Guy's Blog

Guy frequently keeps this blog updated with thoughts, challenges, interviews and more!

Tag: Fitness

Creating a Physical Practice

We have to move.

If a shark stops swimming it dies- and if we stop moving it doesn’t take long before the problems mount up. We can get away with it for a bit longer than sharks, but sooner or later the bill comes due.

Swords are cool- cool enough to get people who have never even considered taking up a physical activity for fun before to actually start training. There are huge long-term health benefits to regular exercise, pretty much regardless of what that exercise is.

But no historical martial art is optimised for long-term health. It can’t be: the immediate needs of surviving the sword fight are more important than the possibility of eventually developing knee problems or back pain. 

The specific ranges of motion required by a given sword fighting style may be quite extreme (such as in a rapier lunge), but they will never be comprehensive: in no style ever do you do a gentle forward stretch with a curved back, or indeed arch as far back as you can sensibly go, or even just touch your heel to your arse to stretch your quads. Those ranges of motion are good for us, but not included in the martial arts themselves. 

I intend to be swinging swords around in various historical manners for decades to come, and I’m already 48. It is therefore necessary to have a physical practice aimed at filling in the gaps, and keeping this carcase in sufficiently good shape that I can be whacking my friends over the head with blades when I’m 90.

I also need to be able to teach my students how to do the same thing- and there’s the rub. Every body is different, and so every training regime should be tailored to the individual. And every body changes over time- ideally getting fitter and stronger, but at least not deteriorating any faster than we can help. Which means that you can’t just learn a routine now and stick with it forever, if you want the best results for the least effort.

I cover the fundamentals of how to train in my book The Principles and Practices of Solo Training and we follow those principles in class. But the book doesn’t include much in the way of specific exercises, because it was intended to lay out the principles, not cover every possible practice. The book will tell you how to train, and how to prioritise your training time, but it doesn’t tell you whether you should be doing push-ups or lunges right now.

To create our practice we need a comprehensive suite of exercises to select from, and the skill to choose from that suite wisely. We also need to know what it is we are training for at any given time. Here are some possibilities:

  • Pre-hab. Long-term injury prevention through movement, range of motion work, breathing and strength training. This is perhaps 50% of all my training.
  • Conditioning. Increasing our strength, speed, range of motion, or other attribute, through exercises of various kinds. This is about 40% of my training.
  • Warming up and warming down: preparing for a specific kind of movement (such as strength training, rapier footwork practice, a longsword tournament bout, or any other high-intensity activity), and promoting recovery afterwards. You may need to warm up for pre-hab or conditioning, of course.

A specific exercise such as an overhead press, or a push-up, or a hamstring stretch can be used in all three of these situations- but how we use it will differ. 

Structuring a Training Session

I run a Trainalong training session over Zoom three mornings a week, and usually structure them like so:

Section One: warm-up.

1. Running a diagnostic. Gentle joint rotations from toes to fingers, with a few squats and some gentle range of motion work. This tells me whether I need to pay attention to a specific area, and whether the session I had in mind is likely to be a good idea.

2. Full range of motion of the spine

3. Shoulder stability work

Section Two: conditioning

Focusing on my own areas of weakness, especially forearms.

1. Some kind of strength work, often bodyweight or kettlebells

2. Leg stability work such as seven-way legs, or kicking practice

3. Forearm conditioning

Section Three: skills practice

1. Some kind of footwork

2. Some kind of weapon handling (though often disguised as stick conditioning drills or bladebell exercises). These are often combined with the footwork, of course.

3. And/or breathing training, such as the Breathing Form.

Section Four: recovery

1. Some breathing

2. Some stretching, especially of the legs

3. Forearm and leg massage (which you may be familiar with from my free Human Maintenance course)

4. A very short meditation

5. Deliberately finishing.

Seeing it broken down like that doesn’t reflect the experience of it. The sections will blend into each other, and overlap- we may intersperse arm weights with footwork, for example. I very often include planks and other “core” work in with the spine range of motion or hip/knee stability exercises. The full-body survey at the beginning and the warm-down ending sequence tend to be quite consistent. I also adjust the training depending on my own health and current needs, and incorporating any requests that the students bring up on the day. 

Some of the weird stuff we do sometimes includes jaw relaxation exercises, toe yoga, and finger dexterity drills. 

