thebatdojo

Die "Fledermaus Dojo" ist nicht tot!

2011-08-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

America...

2011-05-01T22:02:00.001-07:00

Fuck yeah. :)

So many fail...

2011-04-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

...because they don't get started - they don't go. They don't overcome inertia. They don't begin.
~ W. Clement Stone

Spring training has started! Day one was a success.. Most of us left dizzy, nauseated, and limping. The next day was no better, with our ability to walk hampered by the hypertrophic damage to our hamstrings. Good times for sure!

For Brazilian jiu jitsu, this is an EXCELLENT workout for developing core and leg strength. Particularly for the part of the body involved with double/single leg takedowns. For girls, this attacks all the curvy bits, they complain about and guys like...trust me. :)

The workout was a modification of another workout..with an emphasis on 100% activity for 1 minute, versus the original workout's goal of number of reps in a long 3 minute set. Our workout had barely a 10 second break in-between intervals as compared to the 3 minute break recommended in the original.

Here's what we done got done did:

For 1 minute each:
45lb deadlift (just the bar for the next few sessions)
chinups (from dead hangs, no touching the floor for the full 1 minute, and no crying)
kettle bell swings (1 min per arm)
goblet squats with the 25lb kettle bell
push presses with the 25lb kettle bell (1 min per arm)
hi low carry 25lb upper arm, 35lb lower arm (1 min per side)

9 minutes total. Fucking sucked.

Make damn sure you are trained in the deadlift. It's SOOO easy to wreck your back with improper form. Remember, it's really a PUSH movement with the legs, not a lift motion with the back. If you are leaning forward, then leaning back to lift, you are doing it wrong! The majority of the action should be your ass getting low, then rising and pushing forward as you drag the bar across your shins.

Other points, make sure your shoulders are back. Your spine is arched so that your chest is forward, not arched liked cat. Head up and forward looking at the crowd, particularly at your competitor's girlfriend. Push hard through your heels, not your toes.

No pics, I was too lazy and didn't "feel it". Shooting for me is organic; the energy for it comes naturally from some deeply seated part of my id. If it's not there, the camera collects dust.

Later!
Mark

To fight

2011-04-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

..is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions ~ George Santayana

One of our striking coaches, Mike Wright won his second MMA fight last night! So awesome! He is now 2-0!
It was a real pleasure training with him on grappling, which he used quite extensively during the fight. Excellent work! His opponent was tough, with the fight going to judge's decision.

Faixa Preta MMA - Rockwall, Texas

-FIGHT!
-Mark

100

2011-04-12T19:22:00.000-07:00

I completed the 100 burpees challenge! I nearly ralphed my guts out. Well not really, it was tough but not uncontrollable like a bad case of Montezuma's Revenge. I'm glad I did it. Never thought I would really complete all 100. But, what does this really mean?

The Bat Dojo is alive again. Tuesday 19 April 2011, 8pm starts "The New Pain" ©

Be ready, be willing, be here.

-Mark
p.s. be afraid ;)

The...

2011-02-23T20:29:00.000-08:00

Bat Dojo in Kanji...yes for reals! In English: Komori Dojo.

Dojo translates very roughly to "way and place" Referring to the place one is currently parking their derriere is where they may explore the way. What is the way? Anything one endeavors. Martial arts, weaving Indian rugs, or excavating magic nose goblins.

In America, dojo is almost exclusively used to identify a place as a martial arts school. The Japanese language, typical of it's vagueness and non-confrontational grammer does not directly identify martial schools linguistically. The most common wordings for any type of training area are dojo, kan and ryu. The dojo, referring to a place which helps you along your "way". Kan, referring to hall or sometimes a house(Uses: Shotokan, Budokan). The incredibly vague "Ryu" describes a flow. A form of ideology rather than a physical location(Uses: Goju-Ryu, Shito-ryu).

WTF? What about jiu jitsu? Jitsu, another astonishingly vague precept is defined(barely) as "art" or technique. Jitsu can be applied all over the place. For example I've trained in bo-jutsu(6 ft staff) , ken-jutsu(sword fighting), tanto-jutsu(knife fighting), iai-jutsu(sword draw), aiki-jujutsu, and hojo-jutsu(combative rope fighting!). The "jutsu" spelling was very common before the BJJ rage.

Interestingly, there used to be and probably still is a major split between the "jutsu" and "do" crowds. Kendo, aikido, judo, iaido at one time were considered sports, games, non-combative exercises...useless for combat. Whereas, the prideful ken-jutsu, ju/jiu-jutsu/jitsu, iai-jutsu guys differentiated themselves by their practical combative nature. Probably some small measure of truth. My ken-jutsu training was pretty wild, with ruthless bladed attacks. Punches to the face were actually considered fair game! Read Miyamoto Musashi's "Book of the Five Rings" and he babbles all about busting some guy in the eye socket during a sword fight! Ballsy, but totally practical according to him. Look at the section entitled, "The Water Book". It states, "You must bear in mind that you can always clench your left hand and thrust at the enemy's face with your fist." Awesome! I think of this even when grappling. On occasion, I exercise this intent. :)

The iai-jutsu sword draw training I did, didn't look any different than typical iaido...Yet, the intent was different. Much different. Infact, the intent was to cleave clear through a dude, starting at his right floating rib and exit out his left jaw. Leaving two pieces of meat for the dogs. Anything lesser, was a waste of our time. Think of your intent.

So I leave you with this question posed by Anko Itosu in 1908:

You must decide if karate(or any martial art) is for your health or to aid your duty.

Later!
- Mark

Success seems to be

2011-02-19T17:07:00.000-08:00

...largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go. ~William Feather

I love that quote. Since 1 January, I've resolved to do 1+ burpee(squat thrust, pushup combo) per day..working up to a goal of 100. Today was day fifty in that venture! I'm still sweating from the fifty I just blasted out. I know people try who to make a beneficial change in their lives...but who really sticks to their resolutions? I would like to think I stick to my resolutions...to the end. Perhaps, I'm a unique case? I would rather think not, I'd rather believe everyone strives to complete a mission.

As a little kid playing Space Invaders on my Atari, I would fire it up and start blasting away at the alien enemy. If I was killed, even though I had 2 more lives, it pissed me off! I would slam down the controller and hit reset, trying again with greater concentration. Perfection has been a long a goal of mine since my days of Space Invaders. A curse and a gift some say :)

Here's my heart rate chart. I had to slow down at 35 as you can see the dip in the chart. This is the Alien blasting me...unacceptable. Next time I'll not take a break.

-Work! Then play a lot!
Mark

The trouble with...

2011-02-09T17:12:00.000-08:00

always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. ~G.K. Chesterton

Sick as a dog, still doing my burpees though. I skipped yesterday's 39, and completed that set about an hour ago. After I compose this crap I'll pump out 40 more for today's set. I am feeling a bit better though.., I hope by Friday to be done with this Anthrax-ebola like crap I caught...

I was nice to Monday's class as I pre-pumped out 20 burpees, they only had to do 18. I'll be less nice as I approach 100 :)

This weekend is Marcelo Garcia! Going to train with him and get beat up nicely. Should be good. Even if we cover stuff I am already familiar with, he always provides improvement and detail I did not know.

Later!
Mark

Victory is always possible

2011-01-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

...for the person who refuses to stop fighting.
~Napoleon Hill

About 1/3rd of the way through my goal. Not bad so far. I just completed 31 burpees on my way 100. My innards are spinning and I feel lightheaded. I'm sure both will subside once I eat breakfast and get ready for my west coast trip at a posh resort, courtesy of my awesome employer!

Below is my chart for the 31 burpees....Weird shape huh?

As the burpee count has increased, I've moderated my pace a bit to survive. Probably not really ideal. I'll try to push the pace and not worry about blowouts along the way --- forcing me to take a breather. No big deal, there is no ego in improvement. One of my first posts was about exercise survival. I believe during the fight one must maintain endurance, posture, damage avoidance...saving up for the kill at the end. Exercise on the other hand is the exact opposite. Wreck yourself, beat yourself up, fail, fail, fail, epic fail, then get back up and treat yourself to some more torture.

enjoy!
Mark

Pain of mind...

2011-01-26T19:05:00.000-08:00

...is worse than pain of body."
~Publilius Syrus

Skipped yesterday's burpees and made up for it today....that means 51. But I think I actually did 56, because I confused 25+26 =51. Since today was the 26th...I thought the total was 56! Oh well, I'm not a math major..

Here's a gnarly chart of my cardiac explosion...Felt like my lungs and legs were going to detonate.

It think it is fairly self-explanatory. Lots of work over time, equals shit tons of heartrate! Amazingly, in three minutes of workout, I was able to nearly hit my interval max...which is around 175-180ish range. That's pretty nifty!

Time to go eat something, my legs still hurt...
MArk!

The future...

2011-01-20T21:25:00.000-08:00

...depends on what we do in the present.

I'm still huffing O2 from the 20 burpees I just ripped out..in a whopping 1 minute 2 seconds!
So far I'm twenty days into this 100 day project; I'm 20% done!

When I first saw this burpee idea, I immediately thought...how stupid! Then I thought, why not? It's something to do, a goal of sorts. It probably couldn't hurt, much.

So far it's been good, I make my Monday night BJJ class do that day's burpees with me. Perfect. I can't wait to have class when I'm at 98. hahahaha

Being at 20, I believe this may be a threshold. I'm starting to breathe heavy. I can feel the weight of the pushups and jumps getting more and more difficult.

So here's a basic illustration of this concept:

Burpee #1: I'm doing GREAT! The world is full of joy and wonder. Life is awesome and I'm exercising! I'll be shredded and badass in no time!

Burpee #12: Some of my liver has now liquefied for muscle fuel. My gall bladder is pissed off and squirted bile directly into my aorta - it's not a pleasant feeling. The internal bleeding is probably not fatal.

Burpee #19: Complete mental failure due to Primary Motor Cortex mutiny. I cannot seem to remember my name, the date or blood type. In the illustration below, those are not tears. That is spinal fluid leaking out my eyes. The internal bleeding, skipped the hematoma stage and launched directly to a full-on firehose of hemoglobin squirts...out my ass.

Final illustration Pain(Yes, I intended that pun): Cellular collapse is complete and I'm pretty much a human meat-bag of chunky salsa. My ears are ringing and some sort of sulfuric acid was mixed up in my gut due to all the jumping and shit. I'm certain the hole it burned through my stomach and gi will etch the concrete in my garage. I should have read the Gracie Diet beforehand so that I knew methamphetamines and Pedialite are not to be eaten together.

-Mark

The time to begin

2011-01-08T21:42:00.000-08:00

...most things is ten years ago.--Mignon McLaughlin

One week in and I'm holding onto my New Years Resolution of 100 days of Burpees...increasing by 1 everyday...
Right here, in my living room, I did today's eight.
It's not too late to join me! There are no excuses!

-Mark

Gracie Magazine

2011-01-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

Wow! The Bat Dojo was graciously acknowledged in the online edition of the Gracie Magazine.

How cool is that???

-Mark

If you want to be happy....

2011-01-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

....set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.

- Andrew Carnegie

If you are not having fun when you train. You're not training. Smile when you enter the mat, and smile when you leave.

See ya!

-Mark

One

2011-01-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

One burpee today. Two tomorrow...ad nauseum...

+1 burpees for 100 days.

This is going to be a bitch.

My ankle is still swollen from a few weeks ago. While training with Vernoplata, getting him ready for the NAGA World Championships here in Dallas, I took a bad throw and landed on my ankle. Dorked it up nicely. It's still swollen. Ankle be damned, I'm going to do my burpees.

Today is still day one, join me!

-Mark
p.s. Vernoplata took 2nd in Gi and NoGi. Not bad for a little country dojo, some dedicated training and some sweat.

Rollin' w/ Noobs

2010-11-27T19:02:00.000-08:00

I love the word noob. Some may say it's derogatory. Yet, for me, it's a term of endearment for the beginners. I've trained in the martial arts(poorly) for 30 years. I've been a noob MANY times. Switching styles, starting over from white belt on multiple occasions - I believe I can speak for us noobs. I've heard brand new black belts in BJJ refer to themselves as whitebelts among black belts. This is so true. We are all noobs, and will continue being noobs forever!

The poor noob will make a few mistakes along the way. One of the most critical mistakes a noob may make in any martial art style is CONTROL. Rather not a mistake per se, it's something learned over time. Until that time, noobs should be treated with the respect usually reserved for an unexploded TNT pile after the detonation plunger has been pressed...

Let me draw a few pictures to explain. You may need to click to zoom.

And the match starts IBJJF style....

And the metamorphosis starts. As a rule of thumb, if your opponents pupils are spirals, one should probably sound the alarm...

Aaaand he attacks. 2000% as usual. Another sign you may be in SERIOUS danger is the "...saw on Youtube..." statement. One must be wary of the Youtube Warrior, and wear your steel gi.

