A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Just finished this year’s first 5/3/1 cycle. As usual, we had two weekly S&C sessions. Unlike our previous cycles, we upped the volume a bit. Instead of limiting ourselves to [Wendler’s original 4 exercises] , we did the following 6 as “main lifts”: Deadlift Squat (atg) Bench Press Press Bent over barbell rows Pull-Ups So, following a functional line of thought, we cover the following movement patterns: Hip dominant stand-up Knee-dominant stand-up Horizontal push Vertical push Horizontal pull Vertical pull Obviously, splitting those into two sessions yields three exercises per session. We split everything into a horizontal day and a vertical day, hence we had the following: Deadlift, Bench Press, Bent over barbell rows Squat, Press, Pull-Ups Also, we took our time to implement a “core circuit”, i.e. a circuit where we’d do modified versions of the main lifts that focussed on joint and core stability. Each exercise is done for 8-12 reps (to or near...

Today, I finished another 5/3/1 cylce. Tomorrow, I'll be on my way to Poland for a short vacation with my family. Good time for a deload week. The Program  I've covered the basic idea of 5/3/1 as well as my tweaks in quite a couple of posts, so here I'll just present the weekly schedule: Monday: Power Snatch from Hang, Power Clean from Hang Wednesday: Deadlift, Bench Press Friday: Squat, Shoulder Press I didn't always manage to stick to those days, so this week, for example, I had to work out on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. However, the general idea should be clear. For energy system work, I did the following: Tuesday: Anaerobic capacity (stationary bike sprints, I1/I3) Thursday: Aerobic capacity (steady state stationary bike, I1) Also, this time I tossed in some assistance work. After each 5/3/1 session, I'd do 4 sets of pullups to technical failure with 90 seconds of rest in between sets. The stats As a base for my calculations, I used the fo...

Today, I finished another 5/3/1 cycle. Next week is deload. About time, if you ask me... The past Back in April before I started my first 5/3/1 cycle, I did proper 1RM testing. Here's what I found: Squat Deadlift Bench Press Power Clean Power Snatch 140,0kg 140,0kg 90,0kg 60,0kg 67,5kg 57,5kg Not impressive by any means, but it's a starting point. Now since squatting heavy ARMAP (as many reps as possible) and competeing in a kickboxing tournament are somewhat mutually exclusive, I couldn't really go all out during my last cylce. Hence, I didn't apply any linear progression to the weights but just stuck with my former 1RM's for this one. As I noted before , I modified the program a little - nothing serious though. I'd start each session with Chad Waterbury's Iron Core Circuit . Every now and then, I'd also do around 10-15 minutes of stationary bike riding before hitting the circuit. Martin Berkhan, the author of leangains.com , says that n...

Today I did my last S&C session before my upcoming fight (which will take place on May 19th). I was in the gym from 15:50 - 16:55, so the whole thing took me just around an hour. Since I've elaborated my current routine in great detail in this post , I'm not going to repeat that stuff here. Hence, I'll only give you the stats. Squat   Warmup 80.0 x5 90.0 x 5 Work 100.0 x 3 115.0 x 3 127.5 x 4 Clean & Press Warmup 25.0 x 5 35.0 x 5 Work 45.0 x 3 50.0 x 3 57.5 x 3 Rope skipping / Pullups: 300 revolutions / x 300 revolutions / 8 300 revolutions / x 275 revolutions / 8 280 revolutions / x 285 revolutions / 8 270 revolutions / x 295 revolutions / 6 Tomorrow, I'll participate in the afternoon class I'm teaching and spar for the last time. After that, nothing but shadow sparring, pad work, rope skipping and stretching. Obviously, I'll keep you updated. So long, take care

Yesterday, I hit the gym for what I thought was going to be a recuperation session. I had my last fight on april 14th, after which I basically took a week off in terms of training. So, instead of jumping right back into Wendler's 5/3/1 training, I decided to do a "hotel room workout". You know, that's one of those workouts when you're abroad and all you have access to is the hotel gym (which more often than not is in a pretty bad state). That's when you try out new exercises and basically just do everything that doesn't suit your current program. Iron Core For me, this was an opportunity to finally give Chad Waterbury's Iron Core circuit a try. On paper (or rather, on screen), this stuff looked so easy. The circuit consists of four exercises:     Dying bug with wall push     Leg curl with stability     Stir the pot     Pallof press I won't bother giving a detailed description for those exercises here, just check ou...

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 -...

