A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Shinergy is an ever-evolving art. So are our training methods. "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" doesn't really apply. There's always a way of doing things in a better way. Of course, you also have to spend some time on things in order to be able to actually evaluate them. So, after evaluating our warmup routine for quite some time now, here are some tweaks to help make it even better - People usually mess up the bent over t-spine mobilisation due to insufficient hip mobility. Instead of keeping the spine neutral, they'd go into flexion. Spinal flexion plus rotation, over the long term, is no good. Hence, a better place to do this stuff is right after our three - way lunge, with one shin on the ground (i. e. ,  with a fixed pelvis and lumbar spine ). This is a pose many know from yoga. Also, when stretching the hamstrings from this position in a subsequent exercise, it's so easy to introduce an additional dorsal flexion at the ankle and reap the add...

"If you really want to become a great fighter, you absolutely must take the time to develop your skills and improve your strength, speed, power, endurance, etc. This means taking fewer fights, not more." - Ultimate MMA Conditioning, Joel Jamieson

After finishing Dan John's 10,000 swing challenge last Tuesday and then taking a day off, I did my first Starting Strength session today. This program, created by Mark Rippetoe and described in detail in his seminal book - which is, incidentally, called Starting Strength - makes a nice general purpose plan for the off - season. Basically, you'd do three sets of five on the following exercises: Session A: Squat Press Deadlift (1 x 5) Session B: Squat Bench Press Power Clean (5 x 3) The days are alternated in an ABA BAB fashion. That means you're training three days per week. In the first week, you're doing session A twice and session B twice. In the next week, it's the other way around. Starting Strength is - at least in the beginning - a linear progression model, so basically weights are increased from day to day. Needless to say, that isn't something you can sustain indefinitely. Hence, I've decided to do a six week block and then decide on what...

"Champions fail more than beginners try" -- Tom Furman [SM160403] Reference: [SM160403] https://www.realstrengthmatters.com/smp-74-art-war/

DISCLAIMER: This is published quite some time after the actual events. I'll explain my reasons for holding this one back in the post. 2016-03-31 : Just went through my first 10,000 swing workout. A couple days ago, I finished reading Dan John's Book "Can you go"[DJ2015] and now I'm into "Before we go". Most of that stuff I already read at some point, mostly on [T-Nation] or similar sites. So really, there wasn't anything really new in the book, Still, for some reason I've decided to give the 10,000 swing challenge a shot. You see, my life is rather turbulent at the moment, to say the least. I won't be going into any detail here (as Pavel Tsatsouline pointed out, oversharing is a dysfunction of our society [TF2015]), but suffice to say that I'm having a rough time in many areas of my life. The good thing is, that as I've pointed out in the disclaimer, I'll publish this a long time (~5 Weeks) from now, so things might be better...