Fit for Combat – Routine #1

Warm Up Exercises for Martial Training & The Push Shuffle Drill

A warm up should be performed before participating in technical sports, exercising, or stretching, and Combative training is no exception. Warming up generally consists of a gradual increase in intensity of physical activity. This increase the heart rate, which in turn increases blood flow to your muscles and raises your body temperature. Warmer muscles are more elastic and less susceptible to injury. It is important that warm ups should be specific to the exercise that will follow, which means that muscles used in the warm up are the muscles required for the following activity. In the case of martial arts, where all muscles are being trained to react with speed and power, all major muscle groups should be warmed up with special emphasis on the feet and legs.

Footwork is the foundation of combatives, so proper warm up and exercise of the legs and feet is essential. Here are several useful warm up exercises.

The Rocker Step:

• 1. Stand in the Bai Jong stance.
• 2. Push off the rear leg, landing on the ball of your front foot.
• 3. Push off your front leg, and land on the ball of your rear foot.

Bouncing, or “rocking” back and forth like this, while not at all the sort of movement useful in martial arts, is a good warm-up for the legs and feet – especially as moving on the balls of your feet, basic to martial footwork, is not naturally practiced when walking.

Advanced variants: Consciously vary the distance covered on each “rock.” Switch leads a few times. Add a punch or two on every other forward “rock.” Beyond this, it becomes Shadow Boxing – throw combinations of punches/kicks while returning quickly to proper stance and moving more erratically.

Jumping Jacks:

• 1. Stand with your feet together, arms at your sides.
• 2. Jump with both legs, spread them to a little more than shoulder width, land on the balls of your feet.
• 3. At the same time, swing your arms out and above your head.
• 4. Reverse the last two steps, returning to your original position.

Jumping Jacks warm up support muscles on the sides of your legs, and get shoulder muscles warmed up too.

Advanced variants: Lunge Jumping Jacks – Same as above, except as you jump bring one leg forward and one back. Reverse legs on the next jump. Gradually sink deeper into the lunge each repetition, being careful to keep the lead knee behind the lead toes at the lowest point.

Running in Place:

When running in place, practice *always* keeping your arms up. That is where you will want them in a fight, so train with them there. Run in place with the legs forward, your knees rising to your waist, to warm up the thighs, and with your legs down, kicking your heels behind you, to warm up the hamstrings.

Jump Rope:

The upper-lower body coordination, combined with mandatory quick motion, make jumping rope a great warm-up, and one that quickly transitions into a cardiovascular workout if kept up.

The Push Shuffle Drill:

A specific part of the Fit for Combat Warm-Up is the Push Shuffle drill. The Push Shuffle drill warms up the leg muscles, exercises support muscles not much used in regular walking, and increases the speed and coordination of your footwork. In the Push Shuffle Drill, the instructor calls out a set of 2 to 4 cardinal directions (forward, back, left, right), and the student quickly executes Push Shuffles in each indicated direction. I have automated the instructor’s part for you, so if you have an mp3 player or computer media player with a “random” setting and a place to work out, you can do the Push Shuffle drill by yourself.

My class always starts warming up with a few of these exercises. Remember: warming up will help to minimize your chance of injury, and maximize the benefits you get every time you train. After you have warmed up for 5-15 minutes, you can continue the exercises above with increased intensity for an aerobic workout, or move on to anaerobic training, technique drills, etc.

Train Hard – You Fight As You Train

K.W.I.C – Having No Way As Way:

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Bruce Lee’s Phases of Jeet Kune Do Learning:

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Martializing Martial Arts – Article #1

The Basic Principle: Interception is Integration

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object head-on?

Here’s a better, or at least a more answerable, question: why should they meet head-on at all? And if an opponent’s fist is substituted for the irresistible force, and your jaw for the immovable object, I bet you would agree they should never meet head on. The question then becomes, what are your options?

Once such a force is on its way, there are four basic options:

• 1. Do nothing: Let force meet obstacle – Passive response, passive result
• 2. Dodge the attack: Let force miss obstacle – Passive response, active result
• 3. Block the attack: Stop force with force – Active response, passive result
• 4. Intercept the attack: Use all force to your own advantage – Active response, active result

We have already ruled out the first option – there are obviously better, less personally damaging, ways of dealing with an attack than doing nothing…

Such as the second option: dodge the attack. Not a bad idea. If you are about to get hit, move to where you won’t get hit. It is quick, instinctive, and effective in avoiding injury. The fatal flaw: by itself, dodging an attack does not improve your circumstances for more than a few seconds. You are still on the defensive, and if you simply keep dodging, your moves are likely to be anticipated, or you will be backed into a corner. This makes refined variants of this technique, such as the bob-and-weave, useful as secondary reactions – but not primary reactions.