Any attempts at demonic possession, or multidimensional soul extraction by your opponent should not be taken lightly.

As always treat your noobs with respect after the roll, no matter how bad you smash him...

There you have it! Be nice to noobs, you were once one!
Mark

A soldier will fight....

2010-11-16T17:14:00.000-08:00

...long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. ~Napoleon

My longtime BJJ buddy Vernoplata came over today for some cardio work. First time for him ever to train cardio with me. I warned him :)

He wants to compete in NAGA so I offered up The Bat Dojo as a place for him to expand his lungs and feel what almost dying is like. Twice a week until NAGA, Vernoplata will be over here for a ~~lovely~~ gut wrenching time.

Today the plan was this: three(only did two) 5 minute rounds of Tabata intervals, with 1 minute rests between rounds. NAGA rounds are 5 minutes each, we'll need to simulate NAGA pain as much as possible.
He got 2/3 rd's of the way. Not bad for his 1st try! Most people do not make it past 8 minutes. These workouts are very hard if you push yourself 100%. No shame stopping after round two.

Here's what we done did:
mini ball slams
squat thrusts
pull-up hangs by an old gi (probably the worst of the exercises)
bag tackle (basically do a double leg without your knee touching the mat)
bag spins (spin grappling dummy 360, back and forth)

Two rounds of:
20 seconds on, 10 seconds off x 10 times = 5 mintues
1 min rest between rounds

He'll probably be a bit sore tomorrow :)

Later!
Mark
p.s. as I sit here, I'm realizing I might be bit sore in the quads too. Hell yeah!
p.s.s. post workout recovery :)

Jiu Jitsu Life...

2010-11-14T18:02:00.000-08:00

So...I was thinking about the various characters around the many dojo's I've visited and trained at. For 30 years I've witnessed the carnage that is the "student". I of course am one of those train wrecks :)

I've decided to draw pictures(poorly) of a few examples of what one sees in a typical Americanized Brazilian Jiu Jitsu school.

The first is the Average Joe. He want's to learn self defense, and to get in shape. Does not want to be in MMA or fight in a Mexican jail for food scraps. In general he's pretty much prey for the rest of the school...

Next is the Brick Shit House. He's the mean bastard who likes to smash your guts but can't get a damn sub to save his life. Typical matches involve him laying on you for 5 minutes, then you going to the doc for compression fractures in your spine. Also, the instructor hates you for denting the mats with your face after rolling with this guy...

The fat guy. Yes, I said it. Round, rotund and impossible to get a guard on. Although he has no cardio, never underestimate his initial burst of Twinkie supplied energy. Surprisingly fast when Krispy Kreme is involved; he will roll over you uncontrollably... Watch out for your balls. (and lunch)

Every gym has a 'roid hound. The guy who claims never to have taken steroids. The military milked his breasts for some form of super soldier serum. He's strong enough to throw actual Grim Reapers at you during rolls. He has zero technique, his primary defense against your guard pass is to lift you with one hand, while shooting up an anabolic with the other. His only sub is to SCREAM; you die from the air compression smashing your atoms into a fusible mass, you then implode into a nano-sized black hole.

F*cking Noobs. These little shits will wreck you. NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A NOOB. Later drawings will show why. Because they cannot tie their belts or pronounce "omoplata" correctly only means one thing: they believe their primary purpose on the mats is to have some sort of spastic-colon retard fight with you. They will attack you at 2000% during drills and try to punch your babies.

This bastard is just the huge guy in the corner no one, not even the instructor will roll with. Strong, huge and ugly; this guy will simply eat you and your pet goat. No one knows where he(or she?) came from, because no one will speak to...it. Or perhaps it just cannot speak?

The tall guy: Mr Rubber Guard Guy, Mr Spider Guard Guy, Mr. HaHa You Can't Pass My Guard Guy, Mr Triangle You All Day Guy. A message from us short people, "Fuck you".

The Token Girl. Fear her. Just because she is a girl, one should not take her lightly. She been known to blog on her website: cutsy.sparkly.glitter-jiujitsu-unicorngirl.blogspot.com about how she quote, "..and then I f*cking choked the ever living shit out of him for not doing the proper IBJJF handshake at the beginning of our roll. I mean come on! Even my puppy, snookie wookums knows you slap hands, then fist bump. Next time that son of a bitch rolls with me I'm going rip his cup off and gore his eye out...Love Pretty Princess"

So there it is...a few examples of what you see in a typical dojo.

Mark

2nd Place 2010 U.S. National Sambo Championships!

2010-11-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

4 x 6 min matches in round robin format. Only 1 single point scored on me during the whole ordeal. The bat dojo cardio saved my ass. I was burned out my last match! My head hurt; it pretty much felt like my brain had crawled clear out my ass and died infront of me. Most of cardio involved #1 grappling, #2 morning long walks and punching my heavy bag obnoxiously. That's really all I did...

One big lesson from prior tournaments in which I was able to apply: ATTACK LIKE A SCALDED APE!! This is what put 3 out of 4 guys on either their heads or their backs. The one guy I lost to, was an "A" division ringer, whom had to drop to my "B" division due to no one there for him to fight. He's a VERY experienced MMA fighter, grappler and SUPER tough dude. So, congrats to him. I was happy I still engaged with him offensively, and didn't run 1 inch from anyone.

Much thanks goes out to my jits buddies and for Reilly Bodycomb being my Sambo coach! I couldn't hear a damn thing he said during my matches, due to my Rhinoceros like grappling style...which is 98% deadbutt them until they die and 2% levitation. More importantly though, he taught me how to throw. Which is really helpful when entering a Sambo tournament hahaha :)

The following video is a reenactment of all of my matches:

Fight Video

Muchas gracias to Georgette Oden for letting The Dude and I crash at her place! We visited her school for a bit today and played around with techniques in the corner. Then a quick roll with a tough 4 stripe purple belt with a nasty spider guard. Cartwheel pass is a handy tool for this occasion :)

Enjoy!

Mark

If you woke up breathing...

2010-10-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

...congratulations! You have another chance. ~Andrea Boydston

This morning at the Bat Dojo I woke up as early as I could....Which means something after 0730... I grabbed a rash guard, some sweat pants and a hoodie. It's late October now and the weather is perfect for morning jaunts. With the exception of a fairly wild Rottweiler down the street, my little workout should be successful. I walked my 1 mile loop at high speed, while listening to some sort of animal screams from some guy related to Vlad The Impaler. I don't know how fast I walked it, but I only got through a couple songs before I made it home.

There is temptation of walking in the front door and plopping my ass back down, figuring this was enough. I resisted the urge to check my email, or compile a Linux kernel and continued my way into the Bat Dojo.

Once in, the feelings of despair instantly subside and I began smashing the heavy bag, and doing pull-ups on my pool ball apparatus. I love that stupid thing, it's so awesome!

Today, I experimented with an old school technique called a breathing ladder. I had read about this years ago and never really put much thought into it until today.

Basically it goes like this, you forget your timer and use your breathing as your stopwatch. Yet the kick in the pants is, you adjust your next interval on less and less air until you drown in your own saliva...

Here's what I did:
Smash the bag at 100% (power/speed) with two hand strikes, two knees and two strikes.
Count 10 breaths
Smash the bag at 100% (power/speed) with two hand strikes, two knees and two strikes.
Count 9 breaths
...
...
...
Count 1 breath
Smash the bag at 100% (power/speed) with two hand strikes, two knees and two strikes.
Then die.

It wasn't that tough mechanically. My lungs were a different story, I thought I was going to suffocate! The desperation for air, gets worse as the intervals continue. This was a test, I'll formulate a nasty workout around these principles later and give it a try. No stopwatch, purely breathing based intervals. Like the famous 300 workout, mine will be 300 breaths!

Later
Mark

Pull Up Ball

2010-10-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

So I'm rebuilding my house, room by room. Pretty much gutting it and starting from scratch. Starting with the room where The Dude was my live in pet, on multiple longterm occasions. Then he got all married and stuff....

The basic beginnings is ripping out carpet and splitting/removing carpet spike strips with a screwdriver and hammer. Both are GREAT grip exercises! When I yanked up the carpet, I literally tore the carpet, by hand into long 3 ft by 10 ft long sections. I kind of felt like I was in one of those 1940's strongman shows where some dude would bend horse shoes with his thumb. It's quite a testosterone filled event! I was shredding and ripping everything in my path, doing the sorts of things my parents said not to do. I was smiling so much I'm sure I had carpet fibers in my teeth.

Upon the sad completion of my shredding activity I contemplated my next Jurassic-like endeavor. I stacked the carpet and foam into two piles. Then using grip alone dragged the pile through my house into the Bat Dojo (garage). Dragging this shit was awesome, I knocked over pretty much everything in my house to include myself....

The spike strips require a different type of grip strength. One to hold the screwdriver, the other to grip the hammer. Then repeatedly smack the screwdriver or my hand in a ratio of about 4 to 1. Warning, gripping or stepping onto an old pile of spike strips...sucks. It felt like an episode of True Blood, minus the hot sex and a semi-nude Sookie.

The cool thing about renovations is I get to play with the MASSIVE amount of tools I've collected over the years. I have a workshop about half the size of a garage, stuffed full of cool stuff to play with. One of which is a drill. Every guy needs a drill and today I got to use it.

My old pool table is going away and I decided to drill a hole through one of my old pool balls. Yes, right through the center to see what happens. I grabbed my Dremel too with a diamond bit and commenced cutting a small divot to center the drill. This was remarkably easy. Next I grabbed a real drill, a MAN's drill with a 3/4 inch chuck and about 4000 watts of power. I expected this was going to dim the lights in my neighborhood trying to bore my way through the pool ball. With a big stupid smile on my face I slapped on a 1/2 inch masonry bit and began the attack. Surprisingly, the bit chewed a perfect hole right through the ball with a mellow, smooth chalky smell, and purple powder residue. Whoa, my drill kicks ass!

I slipped some nylon rope though the ball and whipped it over my chin up bar. Slowly, I latched onto my new chinup toy and lowered my weight. It held! I was a little worried it would explode and shower me with purple powder. Not a good look for a guy. I tried a few pullups and sure enough, this little device will add all sorts of dimension to my grip strength training! I think I'll go build another!

See ya
Mark

World Tour

2010-10-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

Well not quite worldly, but this weekend my friend Amanda and I visited Las Vegas for some MMA work. Amanda is working on her degree and wants to be a part of the MMA community as a whole. This overachiever decided to fly out to Vegas to meet the #1 top industry professionals to finish her school project.
We left on a Friday and U.S. Airways decided to overbook the flight. I had a seat, but poor, little defenseless (blue belt BJJ, black TKD...kicks like a dude) Amanda and her sad puppy dog eyes did not. So I manned up and and gave her my seat. Just kidding, I wouldn't do a thing like that. :)
Actually, we just stayed home Friday night and made our way back. At least U.S Airways gave us vouchers, cash and a 1st class upgrade for the next morning! How awesome!
We repacked our stuff, learning from the dress rehearsal from the prior day and made it to the airport in record time. Las Vegas was warm and windy. I could smell the prostitution and gambling immediately upon landing. Foreign to Amanda, I had to point out the lack of grass everywhere!

The hotel was right off the strip, right across from an In-N-Out Burger. I don't eat burgers and fries; I bring this up because someone I know loves this place. I immediately had to txt her and tell her I was within smelling range. Txt responses had multiple mentionings of "FU", "devil" and "evil"...

Today's stop was with Shawn Tompkins at the Tapout Training Center. Immediately upon entering the facility, Shawn was right there! He graciously let us in and showed us around. "The gym is yours!", he said. I've never been to a gym where that happened. It immediately felt like visiting someones home rather than a place to get punched. The facility is multiple thousands of squarefeet of pure MMA. The floors are stained concrete with hand drawn cracks and the Tapout logo artfully drawn in. The walls are my favorite part. Adorned with images of gorgeous MMA girls and MASSIVE painted Tapout/Samurai images. When I say MASSIVE, I mean 30ft high, 40ft wide paintings! Even the trashcans were painted with Tapout logos. Seven zones, each with it's own set of "tools". One zone would be hanging bags, another a boxing ring, several cages, grappling mats and weightlifting/strength training zones. Each area was immaculate! I don't know who cleans the gym, but I need them for my house. One could easily sit down next to the cage and eat dinner, knowing nothing bad would get on his plate. No smells, no grime, no dirt, no dust (amazing for Vegas) no nothing.

The back area is a cage and a caged in grappling arena for the pro fighters. When we walked in, there was a grappling class for kids going on. It was PACKED! Must have been 40 kids from ages 6 to 14 in there. They were doing so well dropping levels, double legging each other. These kids will be smashing fools in the UFC in 10 years for sure!

In the main cage, Shawn was mitting one of the UFC's top fighters: Sam Stout. Sam immediately showed why he is in the UFC, ripping out a amazingly fast, staccato of punches as Shawn called out the combo. In between rounds of of striking, Sam would jump in with the grappling cage full of willing and very capable opponents. It looked tough and fun, everyone was having a good solid class of weekend training.

