Fitness Update: Actual "Worst Shape of My Life." Part 2

 ...but before I tell you exactly what happened, let me describe just a little bit more of my fitness journey. Bear with me, it won't take long and everything else will make more sense.

I had started fitness training (mostly weights) from the influence of a friend of mine whom I would later start dating. I found that it very positively affected my fighting in the Society for Creative Anachronism. I later took up Brazilian jiu jitsu, competing in 50 matches, and then full-contact medieval armored combat, going to world championship competition with the USA team for three years.

Here is possibly the most epic match of my competitive grappling career:

With each of these new challenges I found myself experiencing more means by which to gain strength and endurance and reached new levels of fitness. At my peak I was doing some form of training or fighting five or six days a week. My weight ranged from just under 180 lbs to a bit above 190 lbs depending on what I was training for.

In addition to the SCA armored combat and the BJJ, the training I did included weightlifting, running, Crossfit, kickboxing, Insanity videos. and various bodyweight exercise drills.

Then I tore the ACL in my right knee:

I still trained, but I was unable to fight, and when I got my knee surgically repaired, I was unable to train in certain ways until I was fully healed.

Then I tore my rotator cuff (sadly, no video of this exists). This again limited my training, as there were things I just could not do with my shoulder after that.

Then other "life stuff" got in the way and my weight ballooned to over 200 lbs. I took pictures of myself. I can "suck it in" with the best of 'em, but when I released my belly, I honestly looked like the fat guy with skinny arms.

When I decided to get back to training, I started the Insanity videos again. This time, however, I could actually feel the fat on my torso jiggling up and down when doing any routine that involved having my hands on the floor. It was disconcerting. But progress was being made. I would wear my steel gauntlets  and padded gambeson while doing Insanity videos, getting a little extra resistance and sweat in my workout...and then my room got hit with the "Order to Repair/Vacate Order"....and that brings us up to date.

So, after the yoga, and looking at my bathroom scale not making the number go down below 205, I started up with the Insanity again.

I determined that my muscles were not as strong as my cardio. They would get too sore and tired to continue before I would get too out of breath to continue. I felt the jiggling of the fat in my chest and my stomach when doing running and jumping things, and again I felt the fat around my torso bounce up and down as I did "floor sprints" and other hands-on-floor exercises.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT POST AND FIND OUT!

Return (again) to ECU BJJ!

Well, after three weeks at East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a new work schedule and an illness kept me away for another three weeks, but I finally got back today (Thursday). This was in a week that I also returned to SCA fighter practice on Sunday and working out with G.A. West on Monday and Wednesday. So my body was pre-fatigued and word when I got there, and I did not slack in the class.

There are certain warm-up exercises moving across the floor that I still can't seem to do as fast as the other guys, and it's a little embarrassing. I hate being the last guy, struggling to get those sit-out's across the floor, as the rest of the class is getting ready to do crunches.

We learned a new way to get out of side mount, of which I will post video soon.

When it came to the free rolling portion of the evening, I was first paired with a fellow with great physical mechanics. He pretty much wiped the floor with me, once he was able to get a hold of me.

Next I fought a member of the competition team who rolled with me when I first started coming to ECU, but not much lately. While he was able to beat me several times, he said that I am getting stronger. Where he used to be able to sub,iot me at will, now he has to work at it. He may be right. I did actually feel like I was able to avoid getting trapped in a submission several time. I specifically found moments where I was saying to myself "guard is better than mount! Guard is better than mount!" (meaning that I should try to get om ny knees with him on his back, rather than letting him sit on my chest)Similarly, I fought hard and maintained half-guard and denied a kimura, and was able to avoid several other submissions.

I sat out one round, and in the final round of training I rolled with someone closer to my skill leve. He tried to pass into side mount right away, but left himself open for me to put my leg in front of his neck while seizing his arm for an attempted arm bar. While he was able to get his head out from my leg, I somehow managed to get his other arm with my legs. I had him in a wrestling hold exactly like one I had seen in a Tarzan comic book!

I didn't really know what to do from there. He was unable to escape, so I tried to twist his arm back, but he escaped. I had him in a few advantageous positions, but I lacked the strength, or technique, or killer instinct, or energy, to finish him off, and he submitted me. In the last minute of the round, I was so beat, that I stole a glance at the clock, When I saw there were 17 seconds to go, I decided to see how little I could do and still avoid being submitted, and succeeded.

When I was done, I felt more beat up than I remember feeling. Hopefully, if I keep my training up, I will be able to fight more before getting that feeling again. some things that bother me: I always seem to get my wrists grabbed by the other guy, and I never seem to be strong enough to get out of it. On m y back, a standing opponent seems to be able to grab my ankles and throw me around at will. I need a more effective escape from guard.

Return to ECU

After spending a few months away from East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I returned to classes a few weeks ago. They have a new location in White Plains, which will save a little travel time.

Thursdays are kickboxing and no-gi night now, though. I've never done kickboxing before. I am comfortable with the concept of a stand-up striking game, like SCA combat, but the hazard of getting damaged and the punching and kicking techniques will take a little getting used to.

In the grappling, I am finding that the layoff did me no favors. My endurance is down, and my technique is rusty. Training without the gi is no big deal, I hardly noticed that I could not grab my opponent's clothes or that my belt was coming undone. I did notice that one guy I was training with seems to be more aggressive than he used to be, and he was always aggressive. I seemed to have a better handle on the technique we were learning, but his killer instinct put me in deadly positions anyway. I think I am beginning to get his number, though...

