End of the Year

I've been looking back over posts on this blog for quite some time, and I've been noticing that I have posts related to new training ideas/concepts or plans that I've had.  What came to mind is that I'm like every other person in the world that finds some new fitness trend and tries to jump on the bandwagon - only to fall right back off a month if not days down the line.

I've been reading more and more about fitness with respects to power lifting and other types of weight/resistance training, to assist in martial arts ability.  Instead of digesting the ideas and trying to see what works and sifting through the chaff  I find myself constantly trying new things.  Not to say that trying new things is a bad idea, but eventually, as an athlete, you do need to have at least a base plan upon which evolution occurs.  I have a tendency to start and stop and never follow one plan consistently.  The closest I came to doing that was with Alwyn Cosgrove's New Rules of Lifting, where I was able to stick with the lifting plan for over 6 months.  It probably helped that I had somebody to train with and keep me accountable for sticking to it.

I find myself reaching a kind of plateau now, due to lack of progress in other areas of my life.  In that vein, I've been reading up on psychology (performance and sport) as well as fitness.  I'm working on getting ideas together to find what works and then create a plan.  What I will be doing at the beginning of the year is lifting 3 days/week and cardio 3 days/week; this begins January 2nd (the 1st is my parents' anniversary...plus it's New Year's Day).

The lifting protocol will revolve around Cosgrove's NROL, and the cardio will be a conglomerate of several different concepts.  Most combat athletes and trainers these days don't advocate long cardio anymore, it is counted as being counter productive.  However, I know what makes me happy, and I know being happy in my training is also important as well as productive.  So each day there will be a moderate distance (probably 3 miles) run at a semi-easy pace, depending on what else is to be done that day.  Cardio day 1 is just a nice easy, long (longer than 3 miles) run; cardio day 2 is an easier run plus tabata sprints (4 minutes, 20 sec. on/10 sec. off); cardio day 3 will be an easy run plus high intensity 100 meter sprint intervals.  The purpose is to build generalized endurance as well as improving explosive-work capacity and ability to actively recover.

Ippon Cup is coming up fast, only 9 months to go, and I'm not anywhere close to where I want or need to be.  This year is going to be different, though, I'm going to make it be different.

Wish me luck!

Training for the Improbable

Kids (and adults) get into the martial arts on a daily basis with the desire to make themselves stronger and more capable of defending themselves.  By and large, those same kids (and adults) will most likely never have any need or reason to use their acquired skills on another human being for the sake of preserving their own lives.  I feel like most people understand this as they get older, but when we're children there might be a bully at school that makes us feel weak, or a person in our lives that makes every effort to feel inferior.  The movies and TV shows tell us that learning to fight will teach us to stand up for ourselves and overcome the adversity and beat the bad guys.  That's absolute bullshit.

The martial arts in generally can do an admirable job of teaching one to take care of themselves in a self-defense situation, but the problem comes when the instructors don’t differentiate between self-defense and training to fight.  Training to fight, can in many ways be the best way to teach somebody to take care of themselves, as is spoken about by numerous proponents on Bullshido.net.  On the other hand, depending on the style, training to fight only teaches movement within a specific rule-set.  My primary training focus has been Shotokan karate, within that rule-set we learn to duel with our opponents within a specific fighting range.  Little of it useful in the real world unless it is trained thus.  Some styles, such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, incorporate combat within a different range, but again neglects to discuss all the possible ranges of combat/

Back to differentiating, though; self-defense is typically defined as a situation where the victim is caught by surprise.  There is, generally speaking, a given victim and a given aggressor.  After the first few seconds, if the situation has not been defused in some way, we have now changed it into a fight.  In a fight, there is generally no given victim, both sides are aggressors.  The law, of course, can take a different view on this once the dust has settled, but by and large, if you watch a fight, there’s really no way knowing how it started.

Rob Redmond, of 24 Fighting Chickens, outlines proper self-defense “training” in the best and most concise way.  Self-defense isn’t about being able to fight, or knowing how to punch, kick and throw opponents, it’s about maintaining your safety by way of avoiding danger.  His blog post The Essence of Self Defense (Redmond, 2010), illustrates in best detail the type of “training” one should undergo to properly prepare for self-defense.