We hung out for a bit and watched some of the other fighters jump in with Shawn. Each one received solid, personal training in the striking game. One of the fighters whom trained with Shawn was a young 12-ish year old girl. She received the EXACTLY the same, very high quality training Sam Stout did. No differences in training material or style. How awesome is that! One thing I did notice, everyone who walked out the cage after training with Shawn were smiling. Tired, sweating, shaking...but smiling. Happy to have trained and happy they are now a tiny bit better than when they walked in the door.

I also need to mention the super cool and friendly Robert McMullin. He is the Tapout Training Center strength and conditioning coach. His website is on the way: Combat Performance I can't wait to see what will be posted so that I can ~~steal~~ borrow some of his training methods! His knowledge and experience in the S&C/MMA world is damn impressive! If you need your lungs worked on, or have a need for the ability to squeeze someones head off with one hand. Please contact him! You'll be very happy you did. He's on FaceBook.

In my opinion this is the #1 MMA gym I have ever had the privilege of visiting (and I've visited a lot!). The people were absolutely awesome, friendly and very family oriented. If you ever make it to Vegas, do yourself a favor, call first, make sure Shawn is around and go visit. Bring your mouth piece!

Mark

The whole...

2010-09-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

is greater than the sum of its parts. Gestalt theory tries to explain human processes with the concept which states, "what we are is more than what we're made of." For example, when we look at something, our eyes sample the light information, modulating neurons in the visual cortex. Some how, something in our cranial goo breaks down this information and makes sense of it. The output is greater (in information) than the input. But WTF does this have to do with exercise?

The people of a gym are the input, and together create a greater output. No matter the quality of the equipment, the size of the training area, the smell, the temperature, noise, fleas or rodents; the athlete can excel. The individuals at the gym are more important than anything one can buy or build. A dumbbell will not push you. A medicine ball will not praise your success or cheer you up on failure. In fact, failure is an option for a chinup bar, but not for the one holding the timer bitching at how slow you are.

I couldn't get to BJJ/wrestling today due to my work schedule so I called up The Dude and it was game on. As part of the plan each week is 2 minutes added to the workout. Whether we workout or not.

Today's workout was a simple fighters workout.
4 exercises x 2 rounds
2 minutes each + 1 minute break = 23 minutes of heart pounding death and destruction.

1. Jump rope fast
2. Box the bag until your knuckles bleed
3. Squat thrust + pushup, jump to a chinup bar and do a chin up
4. Kick/knee the shit out of the bag

No pics today of the devastation. This workout was seriously cardio intense. Muscle fatigue was not even an option, this was purely the cardiac pump controlling the action. The chest burning reminded me of my first no-gi BJJ tournament 4 years ago. After 5 minutes into a stalemate, we had a 3 minute overtime. During the very short 1 minute break, I distinctly remember the thought that the burning in my chest was due to lava pumping through my aorta. I slammed my mouthpiece onto the mat, and bitched at my coach I was gassed. He just glared at me... I picked it back up off the dirty mats, stuffed it into my even dirtier mouth and went back out for more. He won, only because I jumped guard during his takedown attempt and lost two points... It was at that point I knew fitness was just as important as technique and the first concepts of The Bat Dojo were born. I went home and wrote one thing down, "build some sort of workout, which will make my chest burn like it did today." Today's workout was just that.

I have a BPM chart below. One can clearly see the long mountain peaks of heavy heartrate work. Interestingly both of the jumprope segments exhibited a "U" shaped dip. We believe this was actually due to the screaming of The Dude telling me I was a pussy and to hurry the hell up. Amazingly, it worked.
It's also easy to see in the 2nd round of four exercises, the acceleration rate into the activities was much less aggressive than the prior round. Ideally, I want the leading edge to nearly slam straight up, much like the 1st exercise in the 1st round.

Recovery rates in during the breaks were averaging around 25 BPM +- 10 BPM deviation.

And the protein part of today's dinner :)

-Enjoy!
Mark

All great masters...

2010-09-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

...are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Helllo!
I've not been away, I've been secret squirrelling :)

Today I wanted to drill some basic BJJ techniques to:
1. Keep sharp
2. Test my body to see how things go.

I feel tiny bit rusty, but not too bad. I drilled techniques with The Dude and the Nigerian Nightmare today. Just some things I think increase my odds of effectiveness. A triangle setup and some halfguard concepts I researched. I'm building a small rolodex in my mind of a few techniques I want to be my go to moves. My little safe zones to get good at, and expand from there. It's easy to want to build a 10000 technique library yet suck at all of them. I'm focusing on a few things, while ignoring a lot of other things. Actually ignoring isn't quite accurate. It's more of store the technique to be aware of it and come back to it as my arsenal needs to expand.

Ever notice how the superstars in any discipline get typecasted by their technique? Marcelo Garcia's armdrags, Roger Gracie's full mount/x-choke, CroCop's roundhouses and the UFC ring-girls'...eyes. I assume this is a natural progression of finding the answer to one's personal riddle. Right now, I'm all knotted up in this riddle to determine what I'm good at and what works for me (even if I'm not good at it).
My injuries are good. I'm not in any pain, just when I wake up in the morning sometimes I feel like King Arthur is pulling Excalibur out of my gut. Yet, this is happening less and less everyday. Today after drilling and even after about 10 minutes of light rolling with the Nigerian Nightmare I feel pretty good. Although the fat bastard FELL on the back of my head attempting some half retarded guillotine swan dive... Now my neck hurts like hell. We'll see how it goes in the morning....

I'm off to bed!
Later
Mark

Sleep...

2010-09-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

...is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. ~Vladimir Nabokov

Holy crap! Check this out! Ran the Garmin all night while I slept. Looks like there were a few moments of no data.... NO DATA! WTF MAN! Did I flatline??? ;)

(click to zoom in)

One can see definite zones such as the mess at 1:55 to 2:25. Plus a bunch of weird spikes. The spikes at the end are the 7 minute intervals between my snooze button! Everytime my alarm goes off my heartrate goes to 80-85 BPM from 55 BPM!!! This cannot be good!

I wonder what those other spikes are? Perhaps rolling around? Or thoughts?? I was originally going to joke and scribble "Angelina Jolie" and arrow to a spike or two LOL

Interesting stuff for sure!

Mark

To fight and conquer...

2010-09-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

...in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. ~Sun Tzu

ok kids, in lieu of photos, I have for you a stop action video of today's workout. First up was me, then The Dude. Today we did Tuesday's workout but backwards and in 2000 degree heat....MUCH tougher! I think I nearly popped my medulla oblongata.

And some heartrate data:

This shows some serious upward stair stepping trends. The bag dragging and ball busting shrimps were whimpy compared to the rest of the crap we did. These two were at the beginning and the middle valley(11:30 min).

My 90 second recovery was about 30 BPM, just like last workout.

See ya!
Mark

Everybody...

2010-09-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

...has a flavor of neurosis.

"Crazy!" is often the response of my coworkers to my workouts. Occasionally, at lunch we might chat about nutrition and exercise... Actually it's less than occasionally, it's rare. But when we do, I try to softly lend out a helpful hint, then quickly shut up. No one likes a zealot proselytizing their doctrine! I prefer to just be a good role model. An extremely overweight individual I know bought a popular prepackaged exercise DVD plan... I'm typically straight forward about these things and told him he'll never use it. Not in a nasty way, but in a brotherly, truthful method with a genuine interest. He obviously wants to change, yet does not want to attack the problem at the source. Diet? Nope. Exercise? Try again. Killer instinct? Yes.

He has no intention of actually doing the work. No predatory demeanor, stalking good health like a lion in the jungle. Humans have a highly evolved and primal instinct to stalk, hunt and kill a prey. Why cannot your well being be the prey in the absence of a tasty wooly mammoth? Use your carnal skills to rip and shred illness, tearing it apart leaving the bloody remains of modern environmental diseases for buzzards. Not that I want buzzards to get sick, I actually like them.

Today I wanted to get a good feel to see if I'm injury free-enough for BJJ. I wanted to see if I could handle grappling takedowns and vertical stress(parallel to the spine). So far so good! We'll see in the morning though. Maybe this week I can get back into BJJ :)

Here's what we did, incrementing by 2 mins per week:
1 minute each - 20 seconds of break x 2 rounds = 18 mins 40 seconds.

1. Texas Triangle - 3 miniballs setup in a big garage sized equilateral triangle. With the Atlas ball in the center. Run from the Atlas ball to one of the mini balls, touch it with your palm. Run your ass back to the Atlas ball and perform one pushup with both hands on the Atlas ball. Repeat this mess to another miniball etc.. etc.. etc...
2. Bearcrawls around the mat edge - Two opposites sides are just normal bearcrawls. The other opposite sides have a kickpad one must hop over during the bearcrawls.
3. Grappling Dummy squats - underarm grab the bag, step back into a reverse lunge. Stand, swing the bag under the other arm, step back with the other leg and repeat.
4. Grab the 10lb sand filled miniball and beat the hell out of the punching bag with it.
5. Double leg takedowns vs the hanging bag. To make things worse, you have to snatch a kettleball under the bag with the rear hand and stand.
6. Shoulder walk shrimp with the 40lb nut crusher on your junk (lower stomach). When your legs are almost straight, bring feet to your ass and bridge fast keeping the ball crusher connected to your belly button. Repeat the mess.
7. Simple. Low crawl and drag the grappling dummy with you. :)

This workout was tough! A quadriceps beatdown with some nice hamstring action as well. I can already feel my hamstrings getting sore three hours later!

MiniBrock busted up the Grappling dummy a few workouts ago, blowing a nice chunk of guts out's it's newly formed A-Hole(yes, again!). Immediately, during the live workout we taped it up, just as MiniBrock used it for his next exercise. For today's craziness, I added another layer of Gorilla Tape...just to be sure :)

Heartrate graph:

Some cool shit in this graph. 5 BPM psychosomatic lump...40 seconds before the beginning. There are 14 peaks matching the 14 exercises. The 1st round BPM were about 10 BPM lower than round 2. The shrimp with the Atlas ball was a huge rest period with a mini spike both times(~9:00/18:00 min) and a quick drop off. This means, it immediately reached it's maximal intensity then the body recovered quickly while keeping up the pace; interesting! All of the other exercises had nice wide peaks (with the exception of the first exercise in the 1st round). I believe this is the goal. Wide, long duration at maximum intensity. Imagine being about to sprint at 100% for hours!

Sixty seconds of recovery from workout end: my heart rate dropped 37BPM. I'd love for this to be about 50. We shall see if this happens :)

Here's some proof of today's insanity:
**Technical note on the photography. No flash today. Batteries were dead. I cranked the ISO up to 3200 running f5.6/24mm. With almost no ambient light, noise and bizarre artifacts crept in. This time I'll just call it art instead of photography. Enjoy :)

The Dude Ball Bashing

The Dude Ball Grabbing

The Dude Dragging His Bag

The Dude Dragging More of His Bag

Colonoscopy (1st timer newbie!) Bravely Grabbing his Ball

MiniBrock Angrily Bashing His Bag

MiniBrock Banging His Head Against His Bag

Me Attempting my Best Predatory Hawk Impersonation

Me Bashing my Ball Against my Bag

Mark

Triangle of Doom Part 3

2010-09-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

hahaha forgot one painful image... :)

Mark

Triangle of Doom Part 2

2010-09-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

The Dude emailed me at work asking what we were doing today (actually 2 Sep). My simple reply was, "That's classified information." Mostly because I didn't know yet. Although I had an idea...a big fat repeat of last workout because I f'd up by not getting any data! The other part is my theory that states, "Every workout should be unknown and random." It's a little tricky for me as I develop the workouts, but I still do not know the outcomes. I'm uncertain if anyone will survive or whether it will be taxing enough to reap some sort of benefit. A few years ago, The Dude and I literally had a sheet of exercises and we would click on a random number generator on the internet in order to build our task list. Sometimes the internet would be mean and lump a bunch of nasty things together. Pushups, then pullups, then squat thrusts/pushups...etc.. There was no emotional leveling humans do to make the workout fair and reasonable. The cold heart of the computer decided our fate and sometimes it was brutal. We will be back to that intensity in about 4 weeks based on the 2 minute increase per week rule.

Jump back to last week to check out the task list. We executed an exact repeat, with Martian going first to make it home before the wife poisons his lasagna. Second up is a special guest star Kaveman. He brought up a great idea. Try a different exercise philosophy per week and compare the biometric output. For example, a week of P90x, then Crossfit, Yoga, The 300 etc... This is a fantastic idea and I'll be planning that as soon as possible!

The data this time was fascinating, exhibiting all sorts of crazy shit.

0:30 Psychosomatic lump...repeatable in nearly every workout.
Work out starts at the 1:00 mark and ends at the 15:00 min mark.

