A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Disclaimer: Geeky stuff ahead. If you're afraid of physics, do not read. Also, I don't have everything in order just yet, but I wanted to release this before going to Poland, so the missing Figures will be inserted ASAP. Now Anna, a good friend and student of mine, decided to work on her high kicks. Determined, she told me she was going to stretch a lot. That's the point where, as a trainer, I felt the need to intervene and set things into persepective. You see, while some people might definitely benefit from some targeted flexibility training, what most need is actually mobility. Where's the difference? Well, in a nutshell, flexibility measures the "length" (or rather, the ability to relax) of your muscles, whereas mobility measures the range of motion (ROM) you can take a joint through under control. For my german speaking readers, this is pretty much the difference between "aktive Beweglichkeit" and "passive Beweglichkeit" [WEI2010]...

There's a thing with [youtube] . As soon as a trainer / coach has the time to put up multiple videos every day, I can'thelp but wonder how much time he actually spends... well, coaching people. Or training himself. So, I consider most of what you see on youtube crap. However, there's always an expection to the rule. Some stuff you find online is just plain awesome. Well, I guess that on a platform as huge as youtube, it'd be against all rules of probability if there wasn't anything useful, right? Well, anyhow, one of those pleasant surprises turned out to be a canada-based boxing coach called Jason Van Veldhyusen, or simply ["JT Van V"] , as he calls himself on youtube. Jason also hosts a homepage at [http://www.precisionstriking.ca] , where you can order his videos over the webstore. You should definitely check it out, this stuff is great. Amongst my favourite videos is a clip onside stepping and the creation of angles. The idea of shifting your wei...