. If the setup remains as it is at this time, I’ll be the only one from our team to fight under continuous sparring rules. Everyone else is probably going to stick to semi-contact point fighting. Today, we went through our new training program for the first time (at least, I did. The other guys already had a session or two). Since Frank was s...

This winter’s Shinergy[battle] made me think about the role of the individual defensive system we practice in training and how each of them has its place in combat. Although definitions on the subject may (and surely will) vary, a defensive system , for me, is pretty much everything that keeps you from being (severely) hurt/damaged by an attack. So, without further ado, let’s take a quick look at each of those systems: Evasion and soft blocking : From my point of view, it’s always best to simply not be where the opponent strikes or kicks. Now that might seem like a no-brainer at first, but actually, most intelligent fighting systems make quite a lot of fuzz on that matter. Now on the one hand, you have western boxing, where a basic bob and weave is amongst the first things you learn. On the other hand, consider Wing Tsun (or early forms of JKD, for that matter), where most if not all blocks aim at redirecting the attackers force and ultimately using it against him. I won’t bother ela...