The third option is better. Block your opponent’s strike, neutralizing the attack. Use the “hard method” of the martial arts, throwing your force against your opponent. However, there are two obvious problems with this option: 1. If your force is not of the right type and in the right place, you may as well have done nothing. 2. This response, like dodging, leaves you in reaction. You are still merely responding to the environment and not controlling it. You deal with the force, but expend energy in doing so, and gain only time, not initiative.

That leaves the fourth option: interception. The use of all force, including your opponent’s force, to your own ends. In the domain of grappling, Judo and Jujitsu are known for this. The use of “ju” in each case is an explicit reference to the martial arts principle of the “soft method” – using your opponent’s strength and energy against him.

The idea of interception came into its own in Jeet Kune Do. As Bruce Lee said in Longstreet, “To reach me, you must move to me. Your attack offers me an opportunity to intercept you.” That is it in a nutshell. As an attack approaches, instead of simply moving out of the way or blocking, launch an attack of your own. Interception is the ultimate combination of “soft” and “hard” techniques, and can use both forces to your advantage. This is one of the principles of Jeet Kune Do that make it the best known foundation for unarmed martial arts expression.

By using all forces to your advantage, interception is the most complete, most whole, most Integrated foundation of combat. So it the basic principle of K.W.I.C..

“When an opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, I do not hit; it hits all by itself”.

– Bruce Lee, “Enter the Dragon”

Information Level: Basic

Happy New Year to all of you. Now, start the year off right, and make sure you have a backup of all your important data.

REMEMBER:
1. All of your irreplaceable digital photos, your mp3 music collection, your college papers and/or office documents, and your business/financial information, is stored on what is basically a glorified cassette tape! The hard drive is susceptible to magnetic, electronic, and physical damage… not to mention the motor may simply burn out.
2. Archiving is NOT the same as backing up. If you simply archive your data by moving it from your computer hard drive to an external storage medium, it is still only stored in ONE PLACE, and that one place may break in any of the aforementioned ways, or just get lost.

The Three Levels of Data Backup, plus one bonus:

For the casual computer user:
If you use your computer relatively lightly, mainly browsing online, word-processing, and some family photos, you can simply back up all of your data to a thumb drive. Thumb drives are small (thumb-sized), cheap (often less than $50), and are less likely to break because they have no moving parts, but they are more easily lost and have limited capacity.

I have a few of these SanDisk Cruzer Micros kicking around, and they have served me well. Most of your data is probably in your “My Documents” folder. Get a thumb drive, copy everything in “My Documents” to it, now you have a backup.

For the more frequent computer user/music lover/video collector:
If you use your computer more than a little, you may have a lot more data than will fit on a thumb drive. All of you with an extensive iPod music collection: this means you. You can follow the same procedure as with thumb drives, but with an external hard drive

For hard drives, I recommend Seagate – they can fail like any hard drive, but they’re well made, and have one of the best warranties around.

For the business computer:
For the business computer, data loss is not an option. Business computers can hold the most valuable data, while working harder than the average computer in less than ideal conditions… for such mission-critical systems, you should backup your data daily, as above, and “image” the entire drive regularly as well, so if disaster strikes, all your data as well as the operating system and your software can be restored in a couple of hours. Either an internal or external hard drive will do the trick.

‘Hard Disk Light Effects‘ by Matt and Kim Rudge via Flickr

Contact theTechRelay.com if you would like further assistance/advice on a backup solution for your data. We’re here to help!

Bonus solution – Internet backup for your part of the internet:

What happens if Facebook crashes? Or Twitter? Or Gmail? Do you have a copy of all your images/status updates/emails? Probably not. That’s what Backupify has stepped into the breach to do. Backupify is an online service that will automatically backup all your online accounts, and let you browse & download the backups. Backupify is a new service. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, and it looks pretty good. The best part is that if you sign up before the end of this month, it’s free! If you have invested time and energy into your online life via Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, etc., check them out.

Please, start the new year right. BACKUP your data. Data recovery is very expensive, and never a sure thing.

Information Level: Basic/Intermediate

In The Short List I recommended Sunbelt Personal Firewall (free version) as my firewall of choice. I have since discovered two problems with it: 1. It presents a nag screen every once in a while, asking you to upgrade to the paid version, and 2. It does not work with Windows Vista (don’t know about 7). PC Tools Firewall Plus has neither of these drawbacks, and is still effective and light on system resources.

