A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

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

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 -...

In today's outdoor session, I explained the concept of what we Shinergy-guys call "flow sparring". Before I get into the concept, let me tell you a short story. In 2005, we had just a handful of veteran fighters (particularly Tom and Harry) on the team, the rest of us was pretty green. Still, we decided to compete in the Open TaekwonDo World Championships in Cardiff, UK. Now don't get me wrong, when I say green, I'm not referring to athleticism or technical skill. We were doing fine in those areas. However, Shinergy looked and felt quite different back then. We were doing lots of Wing Tsun Chain strikes and none of us had an idea about proper boxing footwork. In fact, those open tournaments had a great effect on our style and curriculum. That's one of the things I love about Shinergy: it's an open-minded style, we adapt when things don't work out. However, I digress. Coming back to the topic, our problem was not an issue of athletics or technical skill...

During July and August, I'm officially taking a break. Hence, my Dojo is closed. Still, I feel a certain responsibility for my students and their training, so once to twice a week we're taking advantage of the weather and do an outdoor session. Yesterday, we warmed up with some shadow-sparring. Now I feel that shadow-sparring is a great tool to sharpen an athletes technical skills and work on his cardio at the same time. Unfortunately, shadow sparring doesn't come naturally for most students and many instructors are a little uninspired when it comes to implementing specific concepts within a shadow-sparring session. Therefore, I'd like to present some ideas on how to incorporate shadow-sparring as a coaching tool for martial arts training. Personally, I like to start out my shadow-sparring sessions with a round or two where I do nothing but stepping. I do incporporate some bobbing, weaving, blocking, etc., but no striking whatsoever. This helps me work up to an operatin...

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...