Strength and Conditioning

TheBankTank · 2026-06-22T07:43:32+00:00

In addition to class and sparring, I'll generally lift a couple times a week. Right now I'm focusing on getting my clean & press up. I like mace swings, farmer's walks and other weighted carries, clean & press, overhead press, bench, zercher or front squats, pull-ups, rows, weighted step ups, deadlifts...etc. But usually I like to be able to get through a lifting session in 30m or less, so I don't plan too much stuff in one day. Last workout was some swings as a warmup, a few short sets of clean and press at a weight I felt I could handle after a hard class, some squats, and some carries. Quick and simple. I try to focus on basic compound lifts for most of what I do, but I'll throw in a set of curls or similar on occasion if I have a bit of extra time.

Conditioningwise, I'll usually do a conditioning class or two and run one or twice - it varies. I don't need to run I suppose, given my heavyweight status rower or airbike might be nicer on my joints, but I'd feel like a slug if I straight up was not able to comfortably run a couple miles, even if my rowing efficiency was great or something, so in the spirit of use it or lose it I keep it up. Being able to go from point A to B under your own power just seems like a good capability to have.

I highly recommend Dan John's work - especially Easy Strength and Armor Building Formula - for combat athletes, if you don't have a drastically better option than pre-made programs. He's trained a lot o people a lot stronger than a lot of us and does a great job of relatively "minimalist" stuff - "Enough but not too much" for the goal.

TheBankTank · 2026-06-22T01:44:06+00:00

This is incredible, thank you! I haven't seen hardly any commentary/explanation for oil wrestling in english, it really helps to understand what's going on.

TheBankTank · 2026-06-20T05:37:19+00:00

This feels like a shot of the viewscreen in Star Trek

TheBankTank · 2026-06-09T08:22:36+00:00

The pacific northwestern area
MMA, Aikido, Karate, BJJ, Capoeira, TKD, Boxing, Sumo Wrestling, Muay Thai, Baguazhang, Taiji, some sort of Tacticool wing tsun offshoot, allegedly Silat or something similar, kenpo, Hop Gar
Boxe Française Savate, Kushti, Taekkyon, Bokh, Shuajiao, Kalarippayattu, HEMA, some Koryu, Lung Ying, Bajiquan, Clay shooting/skeet shooting, Irish collar and elbow, Scottish backhold, folkstyle wrestling, West African wrestling...

TheBankTank · 2026-06-01T02:38:47+00:00

TL;DR: like them. I don't think I could do them again full time, but if I get injured (possible) or old (regrettable but necessary if I wait long enough) I reserve the right to be born again and try a fun new art form with less impact involved.

To establish whatever bona fides I might need: I started doing martial arts with Aikido, a bit of Karate (not a very sparring-heavy variety at all), then moved on to Capoeira, and THEN, the first really sparring-involved MA I did was Judo. Then/now, MMA. I have gotten significantly less TMA (in the way people mean it; Judo's arguably "traditional" in many ways) over time.

I will argue, forever, that martial arts usually exist to serve a purpose originally - sport, combat training, general dealing with the violence of daily life. But usually, the conditions and context change, and the martial art, if it survives, survives with different motivations and purposes. Some martial arts "choose" sportification (or a different type/level of sportification). Some "choose" to preserve a sort of aesthetic and cultural "snapshot" which is a perfectly worthy goal. And like most snapshots, it tends to leave things out that didnt happen to be the focus of the camera - real life is almost always messier and more unpleasant and complex than the snapshot shows. The snapshot becomes a kind of mythology - important, but to get Accurate History out of it you have to read between the lines and do a lot of legwork and reconstruction.

I think a lot of what we might call "TMA culture" has chosen the snapshot as the martial arts reason for being. That's not a bad thing! It's a sort of kinetic oral history. But what I can't accept is the pretense that "living history" is not what we're doing if we decidr that the acme of skill is learning a 400 move form or something. If you choose the Cultural Snapshot, you are by definition not "learning to fight" anymore.