The 10 second breaks(in light gray) certainly mark the demarcation between exercises.
The grappling dummy guard exercises were a massive active-rest period. Yet it was taxing as hell. This was almost certainly a strength/anaerobic task. The waveforms were weird, all lumpy and crazy looking. Usually starting with a higher BPM then reducing to a 2nd sub peak. Must be some sort of 2nd wind from the aerobic rest.

The second time through the rings, shows a break due to the prior ToD and general beatdown. A couple ring hops in, then a fatigue induced break kicked in. The funky waveform shows this. The ring hops certainly wore everyone out!

The second time through the bean bag was a train wreck as compared to the first time. Cardio was breaking down, strength was practically gone. At the 30 second mark, I pretty much fell apart.

Both guillotines showed a solid grip for about 30 seconds. Then a BPM breakdown, although...the waveform shows it looks bad, the guillotine hang is really an anaerobic task and heartrate decreases significantly after the first grip failure at the 30 second mark. The successive times clamping on were actually quite solid and long lasting for all of us. BPM vs power output does not always a correlate!

FaixaPretaMMA

Martian Whipping the Bean Bag Around

Martian Ring Hopping

Kaveman Ring Hopping

Kaveman Grappling Dummy with KettelBall

The Dude Grappling with the 25lb Plate

The Dude Grappling with the KettleBalls

Me and the Ring

Aftermath

Mark

Triangle of Doom Part 1

2010-09-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

No...not Sanakaku Jime/Triangle Choke; the choke using the legs. Rather, the name of one of the tortures we did on the 31 Sep. I know, I'm a few days late... I'll have part 2 done up today and posted.

The problem with some workouts is the motions do not often fully simulate the sport one is training for. Not that exercising is worthless, or that running sprints is going to hurt your baseball pitch. My goal with this workout was to simulate a few things we deal with in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. If you're unfamiliar with BJJ, it is a martial art involving grappling. During sparring one is often trying to squeeze the ever-living shit out of their opponent's neck. At other times desperately trying not to have the same done to you. As you can imagine there are times of intense, high-speed scrambling for position or moments of slow, crushing, exhausting fights to escape a pin. We can enhance our scrambling speed with ladder drills, sprints, box jumps etc... The low-speed, smashing is a bit harder to simulate. Today we'll be addressing squeezing, scrambling and crushing.

Each week I've been incrementing the workout times by 2 minutes. This allows us to increase intensity without dying. It also gives noobs a chance to jump in, without exploding. Even if we get to 30 minutes, the workout is adaptable and can be broken down to smaller time segments for beginners, while leaving the rest to the advanced guys.

Here's what we did(I'll try to explain my madness):
1. Triangle of Doom (ToD) - I set up a triangle shape on the mat with three 10lb miniballs. The triangle is as large as the mat area, with about 12 feet inbetween the balls. As you stand there infront of one of the balls, the 2nd ball is 60 degrees to your front right. If you were to run to that ball, still facing forward, the 3rd ball is 60 degrees to your front left. Basically I made a two angled zig zag.
For this exercise, one keeps their shoulders parallel to the garage door. Squat into a low grappler's stance, palm touching the first ball. Sprint in forward right, JUMPING over an old kick shield on the floor, squat and palm the 2nd ball. Immediately change directions to forward left, JUMPING over another kick shield to squat and palm the 3rd ball. Turn around 180 and go back the opposite direction. The key with this workout is to sprint, jump, squat all the while keeping the shoulders parallel to the garage door. This is a 3D motion, forward, up and diagonal!

2. Ring hops - This is a bitch. Grab the gymnastics ring with both hands. Step back a few feet, straighten arms, squat, then jump! Jump high enough to punch down with both hands until your arms are straight. If you bust your head into the ceiling, you jumped high enough.

3. Grappling dummy guard drill - A surprisingly difficult movement. Lay on your back, and guard(wrap legs around) up the grappling dummy. Hug the dummy and grip a 25lb plate tight to it. Lean left until your are on your side. Right foot underhook the dummy, lean right until upright. Lift the dummy with your right hook, switch to the left hook, right foot guard wrap. Lean to the right, left leg comes over to complete the guard. Repeat, backwards to the left. This was one of those funky ass mental/physical combos which confused the hell out of everyone.

4. Bulgarian Bean Bag Spins - This one sucks. Assume a wide-ish stance; feet about shoulder width apart. Grab the bag with both hands on one end and chuck it into the air rotating it 90 degrees...catch it. Whip it back into the air 90degrees, catch it again and keep going. Every 360 degrees, reverse direction. The exercise attack the grips, the arms, shoulders, legs, butt, pancreas and something else I'm sure.

5. Grappling dummy spins - Guard up the grappling dummy and grab two 15-ish lb kettle balls(preferably homemade). Shoot your arms straight in the air. So far so good. Now, start rotating the grappling dummy 180 degrees. Without using your hands, and without resting your arms on the mat. You may use your elbows and forearms to help manipulate the dummy. After 180 degrees, spin in back the other way. This is an obnoxiously difficult task. My goal was to create the sensation of drowning under a gigantic bag of lard...and that's exactly how it felt to me.

6. Guillotine Choke Hangs - Pure 100% testosterone fueled mental exercise. Get rabid and latch onto the hanging bag with a Guillotine Grip (not Gable!), lift your feet off the mat. DO NOT GIVE UP!

Ok....so when I demonstrated this stuff, the looks were of disbelief and of concern I had forgotten to take my meds. Originally, my poor math skills had me state 2 minutes each, with 30 seconds of rest....TWICE. Yet, my cohorts reason (I call it mutiny) stated that would be 24 minutes and certain death. Woops, I don't want anyone to die, so...ok two rounds of 1 minute each exercise, with 10 seconds of rest was negotiated (14 mins total). Pansies.

So how did it feel after roughly 14 minutes (12 min work + rests) of exercise? It felt like I was steam rolled into the hot pavement! Certainly one of the most intense workouts we've ever had. Mostly in the realm of muscle fatigue. Heart rate was good, but it didn't feel all that horrific.

Here's the heart rate data. Oh wait... I totally screwed up and lost my data... MY FAULT! I think I jabbed the start button on my watch on one of the exercises early on. Sucks. Oh well.

We also had a noob join the ranks for a try. Sucker! We'll call him Martian.

Here's Martian, two seconds into the ToD, all hibbly-bibbly like a cat. He wasn't happy afterwards though...especially since he got home late and had to suffer the wrath of the wife...oops sorry! Next time(if he comes back), we'll get him out the door first.

Martian under the bag.

MiniBrock on the bean bag...taking nap :)

The Dude damn near putting his head through the ceiling.

The Dude fighting off the grappling dummy.

Numbnuts dangling off the bag

The Four Grips of Doom.

At the end...the look of, "Fuck, that sucked!"

Another workout partner. He's doing the Tarantula drag. In record time!

Mark!

It is fatal...

2010-08-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

... to enter any war without the will to win it. ~MacArthur

Yesterday...
The Dude came over...after I picked him up...Yeah, that's right. I had get off my lazy ass and go find someone willing to endure sweating in my hot garage, until blood dribbled out of our eyes. It was about 6:30pm and approximately 6000 degrees hotter than the surface of Mars in the un-airconditioned Bat Dojo. This is purely by choice, for one day I'll be telling my kids and students, in my crustiest old man voice, "Hey! You little bastards! I remember when we trained and didn't have fancy stuff like fusion reactor powered ice makers and fix your own torn-ACL machines!"

For today's workout I reorganized the prior workout's exercises as an experiment to maximize efficiency. Which in English means, sucks more. This new sequence has the maximum deflection exercises grouped together. For example pullups and planks since pullups was a large upward BPM jump and the plank was a large BPM drop. I matched up each exercise in descending order, so the largest swings were first.

This time the pattern was thusly:
Each exercise is 30 seconds, the whole thing ran through twice for a total of 10 minutes.

pullups
plank

pushups
bicycle kicks/weight situp thingy

F up the bag with punches
1/2 pushup hold

20lb upright row hold
crab plank

pullup hold
leglift situp

For the prior workout, I stated it sucked. This time it was the deep, dark vacuum of space suckage. I could really feel this one! The shitty part was a series of hitting the bag, 1/2 pushup, then the 20lb upright row. That trio pretty much wrecked any chance of me walking on my hands as a circus clown for a week. I'm sore, the day after!

The cool part is my Garmin software allows me to compare multiple dates! Very neat shit and here's the comparison. The blue area is TODAY. The pink was the prior, non optimized workout.

Both workouts have a 1 minute lead in, of just standing there ready to attack. The workout lasts for 10 minutes, ending at the 11 min mark.

Starting at the left, I noticed I started this workout at 10 BPM higher than prior. Unplanned, just the way it happens. This workout there was no real psychosomatic lump, but if one looks carefully, my BPM started ramping up RAPIDLY about 30 seconds before the 1:00 min mark...and I was just standing there! Totally mental for sure.

This workout seems to have had 10 major peaks vs 7 in the prior workout. Although suprisingly, I was expecting greater troughs during the rest periods. Yet now that I think about it, I had matched the lower deflection exercises together so it makes perfect sense especially at the 6 - 8 min and 8 - 10 minute pairs of exercises. These exhibited low troughs in the rest periods. Which I suppose is good, it means there is rest, but just not that much!

Some fascinating ending points are marked. BOTH workouts ended within 1BPM of each other. How cool is that??? For recovery, we also see several dampening waves at about the 12 min, 15 min, 17 min, and 19 min points. I have no clue what's going on here. I pretty much just stop what I'm doing and start walking in circles around the mat, then eventually plop down on to my ass for a few minutes. I'm not sure if this is a physiological harmonic from the prior pattern or some sort of weird coincidence.

Here's some pictorial proof that we even did anything:

Bicycle Kick with Weight

Bruce Lee

Who has the better right hook, The Dude....

or me???

More bicycle kicking with weight thing of doom.

1/2 Pushup holds pretty much suck. I'm not smiling, I'm about to pop a vein in my head...

Later,
Mark

The only ones who die...

2010-08-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

...are the ones who jump off the rollercoaster.

So I had a back injury and the doc gave me some badass 'roids. Good stuff for sure. Yet the pain meds and anti-spasmotic damn near put me into anaphalactic shock! I told him I didn't need pain meds, but he insisted. I took one of each of the deadly three as prescribed and within two hours I thought I was a goner for sure. I stood at the door of my house at 230 am with my phone in hand. I predialed 911 with my finger over the call button. I hoped they would see me laying there in my driveway. Whatever the meds did, I nearly passed out and croaked. I stayed up late mostly to make sure my cardiac system was still pumping juice to my guts. I lived. I'm dumping those meds, I don't need them. My back feels much better now.

I decided to jump slowly back into some grappling and tried Tuesday's Sambo class. It's a hell of a lot of fun and a great standup game... Lesson learned (again), if one get's paired with a noob, put on every bit of Medieval Armour one can buy. For light sparring; I grab him, he grabs me and immediately knees me straight in the nose. Not necessarily for any apparent reason either. That sucked...so as we progressed in our light grip fighting match, I throw him with today's Russian tie up throw. A quasi sitting your ass, o-ouchi gari thing. He went over and then DOWN onto my now newly sprained ankle. Thanks noob.

So yesterday's workout did not involve running toward or from anything on fire or rabid. This time we focused on arms and core exercises. I decided we should attempt some sort of rapid movements, interlaced with static positions and see if one of us bleeds internally.

Here's what we did:
10 minutes total, each exercise was given 30 seconds.
Motion exercises are at 100% speed.
Static exercises are at 0% speed ;)

Pullups
Plank

Pushups
Pullup static hangs (eyes above bar)

Bicycle kick situp thing holding a 25lb plate OFF the mat behind your head like a hard pillow.
Crab plank (like a bridge but body is flat like a table and arms are next to you, not over your head)

Punch the shit out of the heavy bag
Hold a pushup at 1/2 mast

Leglift situp (Straight leg lift, then pump your ass up off the mat to touch the ceiling with your toes)
20 LB each hand static upright row hold

THEN IMMEDIATELY REPEAT THE ABOVE MESS FOR A TOTAL OF 10 MINUTES

So yeah, it sucks.
I wore my Garmin of course and saw some fascinating trends with this workout.

Pullups, pushups, pullup holds, hitting the bag, upright row holds always increased heartrate.
Plank, bicycle situps, crap plank, 1/2 pushup, leglift situp always decreased heartate.

So now we can apply some statistics:
The biggest increase was from rest to the end of the pushups: 62 bpm
The biggest increase not from the beginning was from hitting the bag(1st round) at: 38 bpm
The smallest increase was the 2nd round of pullups at: 5.9 bpm

The biggest decrease was the plank on the 1st round at: 37.9 bpm
The smallest decrease was the 1st round of leglift situps at: 3.6 bpm

Here's the graph of the data. The workout starts at the 1 minute mark, ending at the 11 minute mark. You can just barely see the tiny, itty-bitty psychsomatic lump trying to appear at the 0:35 second mark.

