Sharpening Your Tools

It’s been said that me most dangerous thing in a kitchen is a dull knife. While I have heard people say, “I slipped and cut myself. Good thing that knife wasn’t too sharp.” Any experienced cook, though, will tell you that it’s likely that dull blade that caused the slip in the first place.

I see how we, as martial artists, treat our body in very much the same way. If we want to perform at our best and keep ourselves safe, it’s important that we keep our muscles in good enough shape so that when we call on them for that one giant lunge, nothing slips out of place. In cooking the knife might not be the meal itself, but a well honed knife will sure make getting there all the easier. Similarly, being strong isn’t the goal of martial artists, but it sure helps.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do lately is taking my conditioning and shaping it to better support the kinds of feats I want to be able to do. General strength training is wonderful and is infinitely better than doing nothing at all. A lot of the content that’s out there, though, is aimed largely at either weightlifters or bodybuilders. If that’s your end goal, then great, keep racking on more weights. If you’re using it as a tool, though, to help improve your performance at something else, it’s helpful to figure out what kind of an exercise plan will work best to help you get there.

A lot of people in the martial arts world recoil at being told to train like athletes. If you aren’t interested at all in tournaments or the more sporty side, I get it. Tournaments are their own thing and shouldn’t be seen as the end all be all of what it means to be a fighter. Some of the best fighters I know hardly ever compete. You ask them for a pickup fight, though, and they’re more than happy to kick your ass. You can still work to be a great fighter without entering a tournament every month.

That said, if you spend all week just sitting at your desk and the only movement you do is going to practice once a week or a tournament every couple of months, your muscles likely aren’t going to be happy when you suddenly ask them to go from 0 to 60. Most injuries I see aren’t due to people getting hit or thrown too hard. Instead it’s someone’s groin muscles not having the range of motion that was suddenly asked of them, or a shoulder going out when asked to reach too far, or a knee not having the kind of support it needed for that deep of a lunge.

Outside of a drive to win or attempt to be the best, this is why I suggest for fighters to train like athletes. Even if you don’t consider what you do to be a sport, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from those who do.

Years ago, when I was a junior in high school, we were asked to read “The Great Gatsby” for class. While of course it’s remembered as one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest works, there’s one other person who was involved with it whose story has always stood out to me. I remember talking about the book in one of my other classes and the teacher in that class mentioned that the same editor for Gatsby, Maxwell Perkins, also edited Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”. Ever since then, I try and always be on the lookout for who it is that top performers go to when they need some help. Of course the person in front, whether it’s the author or the athlete, is the one that gets almost all of the attention. It’s important to remember, though, that no one gets to the top by themselves.

Lately the Algorithm has been showing me lots of short clips talking about basketball. I can’t remember the last time I watched a full game and even when I did, it was never my idea. That said, I find a lot of the stories compelling even if I don’t have a passion for the game itself. At some point a month or two ago, there popped up a clip talking about how Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant both used the same personal trainer, Tim S. Grover to help them find their success. After a few weeks of having that factoid rattle around in my brain, I decided to check with my local library to see if the guy had put out anything I could get my hands on.

Lo and behold, they had a few of his books. I reserved one of them thinking it would talk about what it takes to be great and give some stories about how top athletes approached their sport. Instead what I got was a detailed workout plan meant to train explosiveness, with everything laid out for three months at a time. While basketball and fencing are hardly the same game, getting my legs to quickly get me from point A to point B and then immediately pivot to going a different way is something that the two share.

Right now I’m a month in and have been really enjoying it after all. The book lays out specific exercises and gives you ways to progress from week to week. Previously I’d been doing a lot of just trying to do 10 reps of X or Y, so having something built out that forces me to work harder from week to week is definitely a plus. It’s too early for it to have much of an effect on my game, but the fact that I don’t have to do any of the labor planning my workouts and instead just have to open up a book, set a timer, and get going has made it a lot easier for me to get all the way through my workouts.

It’s gotten really easy for me to prioritize other stuff in my life or just get sidetracked scrolling through social media that I haven’t been doing the same level of conditioning I’d ideally like to be doing. I made the switch a few years back from worrying less about doing a perfect hour-long workout and then not doing them particularly often, to trying to do a little bit of something a few days a week. That said, this has lead to me only finding myself with twenty minutes or so at the end of the day two to three times a week. With this book, I’m spending a good hour four times a week, not having to think about which days I should do legs or what I haven’t hit up lately.

The other really nice thing about Grover’s book is that it emphasizes the importance of rest.’ The author understands that muscles only grow when you give them time to breathe, so he isn’t asking you to do an intense workout every single day or every single week.

Anyhow, I definitely recommend giving the book a try if you’re looking for something to help take you to that next level. If worrying about winning tournaments isn’t your jam, I’d still recommend trying to take some time outside of going to practice to get your body ready to the point where practice itself isn’t what’s going to put you at risk. As well, if you’re having issues motivating yourself to move around as much as you’d like, I cannot recommend having some sort of external accountability highly enough. Maybe that’s going to a workout class where even though you aren’t learning anything new, the teacher is there to make sure you get all your reps in. Maybe it’s finding a video series that you can put on and follow along to whenever your schedule allows it. Or maybe it all starts with heading down to your local library.

In other news I just got my upcoming Bolognese longsword book back from the editor, so now I’m that much closer to having it out. I’m also working on a decently large video project that should be out in the next week or so that I think you all will really enjoy.

Here’s to a very sword filled new year!