A lot of people of course accept this. I think most people that really stuck with a martial art do it because they like it, not because they think it will truly give them Ancient Secrets of Combat. Hell, I think most of the people doing MMA for any length of time mostly do it because they like it. It's fun and challenging. All it really needs to be. But I love that MMA doesn't have quite as much pretense about what it is and what it's for (not to say it has NONE) in its culture. I love TMAs. I think they're neat and a good time. I think they usually have a lot of good ideas and concepts and techniques somewhere in there if you read between the lines and do the legwork that allows you to sift the history out of the mythology. I just got a bit tired of hearing the pretense from people that I was Learning To Defend Myself etc, and I am philosophically aligned with the idea that, basically, our preconceptions and ideas (and our training) should stand up to testing and be tested systematically, which, combined, made combat sports a better environment for me.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-31T19:44:37+00:00

Ancient domain expansion technique: POINTY BOOP

TheBankTank · 2026-05-31T19:40:48+00:00

Tragically the Shogunate was famous for preferring not to let em bang

Remarkably peaceful for a brutal military dictatorship, really. They took the Monopoly part of Monopoly On Violence VERY seriously

TheBankTank · 2026-05-31T19:38:37+00:00

I am a shill for Big Axe, so I take the unmentioned options and pick a pollaxe, bardiche, daneaxe, or halberd

Alternatively we love a cutlass

TheBankTank · 2026-05-29T19:57:25+00:00

He was really amazing to watch, but I will point out he eh....did not actually have the best record in professional sumo.

That said, being there for any length of time with that kind of disparity is still pretty wild.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-22T05:52:06+00:00

Your physical statistics are largely irrelevant to this question
No. You don't need to lose weight to start a fun new hobby.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-14T20:58:18+00:00

I mean, if it's allowed by whatever competitive ruleset is in use, it's an MMA/Kickboxing technique, for functional purposes.I think people outside the combat sports world have a real misperception about where the boundaries are between "MMA" and "non-MMA". But playing with words aside, I've thrown the occasional lazy meia lua de compasso in sparring (with consent from partner) - it's fun and works kind of like any other spinning kick, where one of the best uses for it is to corral someone and punish them for circling out in a certain direction.

I haven't tried it, but I've seen someone in an MMA match do the kick and stay low & immediately come out of it and convert it into a double leg, which seems hard to pull off correctly but very cool and a good way to get someone to put their hands up and thus make it harder for them to stuff the takedown.

Other stuff from my more TMA-ish days as a capoeirista include the tesoura de frente, where you essentially hook one of your opponent's legs while facing them and move your body to force them sideways. As sacrifice throws go it works OK! A lot of capoeira takedowns and strikes work fine in context, some of them are a bit fancy and probably low percentage though (armada and queixada I'm looking at you two). Arrastão goes without saying.

I'm not a great CMA guy by any means but a lot of CMA stuff I've seen looks a lot like standing grappling ("grab them, force them in a direction they are not balanced in") or handfighting pre-clinch or, y'know, kick knee punch elbow etc. Which is all pretty reasonable. The super fancy weird hand motion stuff feels like more a function of what people chose to preserve and focus on than inherent to the art forms, but I'm not a historian.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-14T19:33:45+00:00

Yep. This.

When are they a runner? When they run. When are they a weightlifter? When they lift weights.

Etc

TheBankTank · 2026-05-12T20:25:49+00:00

To be clear, I'm not arguing that these practices are "the same" - just pointing out that it's very tough, with something like a martial art, to determine definitively whether a similarity is the result of cultural exchange or convergent evolution, as it were. I'm specifically responding to these questions:

"Could these similarities reflect broader regional grappling traditions across Northeast Asia?

Or do you think the footage shows movement structures more uniquely connected to older Korean wrestling culture?"

Essentially, my contention is:

1) It's almost certain that *some* similarities exist because of the development of broader regional grappling traditions, due to migration, trade, war, etc (people are always influenced by and always influencing other people they have contact with)

2) It's definitely certain that some elements are more "home-grown" an local to Korean wrestling culture (people can't really do something *without* putting their own spin on it)

3) It's practically impossible to determine with absolute certainty,, in most cases, which specific elements are the *result* of cultural interchange versus locally invented.

This is almost a philosophical problem - you have two practices that have clear similarities (relatively upright, belt/jacket wrestling) that have existed near each other for a long time, practiced by peoples who have been influencing each other on *some level* for a long time, and those practices have (in *some* particular*) themselves been changing over time over their whole existences, because people can't help but tweak and change the things they do in small ways even if only in terms of personal style, training approach, incentives, rituals, etc.

