A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Introduction Endurance is a broad term. Different types of endurance (short -, medium - and long term) are fueled by different energy systems. The first one or two maximum muscle contractions are powered by the phosphates in the muscle cell. After that, short bursts of up to 12 seconds draw their energy from the creatine- phosphate reserves. These two modes of energy production are known as anaerobic (lacking oxygen) alactic (without significant production of lactic acid). Longer efforts, up to roughly 3 minutes, primarily make use of the anaerobic lactic system, also called anaerobic glykolysis, i.e., the utilization of sugar in the absence of sufficient oxygen. Finally, even longer work is primarily fueled by the aerobic system. Here, oxygen is available in sufficient amounts such that sugars and fats can be oxidized in the Krebs cycle. It is this system that will be in the scope of this article. The aerobic system is, amongst other things, relevant for recovery after training se...

If you've been following my stuff for some time, you might know that I'm using the Kettlebell a lot. This weekend, I finally took my official perform better certified Kettlebell trainer course (and exam) with dr Till Sukopp. Those were intense two days, tightly packed with information on how to teach KB drills and lay out training programs. I definitely picked up a couple pointers on cueing and coaching. Also, I learned some new training ideas. If you're one of my students, chances are you'll encounter that stuff soon enough. So long , don't get hurt

Lately, I've been playing around with AviSynth a bit. When looking for clips to edit, I stumbled upon old recordings of our outdoor conditioning sessions. Good old times... 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 -...

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.

After we've built up some decent strength levels, it's time to get back in shape endurance-wise. So today, Chris and I started going through the RKC rites of passage, which basically consist of heavy cleans & presses, swings and snatches. As a warmup, we did three rounds of light thaiboxing sparring. My Gymboss is out of batteries so I'm using my Everlast timer. That damn thing beeps 20 seconds before the round is over, so we stopped 20 seconds early in the first round. After 20 seconds it beeps again, to indicate the round is actually over - we took that as the beginning of the new round and did 3min 40 sec on the second one. All pretty confusing. After warmup up properly, we grasped the kettlebells and went down to business. For us, monday is the heavy day, so it's 5 ladders of 5 rungs for the clean & press. I did the whole thing with 2x20kg, Chris did it with 2x16kg. 5 ladders of 5 rungs means a total of 75 repetitions - this does smoke the shoulders. Afterwa...

I'm currently at the instructor course at Linz, so there's not exactly much time to post. (Atcually, I'll be leaving tomorrow - it's June 25th by the time I actually publish this. Ain't much time to play around here.) I'll be posting about that course in detail once I come back. Anyhow, I've decided to post some pictures and info about my kettlebell workshop on Sunday, June 20th before the impressions fade away. On the workshop there was but two trainees of very different training levels. This made the whole event a great experience for me as I could really dig into techniques with one guy and do crazy stuff while at the same time placing great focus on details with the other guy. Actually, I did a whole lot more techniques than at the workshop I did for the instructors. Among these techniques was stuff such as the 2-hand-anyhow, catch-cleans, etc., so pretty advanced stuff. You can download the basic handout (the stuff I planned on doing, without the extras...

Todays master class was great. We trained outdoors for about 3 and a half hours. It definately was great fun. Basically we did something like this Posture correction (active standing) Joint mobilization Movement Prep (see Mark Verstegens "Core Performance") Deadlifts Unilateral Deadlifts Front Squats Swings with two hands Swings with one hand Swings with a switch Forward shocking (a technique I've leared from Dariusz Tomaszewski, basically it's all about throwing the kettlebell as far as possible from a swing) High-Pulls Swing to rack Power-Cleans Clean-To-Catch Olympic Cleans Power-Snatches Olympic Snatches Turkish-Get Ups Get-Ups via overhead squat Windmills Bent Presses Uhm, yeah, we did a lot. Obviously, this ain't what I'm going to do with the trainees on June 20th, but today was a master class for gym trainers and instructors, so I guess it was ok. As there's an error in the handout, I'll post it tomorrow. So long, take care

Tommorrow I'll be doing a master class at my teacher's dojo. The topic will be "The Art of Kettlebell Training". Sounds nice, huh? Background: At our headquarters in vienna's 8th district, Ronny (Shinergy-founder and my teacher) and Tom (captain of the Shinergy[supreme team], Shinergy[master instructor] and athletic director at our hq-dojo) have decided to remove all those puny machines from the gym and establish a pure athletic-gym. So basically, what remains is a squat rack, a bench, two power-racks, a cable pulley and a pullup-machine, accompanied of course by TRX suspension trainers, barbells, dumbbels - and, as you might already have guessed, kettlebells. Think the gym of my dreams. Now, as there's not too much people in Austria offering high-quality kettlebell tuition (I consider myself to be one of a few), it's my job to instruct our gym trainers on how to use the Kettlebell and turn a piece of iron into a lean, mean, one-stop-shop for fitness. Ok, ...

Today I started painting my new kettlebells. As promised, here's the graphics: AS you can see, I'm not done with the painting yet, but it shouldn't take more than one more session. So long, take care

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....