Conception

Haven't written much in a while. Haven't been really busy either, theres just been nothing to say.

Officer Selection Board for the army, they say I'd make a fantastic sergeant, but they'll take me as a lieutenant anyway.

A failed saut-de-bras and painful lesson in managing acute injuries. Ideas about movement and body coordination, practice and learning. A talk with Animal about pain, fear and confidence.

A class on predator dynamics, criminal mindset and legal concerns. A gathering of incredibly skilled martial artists (and me) screaming and charging and brawling and dealing with the pre and post-fight scenarios. Primitive thought, ferocity and zanshin. Good fun.

A bench and a dip station and 7ft precisions between them. Why not outside the gym? So many mental blocks... I'll get over them.

Jumping with your hips, keep your gut tight. Don't receive with your legs, lower your pelvis. It's like learning to walk again.

Looking forward to studying because you want to know, want to understand. The exam is irrelevant.

The confusion of relationships and the cacophony of feelings and realizing that so little of it matters because I am just so damn happy anyway.

The bliss of exhaustion, of collapsing and leaving a shadow of sweat behind. The joy of undiluted, hard pain. The drive of a tough challenge; and the delight of success or the lessons failure. How could anyone want to give it up?

"Screw it, it's game time."

Here are the revisions for the workout. Rather than just listing the workout, I'm going to explain why I cut some things, why I added others, and the principles behind more of it. This will give you (on the off-chance anyone actually reads this blog) a better idea of what I'm training, and why.

Speed:
I'm going to speed up the time of the workouts, which means mostly decreasing rest time. This is largely due to time constraints on the rest of my life, and the fact that uni will be heating up next semester. Hopefully this will encourage my mitochondria to crank out the ATP faster. I'll post how it goes.

Warm up:
10 reps of a burpee-muscle up combo + dynamic stretching. This is because I've picked up a few injuries lately (nothing serious), because against my better judgment, I have refrained from doing much of a proper warmup. Anyway, its been costing me. I'm hoping this allows me to do a nice easy warmup of pretty much all the muscles in my body, without putting too much strain on any one of them.

Muscle ups: (3 x 10)
Now going to be done slow as possible, especially on the negatives. I don't have the beastly (read: blane) skill to do them matrix-style, so I'll work on the slow negatives. This should also have the added benefits of extra tendon and joint strength.

Lunges: (3 x distance)
Since I've found these hurt me more than most of the other exercises I do, I added more in on Monday/Friday.

Deadlifts: (3 x 6)
These are going to become a staple of my workout. To be honest, I don't know why they haven't been before, they increase lung capacity, leg strength, arm strength, core strength, all round sexiness, and they're pretty fun to do too. I might set some goals for these in the future, once I experiment a bit to determine what I can lift comfortably. Plus, due to the fact my legs are just generally weak, I'm going to be adding more exercises. My core has been letting me down too, so that needs work. Oh, and did I mention my arm strength?...Deadlifts do the lot, so it should help me lots.

Laches: (6 level pyramid)
I've kind of maxed out on these. 122 cm can be done comfortably, but to do so I have to tuck as tight as I can (not that tight, actually), and leave about 2 inches of clearance between my coccyx and the ground because the smith machine only goes so high. I'll be working on proper pyramids (just been doing halves) now.

Planche Progression: (60 seconds total. PB is a 15-18 second hold)
Moved to the end of the workout to take advantage of the fact I'm already buggered by this point.

Chippa pushups: (20 pushups, 10 second holds, 15 pushups)
Chippa pushups, named by me after the guy who first showed me them when I was down in Melbourne one time, is an exercise that involves pushups with holds in various positions. Will be extending the length of holds, and the number of reps.

Tabata thrusters: (20 on, 10 off; 15 reps per set)
Thrusters (its a Gym Jones thing; check them out if you haven't. Mark Twight articulates many things that I get tongue-tied over, or never got at all) are front squats to shoulder press. Pretty standard, but it seems like a good exercise to chain tabata-style, and since I stopped running, I think it might do some good for my cardio.

Hand & a half chins: (8 reps, 4 each arm)
A nice alliterated name for doing chinups, focusing the force on one arm for OACs. I'll keep knocking off digits until I can hopefully make the switch to an OAC. I'm doing this more than negatives because negatives put substantial stress on the joints (which is good...in moderation), and since I'm doing slow muscle ups and such, I'd like to minimize my chances of tendinitis.

Butterflies: (Dunno, likely 6-10 reps with heavy weights)
An exercise for iron-cross training I found on T-nation, more or less hand upside from a bar and flap your arms while holding dumbbells. When I say heavy weights, I'm probably looking at 6-10kgs. Its all relative :P.

Snatch & C&J: (Again, dunno. Likely more reps with low weight till I get the technique well enough to start safely training for strength)
I'm putting in some more olympic lifts because I've heard wonderful things. Dogen, Gym Jones and Jim Bathurst (of Beast Skills fame) all extol the virtues of them, so I'll put them in and see how they go. Another good reason to go to a gym boys and girls - you can get people to teach you these things properly.

Turkish Get-up:
Saw this on Gym Jones a while back and thought it looked good for your wrists. Hold a (long) barbell in one hand and get up off the ground, keeping the weight raised. Check their pictures if you want to see how its done proper.

Dumbbell swings:
Another fun full-body cardio exercise.

Looking at the next two months, its going to be difficult, but certainly achievable. I can hold a handstand on a bar well, though its a wobbly press getting there (I have been using those pushup bars in my room, 'in the field' it'll be totally different I imagine), I can do a full ROM HSPU on the bars in the morning, by the end of the day its 3/4 ROM. The 'hard' goal for this month is going to be the handstand press I imagine...once I have that down the actual way I'm going to pull off the muscle-up to handstand press will become much clearer.