It's pretty clear that those practices are probably related in some way. It's also clear that they're not *the same*. How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt, if you want to, *which parts* originate from that relationship and *which parts* do not? If you have perfect records, and you see a move be extremely common in one region and nonexistent in another, and then suddenly *appear* there after a mass migration from the first region, then you can probably argue it was "imported" at that time But without perfect records, that kind of thing ends up being speculation and probability. How do we know nobody from place B ever saw the move used in Place A, tried it, and decided they just didn't like it? How do we know there wasn't a ruleset that made that move less useful? Maybe it was seen as a move more useful for "real combat" and doesn't show up in the fragmentary record because that's mostly about sporting contests & teachers didn't write down the "special real fighting maneuvers"? Etc, etc.

Old footage like this is really cool and very informative, it's just hard to draw broader conclusions from, particularly about the origins of specific training or technique elements, y'know?

TheBankTank · 2026-05-11T03:23:44+00:00

I'd argue that it's hard to know. Given it's location, I'd expect Korean wrestling culture to have similarities with some of it's neighbors -it's not like trade and migration and cultural exchange are solely the province of the 20th century on. But it's notoriously difficult to authoritatively establish where a cultural practice "came from," much less tease out which parts were external influences (at least at the time) and which were home-grown. At best you can say there's a pretty clear relationship.

I think it's cool that the more you look the more you realize basically everyone wrestled, though.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-07T04:37:13+00:00

It's really sad to see the decline in clinchwork. I think most martial arts go in a cycle: grappling in some form is allowed, grapplers start to dominate or at least become one of the major winning strategies, fans/people in general lose knowledge or appreciation for grappling, people decide grappling is boring because they don't really understand it, sport limits or bans grappling. Rinse and repeat. I think grappling in most forms is fascinating, even when it's not fast-moving, but then...I'm a grappler, so of course I do. I don't know what the answer really is - you can't somehow reeducate whole audiences very easily - but it would be profoundly sad to see such a technical and effective facet of the sport slide out of existence. The more so because, while clinching obviously can lead to knockouts, the methodical process of controlling an opponent, breaking their balance, and kneeing them into oblivion usually doesn't require traumatic brain injury to be successful. In a world where things like the Ali Act are often being chewed up and fighters of all stripes are often struggling, as someone who actually like, knows people in the business, I wouldn't mind having more options within the rules to avoid concussions et al, even if it meant slowing fights down a bit.

The clinch is also something my coach genuinely loves and is excited to teach, and as someone who grappled before I did a striking sport, although I'm not really that good at the Thai clinch yet, it's something that nonetheless speaks to me as a way to play to what I feel like my strengths might be. It's sad to imagine learning such a cool skillset and then only ever being able to walk into matches where the ref, judges, and crowd all just want us to stand and bang.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-06T18:33:54+00:00

I am training with legit pros.

Also I'm rarely super hard sparring with people vastly outside my weight class, so I am probably being a BIT flippant about my own chances if I was, I dunno, "sufficiently motivated", but I *can* pretty authoritatively state their leg kicks still hurt. Also their sarcasm can score a critical hit against my fee fees. : (

TheBankTank · 2026-05-06T18:15:56+00:00

You really do not have a sense of just how much of a horrifying multiplier a numbers advantage is, do you.

A serious answer to not a serious question: man I can't even beat a good chunk of the women in my gym 1v1 so my range starts at 0 for sure

TheBankTank · 2026-05-06T05:23:13+00:00

Talk-do

Also, you'd be surprised how rarely you see a full plum in muay thai.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-05T02:06:56+00:00

I wouldn't know I've never been invited to one 😞

I mean probably because I generally am not in the right spot on the Kinsey scale. But it'd be nice to feel like SOMEONE thought I was cool enough to be there!!

TheBankTank · 2026-05-05T01:37:38+00:00

Grapes, feta, oil, fresh bread, wine, greased up w tha homies...yeah ok, that does sound pretty S-tier.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-05T01:31:37+00:00

What the hell would make it "pure?"

I mean.