Interestingly, my final recovery time was long and slow. Much like a long, low intensity cardio workout. I was also able to gain the benefit of quick, high intensity recoveries during most of the static positions. I guess that is a win-win in terms of multimodal, functional exercise. This workout is much like being attacked by mutant Cromagnons. There you are, sleeping...then BAM a war club rushes in and wrecks your cave-wife's new clay pot. You're now pissed and grab your stone axe and beat some brains in. Sometimes you are bashing away, and sometimes you are locked in a static hold while wrestling a weapon away. The abrupt end comes when you kill off the last mutant and clean up the mess. The previous workout was the exact opposite; a long, snowy hike to the enemy homeland for a fight with a rival clan over Net-Neutrality...

My goal with this is to rearrange the exercises to see if I can maximize the effect. What happens if I mix the dynamic with the static exercises so that there is absolute maximum BPM deltas? I believe this would increase the quality of the work out considerably!

Later!
Mark
p.s. sorry no pics. This workout was more of a study to see if anyone would spontaneously implode like a blackhole into a highly compressed singularity of dark matter. Then rapidly detonate, splattering my expensive camera with chunky human salsa.

Accept that some days you are the pigeon...

2010-08-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

...and some days you are the statue. ~Dilbert

Today was interesting. The Dude and I did a 1 mile warmup walk around the neighborhood. Upon returning to The Bat Dojo I noticed something moving on my front lawn. I took a quick look and there was this cool little road runner, who quickly hopped up onto my mailbox and pretty much just sat there looking around. I took a few snaps, one of which one is below after he hopped back down. I've always liked birds, I used to raise them as a kid and even had an unofficial pet crow for a summer. He used to visit our house and hang out. He would hop around our pool area begging for snacks and tease our pet Dachshund..much to my adolescent amusement :)

Today's workout is a small step up in the long, smooth progression of increasing difficulty. The workout was 10 minutes of exercise with nine 15 second rest intervals.

Here's what we done did:

Each item performed at 100% for 1 minute.

Then 15 seconds of rest.

1 - kick the bag
2 - punch the bag
3 - elbows and knees to the bag
4 - guard jumps - holding blue mini ball not your own hands or the bag--> a bitch
5 - Punch, drop, kick, stands
6 - 3 ball ladders
7 - 4 square:
    - low crawl (under bag/rings),
    - bear crawl
    - lateral pushup walk
    - crab walk
8 - Lateral ladders(side steps) with 10 lb mini ball. Each ladder end, do 3 around the head rotations each direction.
9 - Mini Ball slams
10 - Turkish get ups with mini ball, arm straight up.

11 - Hurl (just kidding)

Here's the heartrate chart:

As you can see, there is a psychosomatic minijump the seconds before the hard cardio portion. Just like prior workout! There are 9 spikes of heartrate. Yet wasn't there 10 exercises? Yes, the 1st one builds the heartrate up, and it climbed during the 1st rest interval and merged into the 2nd exercise spike. It's an interesting element to note. Heartrates(we'll mine anyways) seem to carry inertia during acceleration.

The Dude Bag Bashing

The Dude Bag Bashing again

The Dude Ball Grabbing ;)

My Bag Bashing

My Ball Grabbing

My Ball Grabbing..again

GEEK ALERT -- STOP NOW IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ ABOUT NERD STUFF!!

Last post had a PSA recommending one to strip EXIF data from JPG's. EXIF data is bits of data about your image. Cameras and camera phones stuff the EXIF data chock full of crap in which hackers and stalkers love to harvest. In particular, GPS data from phones is a stalkers dream. As you wander around your house taking pics of your lovely petunias, posting them to Facebook or tweeting to the universe, some creep is dragging out the location data.

How does one rip out the EXIF crap? There are plenty of ways. Keep in mind, this change is permanent!

1. If you have Photoshop (Mac or Win), open your image and re-save it using the option "Save for Web". This will strip it all out.

2. If you are on Linux/Ubuntu etc... Install Gimp(also for Windows!) and install this plugin: http://registry.gimp.org/node/33

It will allow one to "Save for Web", effectively peeling out the EXIF data.

3. If you do not have Photoshop or Gimp try googling for EXIF editors. For Linux they are limited to the command line i.e. jhead, exiftool etc... Not hard to use, just not friendly for noobs. One benefit of commandline tools is, with one command one can peel out all the EXIF data for 10 bazillian images!

On Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install jhead

$ cd /into/the/directory/of/your/files

$ jhead -purejpg filename.jpg

This will rip out that pesky EXIF data for the file "filename.jpg". If you want to rip it out from all the files in that directory:

$ jhead -purejpg *.jpg

4. PhotoMe might be useful for people as well. It's free. It's only for Windows, but Mac/Linux people can run Wine (windows emulator) and it works just fine.

Later!

Mark

Lies, damned lies and statistics...

2010-08-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

I'm good with numbers but bad at math. Does that make sense? One of my all time favorite classes in university was statistics. After I learned the algorithms, I could rip out a Chi-Square in record time. Now I can barely do 6 + 5 - squid = 42. More about statistics in a minute. As of today, this is my first full day on steroids. Yup, I'm now a roid raging freak, unfit to enter the cage for the UFC. My orthopedic surgeon is stuffing me full of Methylprednisolone for the next 6 days. Woohoo! According to the internetwebtubes, birth control pills can doubles it's effectiveness. I'm not going to dig through the purse of some chick at the club for some. Ladies, if you want to test this theory, ask your doc and get you some roids! I'm not responsible if you grow a beard and a set of girl testicles though...

So here's the theory of the day. Have my workouts made me better? Or did a quick stint of roids help?

Here's what I did:

Walked my usual route for a mile, then hit the lap button the moment I returned home. I then stood around, stretched my arms and hung from my chinup bar until my heart rate made it down to 100. Then I hit lap again. This next lap I layed down and started heavy breathing and psyched myself up for my test. I rolled over, set my stopwatch, hit lap and commenced. 100 knuckle pushups. All pushups were atleast until my upper arms were parallel to the floor, nose nearly smacking my timer with a 100% full locked arm extension. The same pushup I've been doing since my dad smacked me at age 10 for doing them wrong.

Here's my Garmin showing the stats. The top graph is my pace, the bottom is my heartrate. You can clearly see when I stopped walking due to the pace reduction. What interests me is the recovery rates. After walking, it took me nearly 7 minutes to recover from a low intensity, relatively long aerobic activity.

Clearly one can see my pushups starting at the blue marker and ending at the red. The recovery rate was nearly 3 minutes! Short anaerobic, bursty, high intensity exercises seem to recover (for me) at twice the rate of aerobic activity. I would not doubt the human body has some efficiencies built in for survival. In a fight, or hunting a cave bear, one needs to blast a huge amount of energy, then recover quickly. As we know from countless UFC fights, schoolyard brawls, hunting with spears and police video cams, the vast majority of engagements are high intensity and short duration. Recovering quickly from each sub-engagement, such as a clinch, handcuffing a scumbag or pulling your spear from the side of a very pissed off wooly mammoth for a second stab is HIGHLY important to your survival!

A few tiny interesting bits:
- The tiny peak just before I start my pushups is a psychosomatic response to activity. Fight or flight response. It's the same exact peak one gets just before the referee says go!
- At the very end of the graph it spikes to about 120 bpm. That's me getting up off the mat, stretching and cooldown.

On the wall of The Bat Dojo is a big ass piece of 20x30 inch paper. On it I scribble stuff... Today I scribbled this:

Nearly half my original record :)

Mark
p.s. Public service announcement. I'm a computer geek hacker guy. I don't break into stuff, I secure thing so people don't do it to others. If you have a blog and you use your cellphone to post images...make sure you view the EXIF data of the jpgs(BEFORE YOU POST). Modern GPS enabled cell phones will add EXIF data to your pics with your coordinate location! There are plenty of EXIF readers out there which will remove this crap. Or you could change it to somewhere in the middle of the Antarctic :)
p.s.s. Also it may be a good idea to remove phone OS, and type from the EXIF if you're extra paranoid.

To...

2010-08-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

...be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Travel, fun, work, injuries, death, more work....not in that order but life get in the way occasionally. It's ok, I've come through. It reminds me of how the Roman's were ransacked throughout it's existence. In one particularly effective siege of Rome, the population just flat out refused to give in. The concept is this, "You steal the victory from the victor by not admitting defeat." It's like talking shit after tapping or better yet, he lets go because you didn't tap and your arm is hanging there by a chunk of your gi. It pisses off your opponent and you may get beaten again and again, but by not admitting defeat....somehow you win. I do not advocate this behavior in BJJ...yet for some reason, in life, it's what I live by. A big gigantic F U to the world when the sky falls around me. Life will win eventually, but I'm not going to admit it.

Today Mini-Brock txt'd me and asked if it was time. He said he wasn't ready...why? Because he was busy dropping a deuce and didn't know if he would be on time. Dude!


I just bought a new spiffy badass watch. A Garmin Forerunner 305. It tracks heartrate vs GPS! Now CSI can tell the exact moment and location of my heart attack while running from mountain people in the Ozarks.

I fired up my SpaceMan Spiff watch and the three of us walked exactly 1 mile. As you can see from the Garmin diagram below we walked a fast Speed Zone 2, even tapping into Speed Zone 3, woo hoo. Interestingly, my heart rate didn't do shit during the walk. Yet, as you can see, when I stopped walking it spiked to 120! That was because I had to demo the exercises of the day. All 8 of them!

Here's what we did:
One minute of each, no breaks.
1. Lateral pushup walks (about 6 feet), then a pushup at each ends of the walk.
2. Rear somersault rolls to the back of our heads, then roll forward to your feet and jump straight up.
3. Rear crab, arms straight. Legs bent, body flat. Lift one knee to chest then the other. -- fast 4. Lateral jumps over shit 5. Alternating sandbag shoulder presses (from one to the other) -- hop to get the whole body involved 6. Rings, climb, hand over hand, no legs. 7. Back shoulder walk with atlas ball on gut 8. Turkish get ups with sand bag on shoulder

Each exercise is really easy...on their own. Once you hit about the 22 second mark, shit starts to break down and you feel like you have to poop. Not nice poop, but explosive death poop.
From the diagram you can clearly see the 8 minute run I had. Starting at 83.6 bpm and slamming up to 165.2 bpm at the end. It reduces rapidly and nearly back to normal at the 10 minute mark. The goal is to reduce the recovery time. By what I've read, recovery rates are a true measure of performance and now I have a way of testing this. Also, according to theory, 185 is my maximum heart rate for my age. I remember charting my heartrate last year and routinely hitting 188. So maybe theory is correct!

Here's some images(click for bigger versions):

The Chart



The Face

The Weight

The Arm

The Jump


The...uh WTF??

The Pain

The Birth of an Alien Atlas Ball


Later,
Mark

Ahhhhh home...

2010-08-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm home for a moment. I'll be heading out very shortly.

I spent the weekend attending Defcon 18 in Las Vegas. It was pretty much amazing!

The mobile Bat Dojo was in effect. We walked and walked and walked. At the moment I'm managing a old back injury flare up and hardcore stuff will have to wait. This weekend we walked for miles from the Sahara, past the Riviera and onto the expensive end of the Strip. Each night we walked probably 2 miles at Defcon and 5 miles to and from food. Necks were exercised while rubber necking the mountains of scantily clad girls strutting around. There must have been fifty bachelorette parties running around. Each one contained between 5 and 30 girls in pretty much standard stripper wear... It was nuts!

I'll report in some more soon!

Mark

Fear...

2010-07-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

...makes the wolf bigger than he is. ~German Proverb

Today Mini-Brock and The Dude braved the North Texas heat and visited The Bat Dojo outside (my back yard...the BatYard???)

I had IM'd Mini-Brock earlier today and he said something about, "Never doing cardio blah blah blah...".
My response and I quote, "oh i have big plans...painful plans...explosive lung plans"
His exact response,"...wut....it's always like a painful surprise"
A final terse reply of, "Yes :)" (that should have been an evil, nasty devil grin with teeth gnashing and slobber spewing, but I'm not quite sure how to spell that in emoticon... I may need a new keyboard, keyed in a pseudo Alien dialect in which I have to lay face down on the device and dry hump it until my emoticon is formed.)

Back to the task at hand. Today's festivities has no name. It just sucks. Lots of running, lots carrying stuff while running and lots of cursing. The basic course is a star shape with some sort of flattened umlaut over it's head. The looks on the faces of my two comrades was of total disbelief and confusion of the task today. Hysterical!