Today, Chris and I did our first "Push" session in our reloaded 5x5 program. All those little tweaks probably make the program even more awesome than it was before. As usual, after warming up, we worked the pads for 5 rounds each. Today, we didn't freestyle a lot but rather worked on specific drills, some of which are inspired by Anderson Silva's instructional videos. (I've compressed the video to just a few seconds per drill so as not to bore you.) Then, we hit the gym and lifted some heavy stuff. Well, ok, nothing all too heavy today, but then it was only our first session. Basically, there's been two changes (improvements?) over the original program: Front squats became Overhead squats At the end of the session, we'd do 25 bottom-up presses on each arm , following Chad Waterbury's recommendations in his article, the 25 Method . Hence, the new "push" session is structured as follows: (Snatch to) Overhead squat, 5x5 Clean & Press, 5x5 ...

Alright, Chris and Elias came back from their tournaments (they just recently fought in Germany, then in Steinbrunn, Austria, and each of them scored medlas in both tournaments), so we went back to doing our saturday sessions again. Due to a high level of fatigue, we skipped circuit training this time and focused on really implementing new stuff instead. In the following, I'll show you some of the cooler exercise - the highlights, if you wish. Just give some of those a try in your next workout, you won't regret it. Suspended Reach Side-Plank Ok, quite frankly, I've no idea how this exercise is really called. Regardless how one might call this beauty, it definately rocks the core. The setup is pretty simple, so instead of describing it in theory, I just put up a video. Enjoy! Single Arm Power Pull Another great way to work the core is the single arm power pull. I first saw this on the "TRX Essentials / Cardio circuit DVD" and instantly liked it. Pulling strength an...

So today after some padwork for warmup and specific training, Chris and I jumped into some more structured, more serious strength & conditioning program again. After some hard thinking, we concluded that after all the instructor courses, seminars and workshops we attended, we still don't know a better system than the 5x5 program I've written so much about on this site. Hence, we'll do it again. Anyhow, although they say you should "never change a running system", we've decided to tweak some parameters to even further increase the program's effectiveness. Let me recap the original program again Monday, Thursday: "Pull"-type movements (horizontal pull, vertical pull) and hip-centered "Stand-Up"-type movements Tuesday, Friday: "Push"-type movements(horizontal push, vertical push) and knee-centered "Stand-Up"-type movements Sets/Reps: 5x5, with progressive load (e.g. 130 in the first set, 132.5 in the second, 140 in ...

As promised, here's a summary of our conditioning session on Saturday, April 23th. You see, Chris, Elias (the new guy on the team) and I have decided to make saturday our "crazy stuff" day. Basically, that's when we'll try new drills or do stuff we can't do in the dojo for obvious reasons. Without further ado, I'll just jump into the the session and give you an overview of what our saturdays look like these days. Goes without saying, we start the whole thing with some warmup. I won't go into great detail here, but I'll present you my favourite warmup toy (at least for now): behold, the speed ladder . I tend to use this a lot in my youth and children classes and I also love to warmup with some stepping myself. Below, you can find a short clip of a "2-in-2-out" step. This form of training develops quick feet and mobility - definately something worth working on for a standup-fighter. In my opinion, explosive strength is the single most impor...

So here's todays video clips. The recording is pretty bad, but it gives you an idea of what our training sessions look like at the moment.

Sometimes it's so simple. Still, we fail to think of it. Afterwards, it's quite awkward to think such an obvious thing didn't cross the mind in the first place. But then it just didn't. I had a situation like that today, while teaching my conditioning class. Now "class" is a bit of an overstatement here, it was more of a personal coaching with one of my advanced students, Doris. Usually, the conditioning class quite full. Today, however, with christmas being just two days away and the streets being covered in ice and snow, most of my clients chose to stay at home. Not that I was really surprised. This gave me the opportunity to tailor the session specifically to Doris' needs and address some points I sometimes have to leave unattended. When it came to strength training, we basically did a modified version of Charles Staley's EDT (escalating density training). In a nutshell, the idea of edt is to do two exercises alternatively over a certain time period...

Just got my new set of kettlebells. Finally. I've been holding kettlebell classes at my dojo for about a year now and since then, my students have gotten stronger and fitter. That's why I decided that when it comes to conditioning, the only thing better than a kettlebell is more kettlebells. Now, my kettlebell arsenal looks like this: 04kg x 2 08kg x 1 12kg x 1 16kg x 2 20kg x 2 24kg x 2 32kg x 1 This should do for the moment. There's heavy weights for strength and power, medium weights for hypertrohpy and lighter weights for conditioning. Since I can proudly say that my conditioning classes are attended not only by my male students but also by women, the 4 and 8 kg 'bells make sense, too. Now, whenever my students need to change weights (e.g. they switch exercise from a press to a squat), there's some confusion as to which kettlebell is of which weight. You know, a 24kg kettlebell can easily be mistaken for a 20 or a 32. Some solution to this issue had to be found....