Indigenous Ability

In the empty-hand realm of combat true ambidexterity is a rare bird. Marvelous Marvin Hagler took great pains to develop facility both as an orthodox fighter and as a southpaw, but we could easily see where he stacked his chips when the heat was high.  Seeking ambidexterity is a worthy goal, but one that has opportunity-costs. That is, the time put into developing the off-hand [off-foot for kicking, or off-side for grappling] means that is time we no longer have for moving the competency needle further towards mastery on our “good” side. We should always make that opportunity cost/cost-to-benefit analysis in our training as there are only so many hours in the day, and precious few per week dedicated to training itself. With actual training time at a premium do we want so-so returns or better-than-average? This is not an argument against empty-hand ambidexterity, not at all, just one of time-utility and, well, a jaded eye towards reality. If we are to make t...

Let’s talk “making an entrance,” Vikings, action heroes and what can be gleaned from these for our day-to-day use. By “making an entrance” I refer to how we step through any and all doorways. [BTW-This material might best be consumed in tandem with our lesson on The Killing Hand.] To begin our journey let’s go back over 1,000 years to an Old Norse cycle of poems that in compiled form are known as the Havamal (“ Sayings of the High One. ”) The authorship is attributed to the God Odin, but we need not sweat the fictional origin of the wisdom to realize that the advice offered is grounded in the pragmatic and the tactical. The passage we shall consult for today’s lesson is: Allar dyrnar, áður en þú ferð áfram, ætti að líta á; því erfitt er að vita þar sem óvinir geta sest innan bústaðs. That is: “ All door-ways, before going forward, should be looked to; for difficult it is to know where foes may sit within a dwelling.” Here, our fictional God...

ROUGH & READY Old World Strength & Conditioning for Modern Warriors [ The following is a preview of our upcoming book to be released this Fall .] “ A Western Apache warrior named Palmer Valor who came of age in the mid-19 th century recalled that his mother had encouraged him to swim in icy streams and endure other hardships when he was a boy so that he would be ready to take on any opponent .”- The Way of the Warrior Looking for a way to get in the best condition of your life? I’m talking real-world strong, life-tempered stamina, truly useful explosiveness and agility. Of course, you are, we all are. What if I told you there was a way to do this that required minimal gear [not a barbell in sight], cut out trips to the gym [not to mention gym fees], a way that turned out to be fun [albeit grueling], and oddly inspiring. Yeah, we’ve all heard those claims before. Consider this, Lewis and Clark with the Corps of Discovery Expedition made an 8,000-m...

Today let’s take a journey from the ancient Olympics, stop by Denmark for some Viking practices, sojourn with the Inuit and Chippewa cultures, and steal an idea or two from the boxing heavyweight great Joe “The Brown Bomber” Louis. First, let’s define our terms. By movement under load training I refer not to weight lifting but the conducting of your sport/training with additional weight or added resistance hampering your standard movement in the aid of increasing performance once the limiter is removed. Let’s start with the ancient Hellenes. In the original incarnations of the Olympic Games, the jumping events, standing broad jump, running jump, clearing obstacle et cetera were conducted with devices called halteres. Halteres were bits of stone or metal loosely shaped like a modern dumbbell. The athlete would grasp the two ends of the haltere and use a swinging momentum of the arms to “assist” the jump without ever releasing the device. It was thought that halteres...

THE Primary Factor in self-protection/self-defense is situational awareness. Keeping in mind that crime is, more often than not, a product of opportunity, if we take steps to reduce opportunity to as close to nil as we can manage we have gone a long way to rendering our physical tactical training needless [that’s a good thing.] Yes, having defensive tactical skills in the back-pocket is a great ace to carry day-to-day but all the more useful to saving your life or the lives of loved ones is a honed awareness, a ready alertness to what is occurring around you every single day. Here’s the problem, maintaining such awareness is a Tough job with a capital T as most of our daily lives are safe and mundane [also a good thing] and this very safety allows us to backslide in good awareness practices. Without daily danger-stressors we easily fall into default comfort mode. A useful practice to return awareness/alertness to the fore is to gamify your awareness, that is, to use a seri...