Here's what we did:

Starting in the center. Marked by a chewed up frisbee thingy.
1. Run your ass to the tire. 30 ft.
2. Drag the tire and your posterior to the sledgehammer. (100 ft ish)
3. Hit the stupid tire 20 times (10 left, 10 right).
4. Drag the tire back (don't forget to bring your ass).
5. Run back to the frisbee thingy.
6. Run 60ft to the blue 10lb mini ball.
7. Smash it in to the ground 20 times.
8. Carrying it, run back the frisbee and drop it off.
9. Run to the ghetto Bulgarian Bag. (30ft)
10. Swing it 360 degrees vertically, with arms somewhat straight. 10 times left, 10 times right.
11. Run back, carrying that stupid thing and drop it onto the frisbee thingy.
12. Run to the kettle ball. (20ft)
13. Do 10 left and 10 right kettleball swings.
14. Carry it back and drop it off.
15. Run to the 24lb plate. (30ft)
16. Do 1980's styled aerobic, jumping jacks with it...20.
17. Run back, yes bring the plate too...
18. Run off and pick up the 40lb big fat Atlas ball. I love that thing. Bring it back to the frisbee. (40ft)
19. Now undo everything you just did, without the auxiliary exercises.
20. Run the miniball back, sprint back to center.
21. Run the ghetto bag back.
22. Run the kettle ball back.
23. Run the plate back.
24. Run the Atlas ball back.
25. Finish by running back over the frisbee thingy!

Good grief, this was tough! Average times were right at 7 minutes. No one hurled, but we all felt like it. The heat mixed with sprinting, then lifting and swinging was a perfect combination for some oral spewage. I'm not sure if anyone noticed that my Offspring t-shirt had an appropriate slogan on it which read,"shit is f****d up tour". Perfect. :)

This shot is titled, "The Faces of Uncertainty and Fear"

Tire Dragging

Tire Smashing

Bag Flinging

The End

Mark!
p.s. I don't know if you guys know this, but you can click on the images for bigger versions!

Static

2010-07-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

I can barely walk. Yesterday's wrestling leg work was killer and I figured today's workout should be the exact opposite. Going for a wrestler's shot is a dynamic, explosive leg movement. Today we'll be doing static, non-moving exercises.

There's a lot to be said about sitting around doing nothing. I'm all for it! In this case, the sitting around is under intense load. Mostly your body weight. For you heavy weights, these exercises suck! For us tiny people, it's not nearly as bad, but it's easy to add some weight.

So here's what we did today:
30 seconds - pull up bar hang straight
10 seconds of rest

30 seconds - pull up bar hang full pull up
10 seconds of rest
30 seconds - ring hangs straight (your feet are kicked out so it looks like an upside down pushup)
10 seconds of rest
30 seconds - ring hangs, bent arms (REALLY TOUGH)
10 seconds of rest
30 seconds - push up hold straight arms
10 seconds of rest
30 seconds - push up bent arms
10 seconds of rest
60 seconds - Guard hang
Done!

This workout wasn't super tough. The ring hangs with the bent arms were pretty rough on the grips. There was plenty of grunting and groaning to be performed by Mini-Brock and I.

Afterwards we worked on some halfguard and full guard sneakiness. :)

Here's some images!

Mini-Brock

Mini-me

Mini-Me

Mark!

Deja Vu

2010-07-16T19:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I didn't do squat. After a long day of semi-productive work, I came back to the hotel, and right into bed...I knew I had to wake up super early as it's a 2 hour drive to the airport...in D.C. traffic. Which could mean 6 hours...

So I make it to the airport in record time! The airline even offered me standby on an earlier flight, which I gladly accepted as a reward for not staying up late and getting my ass out of bed early. Upon boarding my flight a weird sensation of deja vu ensued.
Let's run through the numbers:

Same aircraft type as Monday.
Same exact aisle seat as Monday.
Same exact chair compadre as Monday.

I slightly lied, it wasn't the same woman as last time, but rather another magically gigantic derriere. This time bigger. MUCH BIGGER. I approached my chair. I stuffed my bag into the overhead and looked at the dire seating arrangement. Below me sat a mid forties, African American female of mammoth proportions. In our seating section were two seats, hers was the window, mine was the aisle. I couldn't actually see the center armrest. I was certain her ass crack had swallowed it. I wasn't at all surprised. Had it been one of those Twiggy thin models, I would have been totally amazed.

I contemplated how I was going to tell her the 1/8th of my seat left was mine and I would have to somehow squeeze in. I casually ask her for my seat belt. No kidding, not even exaggerating the next bit. She reaches down with her right arm and lifts up her ginormous right ass cheek and asks for me to fish that thing out. As my breakfast came up to my throat I simultaneously belched out a feeble, "Ok." I wasn't sure which hand I should use to reach in. BJJ and most martial arts tell you to never extend an arm and I was about to do just that. I also had to pick a sacrificial hand. My left had served me well batting off flies, holding shields, speed reloading my pistols and general slapping people around. My right hand was my power hand. I write with that thing, poke people in the eyes and I'm damn good with chopsticks with it. So I choose the left hand, knowing if I lose it, my new nick name would be lefty. I reach quickly into the bear trap, it was dark, humid and oddly warm in there. I rummaged around quickly. Keep in mind my posture was also poor as I was bent over; my face about 2.5 inches from her right boob.

I find my seat belt and quickly yank that thing from it's fate. I couldn't imagine being that poor seat belt end, trapped under that butt cheek. eww.

I squeeze into my 1/8th of a seat. Snap my seatbelt in. She relaxes a bit and lets the mass expand. It's crushing me from the left. I now find my self in side mount, while sitting on an airplane! This is what fighting Rickson must be like. Simultaneously surrounded on all sides, the more you squirm the worse it gets.

We take off and I endure.

2.5 hours later it's time to land and I can no longer feel anything below my seat belt, or my left side. I think I may have had a partial stroke. The only remaining fully operational bit of me working was my right earlobe and most of my shooting hand.

We land. As soon as the seatbelt light goes out, I reach with my only good hand and pop that thing loose. 40000 lbs of side ways pressure on my left, crushing me into my seatbelt and right hand armrest. Once the seatbelt buckle pops, I launch! A nice loud pop and her flubber blasted me into the aisle. Stumbling because I can't feel my legs, I manage to catch myself by clawing the nearest old lady's face and dragging myself up. Wobbly I stand. I'm alive! Hell yeah! I made it! The blood rushed back to the left side of my face and brain and my vision was restored! Woohoo! Time to get the heck out of here.

I get home, get a hair cut and get ready for wrestling practice. One doesn't miss out when a two time Olympic wrestler is offering volumes of knowledge.

So here's today's workout:

We spend two hours on perfecting double and single leg take downs. Very very very very very cool stuff. He mixes in MMA and BJJ concepts so that we can connect the dots to our other disciplines.
Tire change.

Tire change? Yes I had a left rear tire explode on the way home. Tired, nasty, thirst and sweaty I had to change out a tire. Of course, I had to push the pace. I changed that thing FAST :)

Mark!

Food

2010-07-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

Halfway through my work trip to Maryland and itching to get back the bat dojo and do something productive. After some semi-productive work today I went back to hotel and ate a simple meal of scallops, clams and potatoes. Leaving the hotel restaurant I decided for a long powerwalk around the nearby marina. Passing the pool, I noticed my portly nemesis from yesterday splashing about having fun. For a second I considered grabbing my shorts to offer him a rematch. But he was enjoying himself and I was happy to see the little fat dude exercising. Unfortunalty, vacation is probably the only time he ever exercises.

As part of my walk I needed to buy a few things. One of which was a razor. I go to the little quickie mart and find the razor aisle. Actually more of small rack of random junk. I only needed one razor, not a twenty pack. The woman's razors one could buy in pairs for about a $1. Yet, I'm not about to buy a set of pink razors! So I spend the $12 for a twenty pack of tough guy razors, with all sorts of marketing about how manly I'll be and how many woman will be following me back to my hotel...

So I wanted to babble just a bit about food. I think I eat pretty well. I've always had good guidance from my parents. Both are some form of semi-hippy, quasi-new age types. Growing up, fast food and soda was not common. That behavior followed me as I left home.

Here's my basic rules:
No soda
No candy, cookies, cakes
No lard, heavy fats, creams
No "candy" breakfast cereals (lucky charms, coco puffs etc...)
Limited beef, pork, lamb
Very lean cuts of chicken, turkey
Eat fish
Eat a ton of veggies
Drink loads of water
Eat fish oil

Here's my other concept:
Protein and carbohydrates must be balanced to control insulin response. Wander through the snack aisle of any typical food shop and the "food" will be 99% carbohydrates and 1% other useless crap. Even protein bars and drinks have a ratio over 3 to 1 carbs to protein. For port-workout recovery a 4:1 ratio is often recommended. What I want is my non recovery meals/snacks to be fairly balanced. I would really like to hold off adult onset diabetes. You know, the kind grandma gets for having a shitty, carb heavy diet. Exactly the type of diabetes which eventually led to my grandmothers death many years ago.

At the quickie mart I found a bag of seedless grapes and lean beef jerky. These two should balance a bit with each other to keep my insulin from blasting in one direction or the other.

So I'm not perfect by any means. On my work flights in our jets, they pack in cookies, cakes and other sweets. Do I eat a cookie? Heck yeah! Do I eat five? Maybe in a month. I'm not worried about the little cheater snacks once in a while.

There is an interesting Crossfit video of a famous Crossfit Games winner and his diet. In the video he didn't show what he ate to stay in shape, rather he filmed his cheat day! Him and a few friends piled a kitchen table with gallons of ice cream and other junk. My arteries were cringing at the sight of it all. The video ended with this shredded out, champion athlete showing off the empty ice cream containers. There is a great debate as the whether cheat meals are psychological or physiological beneficial. What do you think?

I can't wait to get home and start eating correctly again. Hotel meals and living off of quickie mart food is wrecking my guts.

Mark

Don't Ever %#@#$% Quit!

2010-07-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

Today was a fairly boring day of meetings. You know, the ad-hoc ones in a hallway infront of the woman's bathroom. Just because one travels 50,000 miles sitting next to Jabba the Hut's wife, doesn't necessarily reflect in the schedules of others. It's like herding kittens in my job.

Upon my escape, I promptly ate at one of the bazillian seafood restaurants. Each one seems to have their specialty. Today's restaurant had crabs for $1 and homemade crab bisque. I love soups. From a can, a pot, a slow cooker or even superheated via Vitamix. I ate their soup and it was good. I also ordered some coconut shrimp. My eyes were bigger than my stomach and I was barely able to compact it all down. I felt like hurling on my drive to the hotel.

Once at my accomodations I grabbed my Vulkan shorts and my Pan Ams 2009 t-shirt and went for a nice long walk. Partly because I needed to buy a toothbrush. The one the front desk gave me was apparently a refurbished unit from Ebay. As I brushed, the bristles would pop out and it felt like I had a semi-digested birds nest in my mouth.

The walk was part of my warmup and to help my coconut shrimp find their way past my pyloric sphincter and into my intestines. I still felt like hurling.

I survived my walk and grabbed my towel from my room and dropped off my shiny, new unused toothbrush. I wandered down to the outdoor pool.

I absolutely love water. I swear I was a sea anemonie in a former life or perhaps a sea cucumber. There exists some weird aquatic gene in my family as everyone in my family are all natural swimmers. My great great grandfather was a stevodore on the docks in New York and in Italy. Old family stories tell of him swimming so far out into the ocean, the lifeguards would send boats out to retreive him. Upon reaching my aquatic ancestor, he would ask politely if THEY needed help!

As you can imagine, today's workout involved water. The pool was a nice big affair about 100 feet long and 30 feet wide. I jumped in the lukewarm water and started to immediately go into full survival water treading mode. It's also in my genes to not want to drown. Of course after 20 seconds of flailing around randomly, I simply put my feet down. Stupid deep end was only 5ft...

A quick story...I am crew on various military aircraft. I fly in the back, I'm not a pilot. They always refuse to give me a chance at the flight controls, or play with sharp objects in flight. It's cool shit, I get to play military for a day..all the time. One particular military aircraft required me to endure full up water survival school. Which consisted of parachute landings in water, parachute dragging in water, dunker tanks, spin chairs, and escape hatches all in or under water; often blindfolded. Swimming underwater, blindfolded through various obstacles is tough stuff! All of this in full flightsuit, combat boots, helmet, an out of order life preserver unit, gloves and a survival vest. It was actually quite fun. Except for one part: water treading. This, my friends, is where I nearly drowned along with a whole class full of civilians and young, tough military recruits. At first I though things were going ok, I'm 3/4's fish by genetic makeup, I should be able to handle this. We had to swim our asses across an Olympic sized pool and then begin water treading. Tired from the long swim, we began flopping madly around. Keep in mind, I exercise. A lot! Infact I even borrowed the pool card from my strength and conditioning coach. I would go swim in my flight suit for practice while onlookers thought I was a retard. But at this pool, desperation ensued as I quickly realized that I was no longer a shark in the water but rather a brick. I hate dying, it pisses me off. After several failed attempts at breathing, while splashing wildy, I was just barely able to inflate my life preserver and survive. This was probably the closest to actually dying I've been. Unfortunately, the guys I was with were technically dead as they were pulled from the pool unable to continue the exercise. They didn't quit, they were pulled. Which, is quite honorable.