I’ve attached a fairly comprehensive list of the exercises we do as a pdf below. Be warned, it’s just a list, and “Granny’s Scarf” may not mean anything to you just yet. But it should give you an idea of what I mean by ‘comprehensive’. 

What about the skill to choose wisely from the list?

That is primarily a matter of mindset. If you go into a session with the intention of finding out what your body needs, and then carefully doing that, you will probably avoid injury, and certainly become better at listening to your body. As every body is different, I encourage my students to adapt or adjust what we’re doing to suit them. I may be recovering from an injury or illness, and be doing some gentle recovery work when we’re twenty minutes in- you may need to be doing push-ups or kettlebells while I’m resting. While the class is doing Turkish Get-ups, a student with a knee problem may be doing her prescribed rehab exercises.

Levels of Difficulty

Every exercise can be done at various levels of difficulty. Let’s take the humble push-up for example:

1. Knees on the ground, go down an inch.

2. Knees on the ground, work up to going all the way down.

3. One leg extended

4. Full push-up position, hold

5. Working up to a full basic pushup

6. Different hand positions- three knuckle, two knuckle, one knuckle, prima, seconda, quarta, hands wide, long, staggered, etc.

7. Going for more repetitions

8. Slow push-ups (eg 30 seconds down, 30 seconds up)

9. Plyo push-ups, eg clap push-ups, or push-up-twisting-squat-jump-burpees

10. One-armed push-ups

11. One-armed push-ups with different hand positions

12. Plyo one-armed push-ups

And so on.

I may be working on 6, while one student is on 2, and another on 11. Literally every exercise has easier and harder versions, so can be adapted to anyone’s current level.

Join Us!

It is very relaxing to just show up and do as you are told for a while, and indeed having a personal trainer who knows you well and pushes you as needed would be great. But as martial artists, more is expected of us. We can’t be dependent on external forces to guide our training- we must take ownership and responsibility for our own development. And outside a one-to-one coaching session, no trainer can perfectly adapt the class to your needs. But you can. 

One way to learn to do that is to come to my Trainalong sessions. You can find them in our Sword People community.

 Everyone is welcome, whether you’re super-fit or not fit at all (yet). You won’t hold up the class (or be held up) because we are all moving at our own pace.

Useful resources on this topic:

You may find The Principles and Practices of Solo Training helpful.

I cover a lot of the exercises in the Solo Training course, though that course focusses primarily on weapons handling. https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/solo-training 

You can have a go with a sample session here:

You can download the exercises list here: Trainalong Curriculum

You may find my conversation with biomechanist Katy Bowman: Movement Matters.

Read Full Post

Staying fit- what to do?

Hello.

I’m having trouble making sure I hit all the pain points in my own training. I have a simply enormous variety of exercises and practices that I should be keeping up with. Such as:

Meditation: Awareness of Breathing, Body Scan, Mantra, Movement.

Breathing exercises: Wim Hof method, standing qigong, the Crane, 9 breaths, the Health QiGong form.

Bodyweight exercises: push-ups (many kinds), pull-ups, plank/killer plank, squats (many kinds), quadruped movement.

Leg technique: kicks (front, round, side, back, hook, stomp, crescent inside, crescent outside), leg swings. Footwork drills (accressere discrescere, 4 guards, rapier footwork form, smallsword footwork and lunges etc. etc.) 7-way hips.

Weights: Kettlebells: overhead press, Turkish Get-Up. Small dumbbells: turns, rolls, wings. Clubs: figure 8s, cutty-cutty, krump-schiel-zwerch, squats. Long stick: figure 8s, static catch, twisting catch, feed-through, prima-quarta extensions, play. Short stick: shoulder mobilisation routine, shoulder stretches.

Stretches/ flexibility training: Hamstrings, single leg extension, back arch, forward bend, side bend, twists left and right, four-way wrists, shoulders.

Skills practice:

Pell: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword

Point control: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword, smallsword

Handling drills: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword, smallsword, long stick/spear.

Forms: Longsword, Rapier, Sword and Buckler, T’ai Chi, Health qg.

Massage: knees-feet; elbows-hands

(All of these except the meditation are included in depth on the Solo Training Course. I’m currently working on a standalone meditation course based on a six-week series of classes that is just finishing up.)