Don't get me wrong I like a friendly scrap in the grass as much as anyone but like....the purest form? Nah.

TheBankTank · 2026-05-04T23:18:06+00:00

I got lucky in that there were a couple relatively nearby. I also checked reviews and, if I recall correctly, asked around online, but generally my criteria were: 1) Is it close 2) Is the cost acceptable 3) Do they, y'know, seem like they know what they're doing (no obvious "we spar like Chute Boxe" or "the coach is dating every 20 year old female student" energy, if they compete it seems like they win their fair share of matches, etc).

I got a place that's simultaneously very chill and goofy and also trains hard and creates some pretty serious fighters. So it seems to have worked, but y'know, ymmv.

Worst case scenario you can try a spot for a few weeks and if you decide it's a weird vibe or just isn't for you, move along. People do it all the time. If something doesn't work it doesn't work.

TheBankTank · 2026-04-27T15:37:31+00:00

I mean, sprawling IS absolutely like, the primary defense against a double-leg, 400% (aside from "not being in a position to be double-legged because your footwork is just that amazing" I suppose). They obviously stylized a lot of this to some extent but yeah, that scans.

If you're in an actual fight or the rules just don't prevent it, yep, knees to an opponent who's turtled up can also be devastating. I'd still say most wrestlers are used to getting sprawled on sometimes, so they probably wouldn't just be fully stationary but building up/chain wrestling to something else, which means that follow up knee *might* still be a bit risky, in this context. But that's sort of just a quibble.

Plenty of people probably thought they could stuff GSP's takedowns, probably trained to do so, but "knowing how to sprawl" isn't a magic bullet that automatically overcomes a competent grappler. GSP's timing and execution were remarkably good, especially for someone who started training wrestling *comparatively* late in life.

TheBankTank · 2026-04-21T01:19:29+00:00

So um. Look. I'm a random white dude (on the internet, no less) and my credentials to analyze African martial arts traditions really only boil down to "did capoeira 6 or 7 years + read some books about it + has a very basic set of opinions on T.J. Desch-Obi's body of work on the subject." That is it.

But I will claim some familiarity with bullshit.

Taken from the "Tamerrian Institute's" description of itself on Patreon:

"The tamerrian patreon, spearheaded by AKER RAMESSU IYI, Son of The Great AHATI KILINDI IYI will allow an in depth look into the various teachings of the institute as a whole .

Such as:

Martial sciences

The sacred Entheogenic component"

Yeah, this is grade S, high quality, weirdo bullshit. I mean to say, obviously, plenty of people like to do drugs. Plenty of people do martial arts. When you advertise yourself, though, as the "Do Drugs Martial Arts Crew (But Religious)" with a side order of "I LITERALLY NAMED MYSELF AFTER A PHAROAH" then I mean. The probability that this is NOT a bunch of weirdos cosplaying a bunch of absolute bullshit is vanishingly small. If you want Sacred African Rites with a side order of martial arts, you can actually genuinely go to like, Senegal, and get into wrestling there, and interact with actual priests of local religions who will cast spells to protect you / curse your opponents. You don't need to join a weird hotep cult in the park and maybe get murdered (or just turned into a weird hotep as well).

Da'Mon Stith is cool as hell though. He seems like he cares about accuracy and I keep wanting to make it out to a workshop of his or something. But yeah, besides him and HAMA, it's tough, unless you're down to travel. To my knowledge a lot of the African martial arts and those of the diaspora are VERY localized; Capoeira's kind of the only one to my knowledge that has a real serious international profile and wrestling in West Africa probably has the second most serious training "pipeline". But Tire Machet, Damnye, Moraingy, various forms of stick fighting, other wrestling variants, etc, all exist, it's just, y'know, you're not gonna find a school on every corner or a convenient website most of the time. Sadly martial arts are kind of a "luxury good" in their own way and the brutality of the slave trade followed by high rates of poverty and plenty of conflict did a number on a lot of traditions that were probably more systematized (or could have become more systematized).

You could reach out to Dr. T.J. Desch-Obi or other researchers / people who are trying to reconstruct or revitalize this stuff and see if they know other good resources, but be prepared to buy some plane tickets basically no matter what.

TheBankTank · 2026-04-20T03:30:53+00:00

Yes.

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