A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Yesterday night we returned from this year’s [open polish taekwondo championships in Czestochowa] . As expected of a [PUT] event, it was superbly organized. Everything went down smoothly with the exception of some misunderstandings regarding weight divisions, but this was also quickly taken care of and handled professionally. The schedule had weigh-in on Friday night, semi-contact sparring on Saturday and continuous sparring on Sunday. Now at most tournaments, you can never be sure when you’re going to fight – I had days where I spent 10+ hours at the venue before stepping into the ring. That’s not so much of a problem by itself, at least if you know it in advance. What’s troublesome is having absolutely no clue as to when you’re up, because that means warming up again and again so as to be ready to compete at every moment. Good luck going through a fight after having warmed up like ten times or so. This time, despite the fact that more than 550 competitors from four countries (Pol...

Come Sunday, I’ll fight in the [XX Open Polish Taekwon-Do Championships] in Czestochowa, Poland. Didn’t post a lot in terms of fight preparation this time, although I did line out what our [S&C sessions] and [T&T sessions] look like at the moment. I really just didn’t feel like thinking too much about things. Im trying to get to a point, where, to put it into [Martin Rooney’s words] , a fight is “ just another day at the office ”. Anyhow, today I did my last session before the fights. Up from now, it’ll all boil down to the [Warrior Warmup Routine] , some light stretching and easy shadow sparring. No point in burning out just right before the real thing. Speaking of fatigue, today was hard. Although we cut round times to 90 seconds to keep things fresh, I really had trouble going through all the exercises. Must be the carb deprivation kicking in – I haven’t eaten carbs in what feels like an eternity (but in reality is more like 3 weeks or so). Explosiveness and [the At...

So in [this] post, I’ve given you some insight into what Chris and I are going to do in the gym over the course of the next few weeks. Since we’re going to fight on March 16th/17th (as a matter of fact, Chris is fighting tomorrow as well as next Saturday, that’s two tournaments in two weeks), I’ve drawn a whole lot of inspiration from [Dan] ’s and Pavel’s [Easy Strength] . On a totally unrelated side note, I was impressed to see those guys are citing [Prof. Schmidtbleicher] … but I digress. Anyhow, what I planned on doing was pretty much something like this: Hit the gym on Wednesday and Friday Do Power Cleans and Power Snatches to build power (do one of those heavy, limit the second to technique practice) Do Deadlifts and Squats to maintain strength (“kind of” max out on one of them every week, don’t do both in the same week) Now usually coaching is a feedback-driven activity, the order of events looks something like this: Assess (where do you stand?) Plan (where do you wa...

No comment on this one. Just lean back and enjoy the show. So long, take care