Some background to the Grappling as a Theater Art workshop:

I first got into grappling because I wound up managing a female wrestling team. It started with my girlfriend and I going to fetish clubs and wrestling on the floor. At the time I was also building her up as a model to create action hero for comic books, trading cards, and a website. Soon one or two people had contacted her asking if she did wrestling sessions (where a man pays a woman for an hour or half-hour of wrestling). One of our early clients happened to train in Brazilian jiu jitsu and offered to train us. By this time we had recruited a few other young women we had met at various places into the team to also be characters and do sessions.

We basically made wrestling the “next big thing” in the fetish scene in 2006. We were booked for a few party performance gigs, which I directed. The most notable was something I called “Sadism and Socialism” in which Rudy the Red Rabble-Rousing Radical Reindeer rallied Happy, the Proletarian Worker Elf in rebellion against Mrs. Claus. We even did a skit at the Chinese New Year Celebration at Fighthouse, the martial arts studio where we trained, called “The Perils of Women’s Self Defense.”

The less said about how that wrestling team and I parted ways in this venue the better, but it did lead to me starting to make a short film I would call “The Redemption fo Captain Zorikh.” Before that film was finished, though, two of the featured performers quit the project. So I re-envisioned the work, found a whole new cast and started over. WE trained and rehearsed for 11 weeks, and by the time I was through, the movie now known as “Redemption: Find Out What You’re Worth” was a reality.

One of the things I discovered as a result of that movie was that grappling is a movement vocabulary that, like dance, can be used to tell a story, just like dance. And yet though martial arts have been adapted into dance for decades now, grappling has yet to break though. Also in the stage combat world, grappling is almost unknown (unless you count its uses in Pro Wrestling).

This led me to thinking of putting together a stage show using the grappling arts as a performance medium. We would perform skits using grappling to tell stories or as integral parts of the stories. I thought this might be a good fundraiser for the movie as well as raising the profile of the grappling arts. Life intervened, delaying the completion of “Redemption” and other things. Now however, several things are converging that is making the realization of this dream a possibility.

For over a decade I have been performing with the Faux-Real Theater Company. For the past few years I have been running the wrestling room at the Wicked Faire. I have been working with East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, making videos or them and getting training. Putting all this together, I have decided that I am going to have some sort of performance at the Wicked Faire in February, and with that in mind, held a workshop at ECU BJJ last Saturday to explore a few ideas for this show.

To be continued…

Fundraiseing matches at Acom Sports NY State Grappling Championships #3

Here's the third match of the day in Captian Zorikh's "Redemption" fundraising challenge. This was in gi. Sponsors, watch closely...



So we got three points!

Stay tuned for the takedown and absolute matches!

Fundraising mates at Acom Sports NY State Grappling Championships #2

Here's the second match. Remember, every point scored would earn me $ towards finishing "Redemption."



Total points = 0

Grappling = Dance?

I just saw a program on Channel 13 (PBS) about Black Grace, a predominantly male dance troupe from New Zealand. The founder and leader of the troupe is a brilliant choreographer and in the program he was preparing the troupe for its appearance at the Jacob's Pillow dance festival.

I recognized the same passion I have for this movie project as he had for his dance project. He really wanted to say something with his dance. He really demanded dedication from the dancers.he really believed in the power and ability of dance to communicate feelings and ideas.

Watching this confirmed for me something that I had been thinking and feeling all along: grappling as a performance medium is dance. Through movement, two grapplers can cooperatively tell a story. The moves that they do, the choices that they make, the manner in which they do them, can all combine to make the audience read the relationship between the two of them. The match or scene can be one of comedy or drama or anger or pathos and pretty much anything else, if you just make the choice that that's what it's going to be.

I now have an idea of how to make a stage show using grappling as the performance medium. It would be similar to a pro wrestling shown in that every scene is a "fight scene," but I believe the stories that we can tell can be so much subtler that the typical WWE show.

Videos from Week 6, talk and improvs

Here is the talk I gave to the cast when I handed out the story breakdown. I explained the story and why it is important to have a believable Adversary for the Hero.



So I divided up the cast into two teams and gave them instruction that would lead them to enact a composite scene combining several elements of the story.

Here was the first team to preform their improv, made up mostly of pro wrestlers with Lee Boria as the Adversary, Jonathan Rodriguez standing in for Captain Zorikh, and GA West as the Mentor-to-be.



And then the second team went on, made up mostly of Sammy's team of mixed martial artists and the kung fu class I had recruited on Week 2. Elizabeth Vergara plays the Adversary, Douglas Ahammer stands in for Captain Zorikh, and Sam plays the Mentor-to-be.



These performances allowed me to see new aspects of the story that I had not considered, and showed me what aspects do not work. It was also instrumental in helping me cast the role of the adversary, and decide that the final tournament would be a match between two teams, not three.

Video from Week #3

Camera by Phil Fiumano of NY Rock TV
Editing by Captain Zorikh

More video from Week #2

Here are some highlights from the week 2 audition/workshop

Sammy Vergara inducted into Hall of Honors.

Sammy Vergara, the grappling trainer for "The Redemption of Captain Zorikh," has just been inducted into the Action Martial Art's Hall of Honors in 2009. He was also awarded for "Outstanding Achievements in the Martial Arts" and as an official ambassador for the martial arts.



I am insufferably pleased that this talented young man is working with this production. It gives me very high confidence that we will have an impressive levvel of grappling to display in the movie.