A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

[A couple of days ago] I posted that in the near future, I’ll deviate from the pragmatic reality of combat sports competition and the related training for a while and instead ponder some philosophical ideas. That’s still the plan. However, this particular issue is on my mind right now, so I don’t see a point in postponing it… You see, sometimes, we (instructors, trainers, coaches, …) don’t practice what we preach. Sometimes, we just lack the motivation and/or dedication to fully commit to our own principles and instructions. That’s why top-level athletes can still learn from their trainers. While the latter possess a superior level of knowledge, it is the former who actually put that knowledge to good use, train hard and compete. There’s a gazillion reasons why someone might choose not to devote his life to hard training and proper nutrition at 100%. Amongst others, that’s family (a luxury many top-level athletes just can’t afford), past injuries, athletic burn-out (in the sense tha...

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...