Nothing earth shattering here. MMA fighters in the beginning included a lot of doughy middle aged karate instructors. It didn’t take too long for very well conditioned athletes to start filling the ranks. These days, most competitors are in very good shape when they compete, and have crushing training schedules that are incredibly hard on their bodies.

Like football players, the training alone for most elite MMA fighters would keep them laid up. They sustain pretty major injuries, and have huge amounts of wear and tear on their joints. The roids allow for greatly accelerated healing, and all around tolerance of their insane training. Regardless of wether they use the roids for the fights themselves, they need them to prepare for the fights more than anything.

Personally, I think the UFC and Pride need to institute random drug testing to all their contracted fighters.

I’ve also been checking out a variety of schools or systems of what the martial arts world calls RBSD or Reality Based Self Defense. A lot of these definitely have an element of fantasy about them, preparing for hugely exaggerated threats or verging on end of the world militia type training. But I stumbled onto a clip(caution bad language) of a fellow named Richard Dimitri, doing some knife work with a Krav Magraw group, and I really liked his ideas, and his attitude about delivering them. I pointed a fellow dojo monkey at the clip and he dug up some more over at this guy’s blog from a seminar in Australia.

Rich runs a group called Senshido, which focuses on realistic responses to street scenarios, and relies heavily on training at full speed and using scenario play to simulate real situations. In one session, he had all the participants drink the equivalent of 3 shots of vodka, and sprayed pepper spray into the air. This is just my kind of training. It’s less about static drills and more about “if this person is attacking me full force and trying to hurt me, what can I realistically make work?”

Rich’s group trains up in the great white north of Canada, so I probably won’t be training with him directly any time soon, but I did order a set of their fundamentals DVDs to try and get a feel for the overall concepts, philosophies, and strategies. There’s also a training group down in Tucson that works this stuff. I might try to get down there for a couple of days and work this stuff with some experienced practitioners.

Of course, this is all in addition to my normal training, but it’s certainly going to contribute to what I’m doing in To-Shin Do.

I’m also looking around for a place to do a little Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training here in the valley, but I’ve just started with that. I’ve checked out one place so far, and I’m hoping they’re not all like that one. I’ve said before that I love martial arts, but I really dislike martial artists. The place I checked out was a good reason why. There’s a really bad jock “I could kick your ass” attitude that seems to emanate from a lot of people at MMA gyms and unfortunately that bleeds over into BJJ as well, since they are so intertwined these days. The posturing and butt sniffing get really old in normal dojos, but a lot of MMA guys have a crazily inflated sense of self worth stemming from their perceived ability to kick ass, and need to blast testosterone at everyone who walks in the door. Yes you’re large and have a number of tattoos. That’s very nice. Yes I’m sure you can kick my ass. You look very tough. Good for you.

Bullshido.net is a forum for martial artists, and was originally meant to expose BS in the martial arts. Unfortunately most martial artists believe every art but the one they study is BS. And since the advent of the UFC, every art but MMA takes quite a rhetorical beating. Eventually people can be calmed down to admitting that anyone who cross-trains in multiple arts (usually BJJ+Kickboxing+whateverelseyoudo) is generally an acceptable human being. But if you’re not training ALIVE, than your art is worth less than dirt. If you want to see martial arts dick wagging at it’s best, bullshido is the place to check out. This is not to say the forums suck. They are actually awesome, but the cross art bashing does get old.

End of Line

Tonight is my graduation into green-black belt, and for those of you counting, I have 3 belts after this one (out of 15) until my black belt. Whee! Tonight I am an uke in one of two black belt demonstrations, which is notable, since these will be our 2nd and 3rd black belts in the dojo. A couple more will be following shortly, then there will be a bit of a wait until the next crop hits.

I have no major plan for these 4 days yet, but I’m looking forward to doing nothing at all. That sounds really good.

I’ll probably finish reading “Mona Lisa Overdrive”.

The fundamental premise of running a successful martial arts school is what so many owners refuse to do. Run it as a business. Pay for advertising and marketing. Track your metrics religiously. Get good at sales. Understand your customers and provide value to them.

Mr. Oliver promotes charging more than most schools in your area, using pricing as an indication of value. But he also backs up the pricing with very well structured programs, especially for kids. He also advocates using contracts, chiefly as a commitment to training, but also to make sure that revenue streams are predictable.