There are lots of ways to categorise these activities. Some are very much therapeutic (such as the forearm turns, rolls, and wings with small weights, which are part of my tendonitis prevention routines), others are more about developing or maintaining overall strength and fitness. Massage is only remedial, some skills training is also conditioning (such as kicks), some don’t seem to fit in a simple box. This makes organising them into a clear system hard.

My usual approach is to simply do what my body feels is necessary. My body is very good at telling me what it needs now, but not so good at predicting what it will wish it had done in five years’ time. I need to take a more deliberate approach. This may mean dropping some training altogether- as a deliberate choice, rather than an accidental ‘oh, I haven’t done that in two years’ realisation, and doubling down on the things that work. 

The overall goal is to be fit enough and skilled enough to do my job properly now, and sensible enough to be still able to do my job properly when I’m 70 or 80 (because why retire? From swords? Really?). Most of my exercises are either sword-skill specific, or establishing the necessary ranges of motion under load (so, strength/flexibility combinations), or about creating a state of mind, or deliberately adjusting my metabolism.

I probably could develop a simplified routine that hits all the bases, but I’d get bored of it quite quickly, and it would inevitably become less effective as my body adapted to it. And I’d lose a lot of the fun stuff. As it stands, a normal session will include some breathing, some conditioning, some skills, and some remedial work. I usually do the meditation separately, and the flexibility stretches also separately, at night.

I control my weight through diet (following the principle that you can’t outrun your mouth), so weight loss/gain/control is not a consideration.

I know from experience that writing out a training program for a weekly or monthly routine will be an excellent theoretical exercise but I won’t stick to it for more than maybe a couple of days unless I’m doing it with a group of people. So one option would be to lay out say a month’s worth of training sessions and publish it as a class program, recruit students onto the course, and then I’d have to stick to it.

Another option would be to just keep all my toys handy, and play with the ones I feel like every day. That’s pretty much what I’ve done in the past, and especially with the help of the regular Monday, Wednesday, and Friday exercise sessions, it works quite well but not perfectly. If you'd like to join in you can find the sessions here.

The Zoom recordings (when I remember to hit the button) are uploaded on the Solo Course. You can see today's session on my vimeo channel here:

Friends, readers, and students, lend me your brains. What should I do to bring order to this galaxy?

And while you're here, let me invite you to the best party this weekend: my AMA video hangout with Jess Finley on Sunday. Join us!

Read Full Post

A new challenge

A few months ago I decided to take part in the Isle of Wight Challenge, a 106km walk done over the first weekend in May. This is totally unlike any other physical thing I have ever done, so I am approaching it with caution. (Props to Joanna Penn for suggesting it; I've joined her Creatives team for the walk.) My overarching goal is to stay healthy, so I have been thinking a great deal about how to train for it. I have been a fan of minimalist footwear since wearing medieval shoes on the medieval streets of Verona in early 2014, and have now gone so far as to own and use a pair of five-toed shoes, to the horror of my children and other conservatives. I trust a million years of evolution over fashion when it comes to my feet. But I need to build up the strength in my feet to handle the uneven terrain and the unusually long duration of this walk. My current approach can be divided into “gym stuff”, “morning routine”, and “training walks”, which I'll outline below. I’d be delighted to hear your suggestions for how to improve it.

Gym stuff

I’m taking most of my training inspiration from Ryan Flaherty (sorry about the Insta link; it's the only place on the net I can find him) and have been working on my hex bar deadlift. I was at 80kgs in September, and hit 110 before Christmas. This exercise really works the lower leg, and trains the feet to take the strain of all that weight. I’m concentrating on doing a few sets, with low reps: a typical session might look like this: 3 reps at 80kg, 3 at 90, 3 at 100, 3 at 110, 2 at 110. Job done.

I’m also including his 7 way hip exercise for knee stabilisation:

I'm also doing box jumps, at which my current personal best (without putting my hands on the box) is 33 inches. These are great for developing the fascia, which store and release energy.

And of course, I’m following my own advice from my (free) knee maintenance course regarding range of motion work, massage, and so on.

