The holidays break was a great opportunity to polish my manuscript and add some of my recent learnings in #muaythai and #bjj into the story. Feeling pretty good about how they mix with the main character’s #taichi and #daoism background and the frighteningly real advancements in #artificialintelligence and #neuroscience

After the encouraging notes from the editor and a lot of trimming to keep the pace fast, maybe it will be time to talk to agents and publishers soon.

#fantasybooks #fantasywriters #fantasywriting #martialarts

Given the warrior origins of all martial arts, it’s natural that discussions often lan on what’s more effective than what. Most of the times debating effectiveness on the streets or in big competitions like ufc as the ultimate ring. Natural, but likely shortsighted, if you look at this field as an ecosystem.

In combat sports it’s crucial that athletes focus on a few high percentage techniques they can master while at their peek.

But since athletes are different, they need coaches that will know all the high percentage techniques to recommend them the few that work for them.

Since percentages eventually mutate once an innovator changes the game and turns an obscure low percentage into high, these coaches also need masters with a complete knowledge of the art, regardless of percentage in competitions, even if that takes a lifetime to achieve.

And those masters sometimes need a different perspective, a source they can go to to find other ideas for challenges they face, ideas that will trickle down the entire system, and often those ideas will come from other styles that were previously considered ineffective until one genius of that art showed how it can be done (as an example, take mma and how Machida made karate dangerous again, or Ronda made Judo badass once more… those two arts, at that time, were considered dead that by many “specialists”)

My point is martial arts is an ecosystem that relies on the deep passion of each individual like a natural biosphere requires each species to survive so everything can thrive.

Passion should be celebrated, not debated. For whatever tickles their fancy – competition, coaching, encyclopedic knowledge, cultural preservation… Athletes, coaches, masters of fashionable arts and the preservers of lost arts are all fundamental to this crazy thing we do and love so much. Therefore, the entire discussion of what’s the best style denotes either one’s small perspective on combat arts, a comercial bias, or just the fact that you haven’t grown enough into it to develop perspective.

Unfortunately, after 30 years in martial arts, I can tell that true perspective requires distance and experience– it’s not something you can build fast like a competitive edge, or easy, like watching people fighting from the comfort of sofa.

#martialarts #mma #bjj #karate #tkd #judo #boxing #muaythai #sambo #wrestling #taichi #kempo #wingchun #tkd #kungfu

Who uses data and devices to improve their training? I’ve been using the #whoopstrap to monitor my performance. It’s interesting to see that the best indicator of a good day for me is how rested I am. Duh… but that isn’t totally related to the simple number of hours of sleep. It’s a combo. The hours, but also the quality of that sleep. How regular it has been, how much it compensates for the strain the previous day, but more than anything to what I had for dinner the night before (and what time). A late or a heavy dinner always correlates to a poor sleep and as a consequence a shitty performance the following day.

Case in point: 6h27 usually isn’t enough sleep for an 84% recovery. But because I had a light dinner last night, I had a highly efficient sleep. In the morning, my mind was clear, my body was rested and ready. I took one hour of yoga then 90min of Bjj. At 46 years old, I was the last to leave the mat. More than that, I managed to make a lot of things work. Things I tried before but was too confused to bring them to life in the middle of a roll.

Then I looked back at my own posts and compared the days I reported great performance and using things I had just learned with the days with efficient sleep. They are a perfect match.

All this may seem like common sense to you, but when you leave it to the “feeling” it’s easy to give it a blind eye. The data, on the other hand, is way more unforgiving. Almost as much as the partners that are going to try to choke me and rip my arms off if I am not on a good day.

#bjj #oss #whoop #sportsdata #martialarts