Embracing the 44

So I celebrated another birthday recently.  I love turning another year older.  Things grow dim, start to sag, balance decays, takes long time to rise from the dead of sleep.  I SAY BS ON DAT!

To most people I am weird anyway, but i see each year as another year stronger, another year tougher, another year healthier, another year smarter.  (Oops, that is over the line.)

I wander through my year watching people.  I watch them get older.  Yes, people get into the gym and get into shape.  And I watch them slide back into their aging patterns.  I do not think we get old by doing, I believe when we grow bored, we grow old.

This is why I love the martial arts.  Every day holds challenge, every workout encourages growth.  The students live in wonder and dread for my birthday workout.  I come up with a little challenge for them and they love to walk away grumbling breathlessly.

Here is the latest.



4 rounds for time.
11 Ball Burpees or Regular Burpees
20 Jump Rope or Jumping Jacks
11 Wrestlers or standard situps
20 Jump Rope or Jumping Jacks
11 Kipping Pullups or Ring rows
20 Jump Rope or Jumping Jacks
11 Squats

This workout took me 9 and half minutes.  Quite an easy one.  I did have to substitute ring rows for pullups due to my right arm.  But it is still a challenge.  Give it a whirl and see how you do.  Feel free to sub in exercises.  AND...remember to do all exercises full range.  Cheating the range, only cheats you.

A Burpee?  What is a burpee.  It is where you jump up as though shooting a basketball and then land and do a pushup.  This little exercise is named after psychologist Royal H. Burpee.  Who knew, a psychologist with upper body strength, go figure.  A Ball Burpee is where you hold a medicine ball and do the same exercise.  Balancing for the pushup is a kick in the shins.

Good luck and let me know how you fare,

C

Get a Grip

One of the most important and one of the most overlooked training aspects of martial arts training...is the grip.  We tend to train for strength; pushups, situps, squats and etc.  We train for speed and toughness, but we forget about the grip.

Having a strong grip means we can train longer.  Normally, our grip strength is used for making fist, blocking, holding and manipulating weapons.  Without grip strength we rely on clamping down and using more forearm and upper arm strength to compensate.

Grip strength comes in different forms, there is crushing, pinching and extensor strength.  These three uses of the grip are necessary for long term training.

I find every so often my tendonitis flares up in my right arm.  This causes the grip to fatigue rapidly.  I use grip training to rehabilitate.  I start with a 15lb gripper.  This is really weak.  Average strength for most people is 35 to 40lbs.

As my grip improves, I move up to the next level of gripper.  Grip strength training should be done every day.  Just a few days without training and your grip slides back in strength.  My left hand is still strong and gaining.

So just for reference my grip training is as follows:  50 reps of 30lbs for the right hand.  The left hand starts with 20 reps of 200lbs and then 30 reps of 145lbs.

I recommend grip training for anyone and once you start...keep it rolling.  Anyone can have grip strength, but it takes true dedication to keep it.

Train well,

It is the unsaid part that matters

I spend time in conflict with myself. I train hard to inspire my students and yet I seem to do is elicit comments like "you are scary strong" or even "well....you're Charles." When folk comment on me being atypical, I point out that I am simply normal. It is what I do not say that people should be listening to.

Today, when anyone leads by proper example, we deify them as heroes. We make them greater than ourselves so we can go through life with our comfortable misery and suffering.

When students first join, they are out of shape. Even the ones in shape, are out of shape. They struggle through reps of ten, and then twenty and so on. Students watch me occasionally due reps of 50 to 100 and wish they had my strength. Strength is earned in the first ten reps; once you get to eleven…you are working on stamina. Simple. No tricks.

Then students reach mid level (Brown belt) and they are working towards reps of 40 to 50. Yes, they are training stamina. This is necessary for upper level training. It feels pretty good to be able to keep up with the teachers.

At black belt level, students become disciples. The warm-up is over and now onto serious training. If you have kept up with the progression, the disciples should be hitting reps of 70 to 90. This sounds really cool, but the workouts take 20 to 25 minutes. And with 15 minutes of stretching, and some sparring, some two-person drills, hitting a couple of your 21+forms…well an hour goes fast. And whaddayou mean? Learn new material? OY! You are joking.

This is where the program changes. We start with Black belt conditioning, six rounds of body confusion workouts. Then we add Weight Vest conditioning. Weight vest starts at 10% of the black belt’s body weight. Does not sound like much, but it is. My weight vest is 60 pounds. No, I don’t weigh 600 pounds…it is the Gi that makes me look fat.