If you only use your computer at home, behind a broadband router that has a built-in firewall, the Windows firewall is good enough for you. However, if you use your computer at public/campus Wi-Fi hotspots or the like, you should install PC Tools Firewall Plus, or another third-party software firewall that monitors traffic both ways.

I do not recommend ZoneAlarm, Norton, or McAfee – All can be major resource hogs, and while they are all pretty good at protecting your computer, making your computer less useful kinda defeats the purpose.

Do you get an error message when you start up Microsoft Word? Most weird Word errors are caused by a corrupted template file called “normal.dot.” It loads when word starts, and if something is wrong with it… you get an error. Fortunately, if you simply delete this file Word will create a new and un-corrupted one. For versions of Word through 2003 it is located in:
C:\Documents and Settings\ (Your Username) \Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
Navigate to this folder with hidden files visible and delete “normal.dot” then restart Word…
Or simply download and run wordfix-normal.bat.

Finally, if you are reading this through a syndicated feed, you may not have seen theTechRelay.com lately. Have a look, it has gotten a major face lift, and I’d love to hear what you think.

All good, all free. Everyone running Windows should try out this software. Period.

Keep Secure:

• Panda Cloud Antivirus – Lightweight and effective.
• Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (free version) – For manual malware removal redundance.
• Sunbelt Personal Firewall (free version) – The best combination of a lightweight & effective firewall I have found.
• KeePass – Store all your passwords securely, because you HAVE TO use different and more complicated passwords than can be remembered.

Stay Tuned up:

• Advanced SystemCare Free – Best allround tune up (be sure to un-check “start with windows” in the options after you install it).
• Revo Uninstaller – For completely removing software you don’t want.
• Defraggler – Defragment your hard drive every month, and use this.

Now get stuff done:

• Firefox – Faster and more secure web browser than Internet Explorer
• Thunderbird – Faster and more secure email client than Outlook/Outlook Express
• OpenOffice.org – A full office suite for starving students and frugal businesses alike
• Paint.NET – Great image editor, for all your picture-cropping-and-red-eye-removing needs.
• Google Earth – See Earth from above (not to mention the Moon and Mars)!
• VLC media player – Not flashy, but it can play almost anything… even corrupted or incomplete media files.
• Sumatra PDF or Foxit Reader – Both are way faster and, again, more secure than the standard Adobe Reader.
• CDBurnerXP – Great free CD and DVD burner.
• 7-Zip – Open pretty much any compressed file you come across online.

There is, of course, lot more great free software out there, but I would call this a good baseline selection.

What must-have free software do you use?

Well, I am impressed. The latest entry in to the realm of free (as in beer) antivirus software, Panda Cloud Antivirus, is closer to the Platonic Ideal of AV-ness than any I have seen before. Here’s why:

1. It works – PC World said in August that it was “the best app at blocking known malware,” and I can confirm it fulfills this essential function well.
2. It does not bog-down your PC in the process of doing it’s job. This is my main problem with antivirus software… and why as often as not I have had the bad habit of not running AV on my personal computer (I know, shame on me). But Cloud Antivirus has a diminutive >16mb ram footprint. Even I can live with that.
3. How it manages to do both 1 and 2 is darn clever. In a nutshell, all the serious antivirus processing and updating is done on Panda’s servers, they stream the latest signatures hashes to your client in real-time while collecting information on the latest threats from clients all over the world. Distributed intellegence comes to antivirus.
4. Oh, and it has a very simple and easy to use user interface. You won’t be able to accidentally disable your internet connection with it.

It WORKS, your PC still WORKS, it’s EASY to use, and it’s FREE. This makes Cloud Antivirus my new provisional favorite AV software, and the one I’ll be installing & recommending to my clients.

So, what are you waiting for… Go get it!

http://www.cafepress.com/wheelturns
http://www.cafepress.com/aieloath
http://www.cafepress.com/feathermountain
http://www.cafepress.com/dragonsworn

And to anyone who is a fan of fantasy, and not familiar with The Wheel of Time, I say this:

It is the greatest High Fantasy series since The Lord of the Rings, it is 13 books long, so far, and you should read it!

http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2009/03/10-annoying-hab.html

And with such entertaining articles to consume, it is ever a challenge to make time for the creation of content…

Over and out,
VV

Everything… and nothing.

That is the message of this, my first blog entry for iNeed.to/integrate; that the decisions made this night by the electoral college will have far reaching consequences for the world, and at the same time, all that anyone can do is chart their own course – change their own life.

Only YOU choose whether YOU are merely created by your circumstances, or whether you create your circumstances, whether you are a victim or victor.

You have a choice… but only if you choose to choose.