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 -...

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...

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...

As the weather is getting better, I'm taking my training to the outside more frequently. Over the last weeks, I've been doing quite a lot of suspension training. As a matter of fact, I even built my own suspension trainer. After some prototypes I came up with a solution that is equivalent to a TRX but cost me only about €40,-. That's a pretty good price when compared to the TRX ( check prices ), the Variosling ( check prices ) and the like. Coming from a technical education, I decided it's always good to have a benchmark, so I bought a pair of PerformTex Training Straps to have a "professional" solution to evaluate my DIY(do-it-yourself)-Suspension trainer against. Only when I opened the package I realized that the PerformTex straps are - just as the name implies - individual straps rather than a single line running through a bail. The whole thing looks something like this: My DIY-Suspension trainer, on the other hand, consists of just one strap running throu...