And still, I hear about my atypicalness. No…I’m normal.

Did you see what I did not just say? Then let me say it out loud. Today at work, I spent two and a half hours moving dirt into trenches. That is about 3600 pounds of dirt. Then add in an hour of moving concrete blocks weighing from 60 to 80 pounds. I carry them 60 feet, lift them over my head and throw them up over the eight foot tall trailer wall.

Of course, not everyday is this demanding. Some days, I just climb up and down scaffolding wearing my 15 pound work bags. Filled with every tool I need for construction and destruction.

So…Black Belt conditioning, Weight Vest conditioning and everything else I put my students through, is not so much. Not easy, but not crazy.

On the flip side, I watched my dragon warriors pick up weight that was 20 to 25% of their weight and go through a workout without complaint. My first thought was to snatch the weight away and ping them over the head with it. But, I watched to see what would happen. They made it okay and I am sure they slept well that night.

And this is the dilemma as an instructor. One hand must become heavy and reign in the charging horses before they can harm themselves and the other hand cracks the whip on the stubborn mules who wish to be dragged to greatness. And here I thought leading by example would be easy.

The next time your teacher speaks, listen to what they say and hear what they do not say.

Good training.

Riddle of Steel

We humans have long been involved with the Riddle of Steel since the first looked for the strongest bone club so they could dominate the tribe. And we have always failed at this riddle (well most of us anyway).

Through the dawn of time to even now, we have searched for the greatest sword, the biggest gun and even the ultimate doomsday device. I believe we have three now, OH Great!!! All these folk believe in “Peace through superior firepower.” And they still fail to solve the riddle, or even the last cliché.

And we are all about WAR! War on drugs, war on obesity, war on cancer, war on blah blah blah. All war is, is the act of destroying something we know nothing about. Easy to understand, right.

Now as you sit there, eating your potato chips, meditate on this. We are individuals that are out of balance. We use chemicals to attempt to rectify this. Problem is our choices. The two items we ingest will either nurture us or poison us. Look at them potato chips, read the label. Do you really thick they are nurturing the body; or just fooling the brain chemistry into thinking it is happy. Anyone know what “Malic acid” or “Sodium caseinate” is?

So how does eating crud relate back to the “Riddle of Steel”? We look outside of ourselves for strength, protection and guidance. We will never find the treasures outside, but rather inside of us. Our body will tell us if the stuff we ingest is good for us. We can tell by the quality of sleep, the edginess, by how stuffy our sinuses get, or the lack thereof.

Training in kung fu has developed my body awareness to warn me of when I am poisoning myself, rather than nurturing. It also gives me the strength and stamina to do the following in one day: 5.5 hours of concrete by hand, 3 hours of demolition by hand, and going through three (not one) black belt workouts.

How does your regimen stack up? We are always interested in finding some new way of training more efficiently. When our bodies are finely tuned, we can achieve great feats of impossibilities. When you say something is impossible and do not try, you have failed to grasp the “Riddle of Steel”

Good training and you are always welcome to visit the school,

DarkArashi

Um...mental block

So tonite is supposed to be my writing night.  Exorcising all the demonic stories from my head.  And lo and behold, nothing.

Nada.

Spent the last three days working in the sun, and the heat, lifting heavy things.  Eyes are tired and still blinking out sawdust from all the heavy framing lately.

I will no longer complain about the 300 pound beams I have been moving.  We had four to move that weighed over 600 pounds.  One topping in at 760 pounds.  Most of the movement was simple lift, swing and drop.  Lift, swing and drop.  All this work has reinforced my training.  Proper technique, good breathing and awareness make the work more efficient, never easy.

I recently watched Ip Man with Donnie Yen and realize the parallels in our lives.  I had a lot of time to train and perfect my techniques.  Now, I must work again, grueling work.  I look for opportunities to test out my training and gain new awareness.  As for fighting the Japanese and being considered the greatest master of Wing Chun...not happening.

And with all this construction work, I thought I had been losing weight.  Pants were looser, but I have gained 11 pounds.  I guess what everyone says is true, I am dense.  I now really appreciate the lower belt workouts.  I no longer finish minutes before them and sometimes coming in last.  The Jade Emperor has cast me from the heavens for being to mischievous.