Train hard.

Scared

I had a profound experience this Saturday. It was at kung fu, and the teacher had brought in a friend of his from a riot police unit to teach us a little about violence. After a little anecdote, he put us in an 8ft square and set us on each other. 2 on 14.

At my kung fu, they’re an intelligent bunch of people. Most of them are university-educated, and we have a few physiotherapists and a pharmacist scattered among them. When in the 14, you developed a pack mentality against the duo. Working together in a loose group, knowing what your particular target was, what you had to do for the pack. Real hindbrain stuff. Scary how quickly you can turn a group of educated, ‘civilised’ men into savages.

I went into the centre for the last round. It was chaos. If my memory serves me well, which I doubt, I got barrelled into from the side, and separated from G. Smart move by the pack, because G has an amazing amount of talent, and separating me from him allowed him to be surrounded, and taken down more easily. (As it turned out, G spent his time making a retreat towards the door, using members of the pack as human shields against the rest of the bodies). I remember being barrelled into by four or five bodies, which would also make sense considering how many would be needed to control G, and I went backwards towards the wall, though I never made it. I remember having guys trying to do a takedown, and never quite getting there. I remember making the decision “I will not go to the ground;” and that was being the extent of my actions. I remember I didn’t fight off my attackers. I remember I didn’t keep my hands up, I remember my vision was blurred, focusing on the back of A’s head, not on the broader situation. I didn’t see another member of the pack slide up on my right side and drill five punches into the side of my head. Game Over.

It scared me how badly I was beaten. I don’t get beaten that often, but neither do most people anymore. There’s this concept, the Prochaska-Di Clemente cycle for behaviour change. We were taught that “it’s important to tell people that relapse is not failure, it’s an opportunity to try new ways to succeed.” Bullshit. You failed. Why do people never learn anymore? There’s no longer any incentive. The lowest grade in schools now is an E. Whatever we learn is enough. Without struggle it’s easy to fake integrity. Without consequence you can get away with anything.

It scared me how badly I was beaten. A thought on the train home was to not go back. That’s easily accomplished. My life would be happier if I didn’t try to explore and learn about violence, I would certainly be better at many other more ‘normal’ skills, able to integrate better with most people in society. But I could not be content, living a lie. Lie is a good word for it. Lie means to tell a falsehood, to engage in a deception. I would be knowingly basing my worldview on a set of premises that I knew were false. I cannot do that. Chiron said that “people who talk about enlightenment as if it were a joy instead of an understanding…always have soft hands.” Soft hands are nice to the touch, but they have no utility. Afterwards, my teacher said “you were a victim of your own inexperience.” It was a nice way to word it.

How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” - Tyler

May 9th

2 month goals:
3 sets of 6 muscle ups: Completed...barely
The first set went off like a dream, perfect form, everything. Second set needed a kick on the last couple and a one-arm-at-a-time push on the last one, and third set needed it on the last 3 reps...last rep was an absolute killer. I was in a dead hang for a few seconds before hand and it was still a struggle to get all the way to the top. Rest between sets was about 4 minutes and 3:30.

Chins with 40kgs: Failed.
Probably should have been more specific with this. Also probably should have trained for it as well, but anyway. I got a rep of each, and that was about it. I'm gonna have another go; because it seemed to me to be much more the tiny weight belt with the bumper-plate weights, that I did it halfway through the workout, and that I'm dead tired much more than me being weak :P.

Gonna revise the workout on Sunday (getting bored), step up the HSPUs to 3 reps each time (8 reps needed in 2 months). Apart from that, still going strong.

Train hard.

Shit Humans Do

I went home home for the first time in a long time this weekend. The air is cleaner there. Time passes slowly. A day at home working on a paper, and a day in the bush visiting some of my old parkour haunts, and did many things I've never done before - and got many cuts and bruises where I hadn't before. Practiced precisions, vaults, flicks, climbing. Practiced alternating speeds, changing direction and keeping eyes ahead while moving on uneven/rocky ground. Practiced sneaking up on tourists.

It was also a good time to think.

Thought about parkour, the independent individual nature of it in a dependent social world. "When you go all the way, you will be alone..." but how often are you alone anymore? (How often do you go all the way anymore?) Traceurs aim for a mastery of themselves, because they understand that's all they can control. But not even that... digestion, nerves, even cancer - are beyond conscious control; whilst good executives and politicians understand well how to control people. We do it everyday, from advice and complaints, to cues in body language and tone of voice. Is it a balance thing, between self and society? A traceur trains to be altruistic, but by being completely independent how can you help others? So do you divide your time between one and the other, one part to be strong, the other to be useful?

Are humans too complicated animals to be able to satisfy themselves with just one mastery?
Is the world too complicated to allow survival of specialists, or too strong to allow survival of generalists? Or maybe we are just drawing arbitrary lines to decide where walking becomes running becomes fighting becomes love-making becomes philosophy, and there are no real differences between them- its all just shit humans do.

I don't know.

Because although they're the same nerves and the same muscles, each has a different mindset and a different objective. I've been told many times that I can't have everything. I don't think I understand why yet. Maturity, I guess.

(NB: Don't you find it interesting how its always kids who have the best dreams? I remember when I was in year 1, and a teacher asked 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' Everyone said doctors ("Because I want to help people!" - I remember that) and astronauts and footy stars and now I see people my age with scars on their wrists flipping burgers or stacking shelves from 9-to-5 and I'm just...what happened?)