Back at the hotel pool I started doing laps. One lap of breast stroke, one lap of free style, and one lap of back stroke(just kicking). I think I did about a dozen laps at a moderate pace. I wasn't too winded but my coconut shrimp were now firmly lodged into the the first major curve in my intestinal tract. The feeling of having to projectile spew my dinner had mostly subsided.

In the pool, along with me were three old ladies babbling about apple fritters and knitting. Also in the pool was this fat kid. About 10 years old, I don't want to sound mean; he was morbidly obese. Too many video games and heavy carb McDonalds. Bascially, your average American kid. The little twerp kept eyeing me as if I was a threat to his studliness. I would launch forward with my poor freestyle technique and he would try to do the same. He was probably bored and had no one to play with. Males have an instinctual threat anlaysis and dominance behavior. It started when we were sperm, knocking the other fellas out of the way, racing toward the goal. The first one wins, the others shall die.

Like a pair of teenagers in our rides at a stop light, we revved our engines. Two sports cars geared up for a lighting fast take off to see who's best. In actuality it was more of a Doughnut Van vs a Honda Civic. Both poorly setup for what was about to happen. My little rotund challenger eyeballed the end of the pool as I readied myself for what was going to be his first major asskicking at a real sport. I launched forward, he launched forward. The little chump actually had the lead for a microsecond. I slammed past him grinning, blowing out pool water, which was probably 6% urine as there were tons of kiddies in the pool before my warmup walk. I made it to the end of the pool (in record time I'm sure) and looked back to survey the devastation I had left behind. Where the hell was the fat kid? I looked around, he was gone! Thinking he had gassed and drowned, I quickly stuck my head under water, subjecting my eyes to the pee soaked, over chlorinated water. I didn't see his fat rolls stuck in an intake vent, he must be above the water. I popped my head up and saw that he had quit. He realized he was outclassed and jumped out of the pool and ran over to his mom while she smoked a cigarette.

One thing I cannot stand is a quitter, even in the face of certain defeat. This disgusted me as the feeling of hurling quickly came back. I grabbed my towel and dried myself off. Atleast the lifeguard chickie was cute.

Mark

2010-07-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

I'm punching this out in a Maryland hotel on my spiffy iPad. I've been traveling all day for work. I had tried to get upgraded to biz class, but so did 876 other people. 875 of whom had higher airline status than I. One poor chump is below me, I hate to be that guy! The nearly 3 hours in flight crushed up next to a caloric over achieving lady was awesome. She had to lift the armrest up so that she could fit in her seat. A nice, soft chunk of her kidney flesh flopped over into my lap, which made for a handy iPad stand, while keeping my thigh sweaty and warm.
I survived, to drive 2 hours to the facility I'll be visiting. It's one of the centers for Naval Aviation. Being a closet aviation geek, I was grinning from ear to ear as F-18's and choppers were shredding the air. For dinner, I sat outside at a dockside restaurant. While I ate some fresh seafood, two choppers flew right overhead and practiced an in-air refueling! How awesome is that?!?! Mmmmm the soft mist of diesel on my crab cakes was scrumptious!
At the hotel, I dropped my gear on the floor and laid down on the bed to rest for a few moments. I blinked, looked at the clock and 5 hours had disappeared from my life! Laying there Apocalyse Now style, thinking to myself, "Nice one bonehead, it's 10pm, you're wide awake and you have nothing to throw or break!"

RESTDAY!
Restdays are VERY important. Much like rest cycles in interval training. One needs these things to recover, rebuild or grow back that ACL one tore while running from the cops. I take calculated rest days ALL the time. My longest was just recently at nearly 2 months. I still did basic stuff, such as long walks through airports with heavy luggage. I'm a firm believer rest days make you stronger physically and mentally. Rest days are also my mental training days. I dig through the net and read everything. I search for answers to my many BJJ sticking points and ponder them. Here's also my chance to spend hours visualizing in my mind in full HD 1080p! I relieve past fights, try new things, develop new attacks and new counters. I asked a psychologist once, "What is the best way to visualize for sports?" He said studies suggest spinning around in 3D looking at yourself from the spectator's viewpoint to be highly beneficial.
Rest days are my injury recovery days. If I feel like something may get wrecked while working out, I'll abstain. There is a catch though, rest days are not for rehabilitation. I believe you've got to get off your ass and do something with the damaged appendage, whether that be physical therapy or slapping a Tito Ortiz blow up doll.
In 2000, I was racing a motorcycle in central Australia. Of course, going obnoxious speeds and silly me decided that the right hand turn ahead was attemptable at warp factor 5. I was right! I attempted it with glory and failure! I sheared the left hand side of my bike off, whilst doing a right hand turn...yeah figure that one out. Along with the bike remodel, my left shoulder helped soften the blow.
At the hospital, I was hoping for something simple like a dislocated shoulder. Pop that bad boy back in, I'll be as good as new! The doc came in, saw that I was now able to scratch my eyelid with my collarbone said, "Well mate, looks like you have a separated AC joint. Go home and keep it mobile, don't want it freezing up on you." Holy crap man! The oxygen levels in my head dumped and I nearly passed out. They put me on some O2 and sent me home. I immediately loaded up a backpack with books to help compress the joint back into place. Once I was able, I started doing pushups, and pull ups. The joint is 100% now. It still makes funny noises, but that's probably bits of my liver and tail lights embedded from the crash.

So I've rambled a bit, incoherently I'm sure. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get a workout in. They have a nice pool with some great genetic material bound together by bikini's :)

Mark!

Farming Gone Bad!

2010-07-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

Today I dug through the internet looking up formulas for force, impact energy, kinetic vs potential energy all that stuff we learned in high school/college science classes...but forgot. My goal was to calculate how hard my 25 lbs basketballs hit when I slammed them onto the cement. Some online calculator did say I used 56 calories to pick that bastard up. So I guess that's kinda cool. Annoyingly, my poor math skills demonstrated a wildly impressive variance in solutions. One time I came up with over 5200 Newtons or about 12000 lbs of force. Uh, nope, the next time I did the equation I came up with a more reasonable 595 lbs of force. Yet, who cares how much energy is expended and impacted? All I know is I get really tired doing it and enjoy the hell out of breaking shit. Here's a nice little shot of some DIY carnage.

Multiple layers of Gorilla Tape didn't help. It somewhat reminded me of the Death Star upon explosion...while sandblasting my most sacred of nether regions.

Today's carnival was twice the pain and suffering as last. Four minutes is all we had to do. This time I had no clue as the the length of time, it was purely task oriented. Get shit done as fast as possible, I don't care how much you cheat, lie, steal or bribe the neighbor kid to do it. Just get it done.

The task was simple. Fill my wheelbarrow with a bunch of random heavy crap, run it to the other end of my half acre, unload one piece, and do an exercise with it. Then, run the wheelbarrow back, unload another piece, do something freakin' cool with it and run the wheelbarrow back... The only stipulation: the heavy as hell, wobbly as a drunk, 35lb cement atlas ball had to be the first in and the last out.

Here's the junk to carry:
25 lb plate
10 lbs mini ball
14.5 lb kettle ball
25 lb Cement Atlas ball

Here's the field of battle. My dog Zulu making sure the area is secure, while The Dude paces out the length. I think he said about 25 yards. But his legs are nine feet long, so it's probably 3000 ft.

The Dude with the wheelbarrow filled and running.

Unload the miniball and slam that thing 10 times.

Unloading the heavy bastard.

Me doing my best monkey impression while swinging the kettelball wildy.

Carnage. Keep going!

Sinking the miniball. The soft dirt let us dig holes about 4 inches deep! Yes, we're proud! :)

Here's what we did:
1. Load the wheelbarrow with all tortures.
2. Run the wheelbarrow to the other end (25-ish yards)
3. Unload a single random torture
     a. Miniball - slam it 10 times
     b. Kettleball - swing it 10 times each arm
     c. Plate - 360 rotates around the head 10 times each direction.
4. Repeat #2 then #3 until the wheelbarrow is empty.
5. Run the wheelbarrow back and reload the Atlas ball.
6. Run the wheelbarrow back to a torture, do the exercise then load it.
7. Run back and grab another torture and so on until the wheelbarrow is full again.
8. Unload the whole mess. done!

Between the two of us, we had an average of 7 minutes. Back and forth running, then loading/unloading and exercises. It was exhausting! I must stress perfect loading form is IMPORTANT. You will hurt your back! Plus the stupid wheelbarrow kept falling over dumping the gear! What a kickass accidental improvement to the whole mess! You had to finish your set then reload all your junk! It sucked! It was wicked!

One last thing...here's a picture I took just as we were done warming up. Perhaps as a reminder of our purpose today? Maybe it's symbolism demonstrating that the struggle for life and death is a constant? Or the fight to survive is all around us, at all times? I don't know, but it was an interesting matchup.

This smaller fighter won by North South choke! Good job buddy!

-Mark!

P.s. I know, I was supposed to show some Bulgarian Bag stuff but it was a bit muddy out and didn't really want them too sloppy as I prefer to use them on my (clean!) mats. Next time!

Sore Core and DIY Junk

2010-07-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, from yesterday's workout, my core is sore! Pain expanding from my chest hair and penetrating into what feels like my duodenum. I'm either about to give birth to a nematode-gazelle hybrid or I'm just sore.

I really believe in the static and hold position type exercises i.e the plank and incline one armed holdups on the rings. Great stuff!

Onto today's crap. There are two reasons why I like having my own Bat Dojo:

Making up shit to do.
Making shit to do.

Today is #2, as I'm resting from #1.

A few days ago I took one of our shattered 10 lb rubber medicine balls and filled it with concrete. I searched through the internets for Atlas ball howtos etc.. There were a few, but nothing interesting.
Taking advantage of the gaping crack in the ball, I decided to stuff some commercial grade, crack resistant concrete in it's gullet.
During creation of this Atlas ball I stuffed in one of those 4 inch diameter foam balls from the local craft store. This helped lighten the Atlas ball, as I wasn't sure how heavy it would be once completed. I was afraid of creating something too heavy, creating some sort of gravity well or black hole. An alternative would be to mix Perlite in with the concrete mix. Which I believe would be the better way.

Another added element was the polyester strings from a rope I pulled apart. These get mixed in with the concrete to act as mini-rebars. Probably didn't do shit! It was recommended on an Atlas ball forum and thought I would give a go. Next ball, I'll skip that part...

Here's a pic of the ball in progress, using the amazing jumpbox as my impromptu worktable.

Here's the demon device in it's glory! 40lbs of pure hate!

You'll notice the snot along the crack in the ball. That is foam sealer. I put that in because one major issue with concrete is it has 1/4 inch rocks in it. These rocks fall off, rattle around and fall out the crack. I learned this with my mini-kettle bells. Annoys the hell out of me. So I sealed them in! I think next time I'll use a hot melt glue gun, as the foam is fairly messy.

So does it do it's job? Am I now a gigantic Viking warrior ready for invasion of Northen Europe armed with nothing more than an axe and a pointed helmet? Not quite! But it is fun to lug around and drop in the grass. The rubbery surface is comfortable and provides excellent grip. DO NOT USE THESE BALLS ON CONCRETE OR YOUR MATS! DO NOT USE THESE BALLS TO PLAY HACKY SACK, FOOS BALL OR AS AMMO IN YOUR PAINT BALL GUN! KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN AND CHIHUAHUAS!

Onto project number duex.
Bulgarian sandbags are pretty cool. Surprisingly, Bulgarian sandbags are rarely sold. Everyone just builds their own. In fact I tried to find a supplier for these and could not find one. Don't flood me with emails with where to buy them, I don't care. I'm with the crowd on this one, DIY is the best way and here's my recipe for success.

Get yourself a roll of that frenchdrain/leech line pipe filter stuff. Looks like a 6 inch diameter sock about 1000 feet long. Probably costs you about $5. Then buy some small, smooth rocks. A bag of which is about $3 at the local builders supply. Get yourself a dozen medium zip ties.

Take some tube sock about 4 feet long, tie a knot on one end, fill it with 8 lbs of rocks. Then choke it off with two zip ties. Fill the sock again with 8 lbs, choke it off again and keep going until you have four 8 lb sections. Tie off the last section with nothing more than a basic knot.

At this point, take your handy hose and soak the segmented worm to blow out the sand and dust particles from the rock. It will tint your sock red. Who cares? If you train properly, your blood and the blood of others will tint it some more.

Once the water dried, I took three more 4 ft sections and stuffed them inside of each other creating one big sock. I figured with all the slinging at each other with this thing it would need all the support it could get!
I then tied a simple knot on one end, then dropped the weight into the mess. Tied it off on the other end and it's done. Note: the inner sock holding the weight is not part of the knot of the outer three socks. This allows the rockbag to drop and squish down into one end, changing it's shape. Which is AWESOME! Spin it around and it slips to the other end. Grab both ends and it levels out. How badass is that! An infinitely changing shape to contend with. Not nearly as tough as holding up a menstruating Wolverine, but we take what we can get.