Morning routine

I usually do about 25 minutes or so of exercise every morning immediately after waking up (and making my wife a cup of tea— priorities!): gentle range of motion stuff, followed by three rounds of Wim Hof breathing, followed by a fourth with push-ups in the empty lungs stage, then my shoulder mobilisation routines, and a few burpees if I feel like it. This is followed by a cold shower (I brush my teeth while letting the shower run to get it properly cold). I videoed my routine a couple of years ago, so take a look here if you'd like to see it, though it has changed a bit since then. Then breakfast, and walk the angels to school. This was my normal morning routine before I decided to do the challenge walk, and I haven’t changed it materially. I also do about 5-20 minutes of stretching in the evenings while watching TV.

Training Walks

I tend to walk everywhere anyway. On a day when I don’t train at all, I’ll more likely than not walk about 10k (according to my motion-tracking ring of power), taking my kids to and from school, and walking to the office and back. On a recent trip to London I needed to get from the hospital where I was visiting my mother in law, to the pub I was having dinner in, about four miles away. It seemed easier to walk it than to fiddle about with tubes and busses. But four miles is not 70. The big problem with going on long training walks is the time they take. I’m used to being able to hit most of my training goals in under an hour’s work. Fortunately, the current trend in training for races is not to cover the total distance (even for short sprints like the 100m). I recently went on a 24km training walk around Alton Water (a convenient beauty spot, with a footpath circuit) which served as a useful diagnostic for the efficacy of my current approach. Two laps of Alton Water covers 24km, and took me four hours, plus half an hour each side for getting there and back. Five hours spent, and it’s less than a quarter of the total distance I’ll be covering in May. (I'm using the Map My Walk app on my android phone to measure training walks. It seems quite accurate, and gives useful data, like elevation as well as distance.)

Lessons from 24km

The walk served as a useful diagnostic for my training progress so far. By far the biggest problem was actually my shoulders. About 15k in, both of my shoulders were spasming in agony. A few shoulder rotations helped, and I didn’t stop for it because there was no clear indication that the walk was creating an injury; it’s just my bloody useless thoracic/cervical spine doing it’s usual crap job. So I will be increasing my shoulder maintenance routines, and seeing if I can figure out why walking is causing the problem. As far as I can tell, it’s irritating the nerves, probably at the junction of C5 and C6 (based on the pattern of the pain), which suggest a hypermobility there, caused by a lack of mobility probably between C6 and C7. In addition to mobility exercises for my upper spine, I’ll also be trying those ghastly ski poles that have become super-fashionable amongst walkers. I hate them because they’re ski poles, but you’re not skiing, and because they occupy both hands at once, and because they’re weapons but not very good weapons (not least because the handle is optimised for an ice-pick grip, though you’d never normally hold a weapon that long that way); seeing a gaggle of walkers coming towards me who are all heavily armed with crap weapons (as I see them), and clearly have no idea of point control, gives me conniptions. [Boy was I ever wrong about those sticks. They are a complete game changer.]

I started out the walk with a four-beat breathing rhythm: in for four steps, out for four steps (no breath-holding). As I warmed up and sped up over a couple of k, that went up to three and three; on the hilly bits, it even went up to two and two. In the easier stages (most of the walk is pretty flat; this is East Anglia after all!) it sometimes went down to five and five, and at no stage was I at all out of breath. When I could see a hilly bit coming, I'd deliberately increase the pace of my breathing to purge CO2 and prevent creating an oxygen debt.

The next day I was completely fine: no significant stiffness or pain. I could feel that my legs had been active, and the soles of my feet were a bit tired, but that was it. (I was wearing Vivobarefoot winter boots).

I am also thinking about doing the long walk in a state of ketosis, to reduce oxygen requirements and because it’s generally better for endurance work. Triggering ketosis is easy enough, but it requires some preparation, and may be hard to maintain with the food available at the actual event. We’ll see…

Advice Please!

Perhaps the most important decision that I have yet to make about this walk is which charity to support. Givewell.org have their recommendations, which are based on lives saved for dollars spent. But I’m not sure that the charities they recommend are necessarily the best use of the funds. Preventing malaria is of course massively worthwhile, but Bill Gates is currently working on it. Will whatever I can raise really make a difference? Perhaps something along the lines of education? Or sexual equality? Education for girls in the developing world perhaps? What about baby rhinos? Or pandas? God, this is such a first-world problem to have, isn’t it? I would very much like to hear your recommendations. When I’ve chosen a cause to support, rest assured I’ll be asking you to donate towards it.

Read Full Post
Search

Recent Posts

Categories

Categories

Tags

Tags