No matter.  Life goes on and I will continue to spend every minute training, whether I am at work, school, play, or just trying to get out of bed in the mornings.

I'll see you all soon in the workouts.

Take care,

YAY job!

So the other day I was driving by what I call the monolith on San Tomas and Central.  This was the last building, feat of creativity, my last company made into a reality.  We were a small team brought together to solve the problems of high paced schedules and less than competent Architects and Engineers.

I am not saying all of them are bad, but the mean skill level of these professionals leaves a lot to be desired.  I do look at the individuals that care and how they use their creativity to overcome obstacles.  I enjoy watching folk solving new problems; we are like a force of nature.

So...why do we have such trouble making projects work?  Well, it is due to the fact, humans can't manage shit (or crap, or poo, use whatever fecal equivalent that is most offensive).  Seriously, there are a lot of dumbasses still working with manager under their name on their tag.  And for the really good managers out there, I am sure you can point a few fingers of dead weight on your team.

Making these monoliths was my job two years ago.  Small team of 3 to 5 people making sure these erector sets went up without a hitch.  Company tolerated us due to our ability to make said company $50K a day.  We were the first to go when the downturn got bad.  I had offers to do this in: China, New Zealand Australia, Scotland, and Germany.  When I started my job hunt, the market turned into vast wasteland.

I was too overqualified for a drafting job, network support, serving coffee and shoveling out cesspools.

You hear about these morons spending eight hours a day, surfing jobs, re-writing resumes and cover letters.  Well, I was one of them.   My HR friend helped me to understand the new market.  Your resume had 15 seconds to sell you.  I would get phone interviews and they always ended with me being to overqualified.  I sure was not feeling overqualified.

We were taught to spice up the resume and make it all sparkly to capture attention.  I was busy trying to dumb mine down.  Not easy to look overqualified on paper.

Last Job: Turd-eater.

Interviewer:  So you were a Turd-eater?

Me: Yep!

Interviewer:  Any experience managing Turd-eaters?

Me:  Yep, four years worth of managing Turd-eaters.

Interviewer:  Sorry, you are overqualified.  Good luck.

Me: Overqualified?  To eat turds?

Interviewer:  Yes.  We want someone fresh to the business to learn Turd-eating.

Me: Yeah, but I have experience and am willing to work for shit.

Interviewer:  Yes, but if the economy turns, we do not feel confident you would stay on.  Another company may offer you crap to work for them and we can not compete.

Me:  Well, that is a pile of fecal matter!

I recently picked up a job.  Not due to my resume, nor filling out an application.  I was simply helping someone with their network difficulties when they asked if I knew anything about carpentry and building homes.  I now work as a Carpenter's Apprentice.

I think the biggest perk to this job so far is this;  I have received more praise for my work in the last two weeks, than the last 12 years in design work.

See you soon at a remodel near you,

C

Physical Challenge for UberGeeks.

So the wife sends me a blog about an UberGeek getting old. I think getting old is for suckers! Yes, we are all going to age, but getting old is a choice.

Our lifestyle now will determine how well we age, or don't age.

I watch and listen to people run in circles chanting, "Oh, I should, oh i should, OH I SHOULD!!!" And never get anywhere. Then suddenly, they are old and worshipping some physician and kowtowing to Insurance Companies to protect them.

Well, for you Geeks, UltraGeeks and UberGeeks, I have an interactive game for you. It is called Shaolin Kungfu.

HUH?

Yep, been around for 1500 years. We have levels, tests, bonus rounds and weapons. Lots of weapons that Manga artists have yet to dream up.

I see Geeks playing Magic, flipping cards. Dungeons and Dragons, rolling dice. No where do I see any form of strength training or cardio (except during lunch at a tournament. UberGeeks can sure eat!)

So I would like to offer the game of Kungfu to all. This is a regime that will challenge everyone, at every level. If you are tired of running in circles and wish to excel, now is the time to join me.

As for this old UberGeek, well I don't want to mention any names but

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2010/05/it-turns-out-i-had-a-fairly-geeky-weekend.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wwdn+(WIL+WHEATON+dot+NET%3A+in+Exile)&utm_content=Bloglines


Still uncertain? Try this, one pushup for every year of your age. Then come see us.


http://www.ascensionmartialarts.com/


I'll be seeing you soon,

C

ps. Wil call me. It is not to late avoid the "OLD"