Indigenous Ability

    THE VIKING “ Now just for fun we’ll each name what we place our trust in. I’ll choose first, and there are three things I place reliance on---one is my purse, the second my axe, the third my storehouse .”—Spoken by Glum in Killer Glum’s Saga , Ch. 14  The battleaxe has been a weapon/tool of war and survival for millennia. Be it a halberd, axe and spike, the Pacific Broadaxe or the diminutive tomahawk of the Eastern Woodlands, this tool/weapon has been a staple of Warring and Frontier cultures the world over. I am no forger of fine weapons but I am a passionate wielder of axes and old axe ways. Be those times fara á víkingu to this redolent passage from Roger de Hoveden’s 12 th century account of King Stephen’s axe wielding at the Battle of Lincoln. “ Then might you have seen a dreadful aspect of battle, on every quarter around the king's troop fire flashing from the meeting of swords and helmets – a dreadful crash, a terrific clamour – at which the h...

  There was an astonishingly creative panoply of drills to build punching power, balance, precision, finesse and overall form. These drills can be found spread throughout early boxing training, in singular pockets of rural approaches to fighting and are rife and rampant in the rough n tumble tradition where power was a premium.   In our newest Black Box Instructional Product, we present 20 of these drills under the rubric “Doubleday Drills” in honor of Civil War veteran and purported “Father of American Baseball” Abner Doubleday as so many of these drills are rooted in hard-smackin’ they remind me of teeing off with a good old fashioned hickory bat. We’ll provide more history on these another day, but for now I believe it suffices to say that getting started on 20 Drills to hit harder and meaner is the key thing—less readin’, more doin’! Many of these drills train attributes that are now illegal, making them ideal for street/self-defense use. I am 100% confident th...

  The Game by Jack London He lacked speech-expression. He expressed himself with his hands, at his work, and with his body and the play of his muscles in the squared ring; but to tell with his own lips the charm of the squared ring was beyond him. Yet he essayed, and haltingly at first, to express what he felt and analyzed when playing the Game at the supreme summit of existence. “All I know, Genevieve, is that you feel good in the ring when you’ve got the man where you want him, when he’s had a punch up both sleeves waiting for you and you’ve never given him an opening to land ’em, when you’ve landed your own little punch an’ he’s goin’ groggy, an’ holdin’ on, an’ the referee’s dragging him off so’s you can go in an’ finish ’m, an’ all the house is shouting an’ tearin’ itself loose, an’ you know you’re the best man, an’ that you played m’ fair an’ won out because you’re the best man. This 1905 boxing novella from the author of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea Wolf ...

  Let’s begin with a corralling definition—when we discuss supplements, I refer to any and all non-food, non-prescribed items one swallows in pill form, mixes and drinks, or transdermal patch or injection. I repeat—we are discussing NON-PRESCRIBED supplements. If a medical professional writes a scrip and you take it to a pharmacy and they hand it over without batting an eye—we ain’t talking that. What we are discussing—anything that you can freely walk into a vitamin aisle and grab off the shelf, anything “prescribed” by a blog [this one included], a podcast, web article and, very likely our current “super-scientific” head of Health and Human Services. All of these voluntarily chosen supposed “helpers on the margin” are what is in the crosshairs today. Before we get all sciencey and get to the real meat of this essay, let’s get three things out of the way. ONE Full Disclosure: The Old Man’s Current Supplement Regimen ·         A lo...