A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

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...

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...