He advocates an average student value of $200 a month through use of a variety of programs including a black belt club and leadership development team. They have a very developed sales strategy of presenting the value of these programs on a regular basis.

Mile High Karate, Mr. Oliver’s organization, believes that the martial arts industry is fast moving toward a franchise model, and that independent schools will soon be extinct. While he talked about this a bit during the seminar, he didn’t focus heavily on it.

One of my chief take-aways of the day was that people really can make a living running a school, and do quite well in the process. While there were some things that I would be uncomfortable with personally, I don’t think they would be deal breakers if not implemented.

He talked a bit about how, like in other businesses, you get a good practitioner of a craft who gets an “entrepreneurial seizure” and goes off to do their own thing. Unfortunately, often times that practitioner doesn’t have a solid business understanding, and has a hard time applying the seemingly callous aspects of a business to something they love.

I definitely have this impulse myself at times. Martial arts has a mystique for many long time practitioners that feels cheapened by bringing money into the picture. But I have to say, this is the first time I’ve felt that I can make a decent living in the martial arts rather than just having it as a side gig.

I came out of the whole thing not too much worse for wear. I have some nice bruising on my chest, but no major damage. And strangely enough, my biggest gripe is that I’ve had a neck twinge for the better part of a week (which I had before the seminar) that hasn’t fixed itself. Probably time to hit a chiropractor.

With that seminar, I’ve been training for 7 days now, and tonight will be a night off to let the body recover.

Tori was awesome to train with, and I think the next time I’m in California, I’ll try to line up some private lessons on some of the unique things she teaches.

This weekend will be dominated by training with 4th degree black belt Tori Eldridge. Sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

This afternoon it’s been acting up badly, like when I reach up to scratch my head, I bend my elbow and it hurts like hell. I was thinking I was going to have to lay off training tonight and get some ice on it.

But a few minutes ago, after getting out of a 2 hour meeting, all of the pain is mysteriously gone. Weird.

Doug rolled into town with his daughter, and I thought it might be nice to just hang out with him and the kid, and take a few days off from everything.

It was nice to have 4 days without responsibilities and feeling “I should be doing something right now”. I rented Dungeons and Dragons – Heros for ye olde xbox, and ripped through it. Good times.

Back at work, my Notes server is dead, which is no big surprise. Man I hate notes.

This weekend is supposed to be cloudy, so I’ll probably do some shooting then. I also have my promotion to green belt this friday. w00t. 14 months until black belt time.

I’m really starting to hate e-mail in general, because no one can provide subject lines that mean anything. Now, I don’t get a ton of e-mail, something in the range of 20 a day, but when you have to reference it, or find older e-mails, “tomorrow’s meeting” doesn’t really mean anything. Especially when you send me e-mails with that same title twice a week.

Couple that with Notes’ lousy search capabilities and it’s hard to find anything.

I’ve taken to tagging all of the files the project is using with spotlight comments. This is a good thing. Now if only I could get people to use standardized file naming conventions. Co-ordinating hundreds of word and excel files with multiple revisions is not fun. I’m intrigued by ShopWiki’s in-house wiki they use for versioning documents.

Blasted Sun
We have reached that time of year when the sun is now coming up at 6am and ruining my sleep. Tonight, the windows in the bedroom get blacked out. It’s amazing how much it helps.

Money Matters
In the course of implementing the monthly budget, I’m finding myself spending much less money, and in general making far less transactions. This is good. I’ve also reduced the number of monthly bills, and set them up with auto pay. This means way less activity to keep track of in Quicken and less worrying. Funny thing is, it feels like I’ve dropped off a cliff

The volume of things I need to keep track of has essentially fallen off to zero, and it’s like having a month of very busy days at work, and then suddenly 2 weeks of no work at all. You wonder if you’re missing something.

But nope. It’s really just gotten a lot simpler. it’s just going to take a couple of months for my brain to adjust.

High Gear
This month is going to be a heavy one at work as we crush through a lot of the implementation work of my project. This could be a very good thing, with the main body of our work done within the next two months. But I expect my posting frequency to be low.

StrongSpace
Just got my StrongSpace account activated from my lifetime hosting deal. I’m pretty stoked about it as I’m going to start a nice little rsync offsite backup routine with my 9 gigs of space. That might be something to start working on this weekend while I’m traveling.

Web Work
One of these days I’m going to get WordPress updated on all of my sites. When that might be I dont’ know. But one day.