A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

This one's rather short. After working out hard for three days, we gave it a break on wednesday. In order to avoid extreme soreness, however, I scheduled a morning session as a means of active recovery. Nothing special, you see, just some light shadow sparring and no-contact partner exercise. I'm a strong believer when it comes to shadow sparring. A quick search on this blog will produce quite a few posts on the topic, so I won't bother going into any detail here. I'll say a few words about what you see in the video, though. Basically, we were just throwing no-contact combinations at each other. I feel that this kind of training yields the following benefits: Distance control - throwing kicks and punches at a real partner instead of a pad gives you a more accurate feeling for distance. Natural reactions - even if the exercise is no-contact, most athletes (especially more advanced ones) will work their defensive skills. This will show you if feints or combinations w...

Here's some more video footage of our summer camp, this time it's about tuesday, the third day. While sunday was all kicks and monday all boxing, tuesday was about mixing things up. I'm a huge believer in combinations. Playing with heights, distances and angles is something most of the martial artists I know neglect in their training. That's really a pity. In the TV-show "Human Weapon", featuring Jason Chambers and Bill Duff, Jerome Huon, a former Savate world champion said "Show me a maximum of variety... low, middle and high. If you always attack with the same thing... first thing he's going to take in... second time, ok, maybe, but after that he knows you. So, you have to change, to be different, to give the surprise for him." You can find the show on Youtube, check out the following clip: I couldn't have put it in better words than Jerome, though I believe there's more to combination than meets the eye. That's not the topi...

As promised, here's the first piece of video footage from our summer camp in august. I'm not a VJ, so I just packed all the clips I have into one big clip, so don't expect any fancy art here. Anyhow, I think this footage gives you an idea of what sparring looks like at my Dojo - sometimes we play it fast an rough, sometimes smooth and easy, but always with a big deal of respect and caution. Sparring is just a form of training, an opportunity for both participants to learn and grow. Getting injured in sparring is a waste of time. Let me emphasize that: Being injured sucks. That's not just me being a softy, I've been there, done that and bought the t-shirt. All it ever did for me was keep me from competing. Not something I envision for my students. Took me a while to realize the true meaning of sparring, even longer to introduce a sensible sparring culture in my classes, but I believe it's been well worth the effort. Since this is primarily a post about the ...

Saturday evening, I returned from the first ever Shinergy[stadlau] training camp. Thanks to the awesome people that took part, this was a great experience. I really couldn't have wished for more. You see, I've had my share of camps, both as an athlete as well as an instructor. This time, however, I took up the roles as both instructor and manager. Put quite some time into planning the whole thing. Still, I was more or less convinced we'd need to improvise a lot - after all, I've never managed a camp before, so I really had no experience in that matter whatsoever. Anyhow, I was struck by surprise as to how little improvisation was necessary in the end. There were virtually no significant deviations from the initial plan. In fact, everything went so smooth that besides acting as the manager and instructor, I had the opportunity to partake in every session myself. The next couple of paragraphs will give you an overview over that fantastic week. The Group First thin...