First layer of sock, holding the rocks in. Make sure you cut the zip ties close, but leave 1/4 inch for expansion. Also trim the edges, because they are SHARP!

Here's the segmented worm all put together, inside a three layered sock.

When you grab one end, it all slips to the other end. The weight stays stacked and inline so that nothing goes funky when you spin it back around!

I made a one segmented bag(2 sock layers) to see how much weight it could handle. This one weighs 12 lbs. I'm confident it could hold twice that.

I'll probably use this one as some sort of grip device or marker for sprints. Run to it, pick it up, run back holding it in your teeth type stuff. You think I'm joking!

Next workout will be concrete balls and rock bags!

Mark

Fireworkout!

2010-07-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

Happy Fourth of July. A day to eat and blow shit up!

As write this, the little bastards next door are popping fireworks and flaming rockets are whizzing by my house uncontrollably. Earlier we had a different sound. The sounds of heavy death metal rang through The Bat Dojo. The minute timer ripping out the sound of an annoying boxing bell beginning our duty to suffer. Sweating, cursing, we engaged in our endeavor to endure some pain. The airhorn fires. Relief. Something our opponent probably would not provide... The boxing bell fires! Eight times we ran through the mini-circuit. Every minute one guy would work while the other rests, reminding the worker how crappy he is performing. Pushing each other until something spewed uncontrollably from our cardiac sphincters.

In total, each person worked for four minutes. Short and sweet. Hey, if training for one five minute round works for Shane Carwin, oh wait...

As I've said before, it's not easy. One of the words slurred during today's training session was either "puke" or "throw up". I can't remember exactly. I was busy lowering my center of gravity, collecting my chi energy and preparing for battle in case a prior meal was used as a pre-emptive military strike upon my mats and I.

Here's the break down for today. It's upper body centric due to some sort of alien life form embedded in The Dude's knee. Probably having little alien-squid hybrids which will one day burst from his patella during Muay Thai, infecting us all. Couldn't be as bad as ringworm or staph right?

- 15 minutes of basic warmup, punching the defenseless bag and general mucking around as usual.
1 minute - Pushup with a crunch in the middle, while your feet and stuck in the rings about 1.5 feet off the ground.
1 minute - Gi pullups
1 minute - Decline, one armed pullups on one ring, while punching a 10 lbs weight up into the air.
1 minute - Incline, one armed straight stability hold while yanking up a 10 lb weight(looks like you're elbowing a guy behind you in the liver).

Then we cooled off with some core exercises.
- Stick your feet in one of the rings and swing using the core 180 at the hips back and forth, keeping your ass and head off the floor. Tough!
- Basic plank on one forearms (1 min hold)
- Modified lunges with 10lb miniball. Lung and raise the ball straight up as you launch a Muay Thai knee forward.

After that we sat around and watched various Marcelo Grappling videos, reminding us actually how bad we really are at jiu jitsu.

As we continue, the workouts will get a bit more difficult. I have several new little evil bastard tortures built. I'll probably blog them tomorrow. They are awesome :)

Here's some shots of the action.

The Dude doing crunch push up thing.

The Dude immensely enjoying gi pullups.

Me having a great time dangling by my fingertips.

The Dude punching a weight while performing a pull-up. Multitasking!

Me trying punching weights with BadBoy eyes hovering over my head.

That's gotta mean something!

Mark!

Martial Arts vs Exercise

2010-06-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

I was thinking today...during an 8 hour flight I had plenty of time to do so...

My train of thought went something like this: a bench press guy crawls under an enormous amount of weight, sucks in some air and blasts the ever living shit out of the bar with his arms. He grunts, groans and farts while sweats pours over his distorted face. Finally, the weight is now at arms length. He rests for a second possibly reconsidering this feat and quickly realizing his scrawny spotter was probably not the best choice. He lowers the weight to his chest, barely touches and slams the weight back into the air a second time, a third time, and so on until a set of 8 or 10 is completed. He's pumped; veins punching through his skin as if mutant, sub-dermal worms were trying to burrow their way back to fresh air. He looks around to see if any hot chicks noticed. If not, he waits until a cute one walks by and he restarts his activity.

Then I thought, how would a skinny little BJJ guy do a bench press? He would shrimp under the same bar, smirking as if he had today's lotto numbers and didn't want to brag. Shrimping some more, and nearly off the end of the bench table, the BJJ guy aligns the bar across his hip. A quick surge upwards, lifts the bar off the rack and his locked arms simply guide it to his hips as he lowers his bridge. A couple of bridge pumps just to show it works and back on the rack the enormous weight goes. Shrimp back out and the scrawny BJJ guy asks the over-roided freak next to him if he wants to arm wrestle. As the gorilla sets up his arm the little BJJ guy arm drags him and chokes him out.

That last part was just for my amusement.
The moral to this story is simply I believe martial arts and exercise are complete opposites. Exercise sticks one's body into a mechanically disadvantaged position, forcing the person to muscle out of everything. Which by definition, what exercise is supposed to do. Martial arts on the other hand seem to be the opposite. For example, in BJJ we use levers, weights, pulleys (gi's) and circles to manipulate opposing forces (our opponent). Nothing in BJJ or any Martial Art I've studied has ever required a practitioner to increase their strength specifically to oppose a force.

So lets break this down a bit. Martial artists cheat like card shark, by lying, stealing and general misdirection when dealing with opposition. Exercise guys jump right under that bar, bite that bastard and lift it with their teeth, if they could.

Speaking of teeth, here's quick true story on this very subject. When my dad taught Shotokan he used to have everyone lay on their backs and lift their head and feet off the floor a few inches and hold for what seemed like a century. Shaking and fatiguing, fighting off flies in the Arizona heat, some of us opted to use our favorite Martial Art technique: cheat like Tiger Woods at a model convention! Our method was simple, bite our gi collar. Gnashing away at ones gi gave us a lever to hold our fat little heads off the hard concrete floor. (yes we trained on concrete, outside!) Of course my dad quickly caught on and he would run around like a rabid badger, pissed off; ripping our lapels out of the mouths of the room full of gi piranhas. Yet we survived, and that was what the Martial Arts seemed to be about. Get the task done, anyway possible, with minimal effort and most importantly survive.

One note, I'm not bashing exercise! Merely stating the two are polar opposites in means of getting the job done. They certainly complement each other. Exercise gives one speed, coordination, agility and fast twist response -- all necessary for a successful Martial Artist intent on catching his little bastard students cheating :)

Mark

4 minutes

2010-06-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

That's all we did. Actually it was 4 x 40 seconds with 20 seconds of rest inbetween. 160 seconds is all it takes to crush a spirit. Well, that and 105F degree heat in a two car Easy Bake oven...

The Tabata interval is a 100% committed attack on the nervous system. Lighting fast, high intensity, mobile and functional. This is the strategy of countless military minds; strike hard, strike fast and take the women!

Today's workout
15 mins of babbling about tonight's Strikeforce while striking the heavy bag.
1 x 40 seconds: squat thrust, sprint (15 ft), bear crawl backwards...repeat.
1 x 40 seconds: side to side lunges, sprint, army crawl back...repeat.
1 x 40 seconds: punch/drop/kick/stands, sprint, tilt a whirl the grappling bag...repeat
1 x 40 seconds: 10 lb minibasketball bridge to standing, hold ball straight up walk fast (15ft), lunge back...repeat.
With the leftover over energy we had, we toyed with some halfguard. I swear BJJ AFTER your tough workout is soooo much better technique wise. One just doesn't have the ability to cheat.

Don't let the short time fool you. After 4 minutes we almost needed an IV and O2. If you push yourself hard enough, a 1 second workout at 1000% commitment will smoke you.

The punch/drop/kick/stand is an old favorite of mine. Jab the bag, drop into side breakfall (simulating you getting knocked down in the middle of a strike), kick the bag in it's theoretical balls and BJJ stand back up. It's surprisingly tiring.

The tilt a whirl didn't last long due to mini-Brock WWE slamming it! The poor defenseless bag exploded, sending stuffing out it's ass. The old crap they stuff in there looked like used underwear and gauze from an insane asylum. Another device got died... I think it's repairable, it's just the zipper. I have to get the gloves and gasmask out to pack in it's gooey innards.
BatDojo Lesson #2321 - Do not slam grappling bags.

Two shots of mini-Brock.

Don't quit.

Subject yourself to more pain than your opponent can offer.

And two shots of numbnuts (me).

Give 101%..or more.

If you die trying, but didn't take your opponent with you...try harder when you get better.

Mark

More Bat Dojo Details...

2010-06-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

So here's the pile o' carnage. Failed attempts at crushing the human spirit. Although we cried, not for the pain inflicted by the experiments, but rather for the shattered PVC pipe filled with 40lbs of sand, lying lonely and broken on the floor.
Bat Dojo Lesson #4432: concrete floors and PVC pipes filled with heavy stuff do not mix.

Here's the wall of old paths taken and room for new adventures:

Hanging pain:

A bit of wall art:

Mark

The Bat Dojo...

2010-06-24T23:40:00.000-07:00

...is simply a two car garage with $1000 worth of Dollamur mats. Three 5 ft wide, by 15ft long black sheets of fall protection are held in place by a wall on one end, storage units on the adjacent side and my dog opposite the wall. The garage door, installed by yours truly creaks loudly like a medievel drawbridge when operated. A black, decade old WaveMaster water filled punching bag hangs silently over one end of the middle mat. Amazing it has survived this long as the target of a variety of weapons and aggressive-jumping guard hangs. A cold, steel pipe setup as a homemade chin up bar hangs over one end of the first mat. The bar has tie straps for height/angle adjustment, along with a set of gymnastics rings for added torture. A very old, dirty blue gi I hauled from Berlin, Germany hangs over the bar for gi grip pullups.

A large variety of experimental tortures sit wrecked in the corner. Several basketballs filled with 25 lbs of sand lay useless. Cracked and leaking the heavy ballast, doing nothing more than holding down my foundation. A PVC kettle bat with a broken handle sits upright to stop the 20 lbs of sand from getting everywhere. Two consumer purchased 25lbs medicine balls suffered a fate a 6th Century war hammer hitting a skull would be proud of. Both expensive balls failed during our training and exploded during some form of high energy smashing exercise. I think I'll fill the carcass (now a mold) with cement and make 70lbs atlas balls out of them. Concrete kettle bats weigh in at 30 lbs; the most medieval and dangerous of the devices lays crushed on the floor. A product of a misguided swing hitting a kneecap or perhaps trying to smack someone who failed to push 101%.

Some items do make it through a workout or two. Home made PVC pushup bars, the only device to survive the last 4 years, mostly because we never threw them at the floor or each other. A mini basketball full of 10 lbs of sand is surviving, but we're not sure how much more punishment it can take. A pair of mini basketballs, filled with concrete and a badass wire handle suffices as the requisite kettlebells. 15lbs each and they are rock solid, and could handily crush a mountain goat.

A variety of consumer dumbells, soft/heavy exercise mini balls, plates also adorn the floor. Then there is the jumpbox. The infamous, overly engineered 2ft square jumpbox. For one of our brethren blue belts is also a mechanical engineer and designed the box to withstand the crushing forces of a pissed off, 40,000 lb midget covered in chainsaws and barbed wire. If it breaks, NASA should study the guts for the next space station, it's truly remarkable. There are more devices for self expression of pain, but some(actually all) were taken by the Air Force, strapped to a laser guidance system and dropped from a bomber onto the Taliban.

The main wall is a canvas for a 4 ft black painting of the Shotokan Tiger. Painted by hand, by me it emblazons The Bat Dojo with a bit of pride. Tiny U.S. and Brazilian flags flank the Tiger.

Training at The Bat Dojo was once very frequent, meeting in secret before our actual BJJ class to cover new techniques and strategies. Showing up to class already sweating, others wondered WTF we were up to. Over the last year training there has waned due to work, and the expansion of our primary school.

The Bat Dojo serves as the breeding ground for new ideas, a chance to practice the old ideas, push our cardio to the limit and experiment with various tortures. It's called the Bat Dojo, because it is hidden like the Bat Cave. Only the few are invited.

I tried to Google some badass quote about bats. Something akin to Vlad the Impaler emphatically chanting about how wicked the wolf was and if one could harness the power of the wolf one would rule for eternity blah blah blah... Well I found one, while searching for the world "bat" and "quote" together I found this gem, "Nobody bats 500. We all make mistakes. - Desi Arnaz". I think I'll keep it until I find something better.

This blog is to detail a bit of our training here. Today was day 1 of the Summer training cycle at the Bat Dojo, and to provide a bit of a guilt trip to train more often and update this blog. For those who train at home this is a place to hangout and trade ideas. I'll post what I've done and happily accept intelligent ideas from others.

Mark!