Cross training & flexibility

As a martial artist, I've always been an advocate of stretching, but now that I'm mixing styles in my new gym I'm noticing that I have to stretch a lot more and a lot more thoroughly. On some days I practice Kung Fu and on others I practice Muay Thai and then on others still I practice both. The different styles I practice utilize different muscle groups to execute their respective techniques and require me to stretch/develop different muscles for proper execution.

Make sure you are doing proper warm ups and stretches before and after each workout. I personally find that I get the best results when I warm up 15 - 20 minutes with light stretching mixed in before a session and preform some much harder stretches for 15 - 20 after a session while my muscles are still warm. Make sure you have a good talk about stretching with your teacher/master/trainer before you get too far into a new program. You definitely want to know what the most effective method of stretching for your respective activity is before you get started. 

A good example of this is how I stretch before my Kung Fu classes vs. my Muay Thai classes. I spend a lot of time warming up my core muscles and upper legs, and I perform some light stretching of the tendons in the back of my knees and loosen my ankles, waist and shoulders up by performing rotational exercises. In Muay Thai I will work some shadow boxing techniques before I start class, and/or maybe jump some rope or sometimes as a group we'll do some boot camp like exercises for 5-10 minutes. This evenly warms your muscles up and while it doesn't loosen those tendons I typically focus on before Kung Fu, it gets me ready for the power driven kicks and punches that make up my Muay Thai arsenal of techniques. 

As I previously stated, you just want to make sure you are stretching and warming up properly for whatever exercise you are performing. This will allow you to perform at maximum capacity and will prevent you from being injured as you escalate the difficulty of your activity. 

Martial Arts and Me has been reimagined and is now Black Belt Talk

It has been a long time since I've posted anything up here but as I've bought a house in a new town, started training at a new dojo in new systems, and just generally had a lot of life changing experiences over the last while I felt it's time to revive the martial arts talk online.

Previously I've had a lot of talk about weight loss utilizing martial arts training to do so and I still will post some about that but as my ultimate goal down the road is to teach and pass on some of the knowledge I've gained over the years I want to use this blog to catalog some of my experiences.

This first post is simply to talk about what I'm doing now and catch you up on the last couple of years.

As it says in my profile I recently bought a new house in a new city. This created a need for me to find a new place to train, which was difficult for me because I've been a single system purist up to this point training formally in only South Korean Taekwondo, long enough to earn a 2nd degree black belt.

My initial thought was to move on to another World Federation sanctioned school which sounds easy enough because Taekwondo is one of the most popular martial arts styles and most heavily practiced in the world. The city I moved to has many martial arts schools a lot of which are Taekwondo.

I started by calling these places and talking to the owners and/or instructors and asking questions like: "Can I continue from my 2nd Dan or will I need to start over", "Are you WTF sanctioned", and "what's your scheduling like". It went on like this for 2 weeks after moving and I even went as far as to make a spread sheet in Excel charting out the positives and negatives of each place. Some I would talk to for a good amount of time to get a feel of how their school was run and if that felt like a good fit for me. As it turned out I got very frustrated because it seemed most of the places near me were more interested in my money than providing a good training environment or were only open on a very structured schedule that didn't allow for me to come on random nights when my schedule permitted like my old dojang.

I moved on to start checking out some MMA gyms in my area. There are a few and I thought if there was no good Taekwondo schools around me then MMA would be a great way to round myself out. I've done a lot of full contact Taekwondo sparring over the years but never really learned how to apply that in a ground or kickboxing type of match. So I started calling and visiting different places in my town and the adjacent towns. One of the places I visited seemed like they had people in good shape that knew what they were doing very well but provided a very aggressive atmosphere. Some might like this but it was not for me. I feel that a positive/uplifting atmosphere is a much more constructive venue for good training.

At this point I was annoyed and had almost decided to shelf the idea for a while, when I stumbled on the gym I'm currently training in now. It's a mixed styles gym that I noticed had Taekwondo as one of the systems they offered. I sent the owner an email through their web site and he responded within the hour (caught him at a good time). I went back and forth with my standard list of questions and instead of answering, he asked me to come in and interview him in person. When I did so he talked to me for 2 hours about the degradation of the rank of black belt due to modern industry and business and how he not only teaches but has his own classes with outside instructors for himself to keep learning. I was sold not only because I can train in multiple systems but they encourage us to bring our own twists and ideas to the classes we participate in. It's a very dynamic environment and a family friendly atmosphere that's open 6 days a week from early morning to late at night.

I've been here for a year now, and I'm currently cross training in Muay Thai and Sho Bin Ju (a hybrid kung fu/kenpo/Taekwondo based self defense system) and am finding that these systems; while similar to Taekwondo in some ways are filling in a lot of holes for me in others. My ultimate goal over the next several years is to take on some side teaching work myself and to better myself physically and mentally through the martial arts.