What’s your flavour? Sport vs. Art

Back in the days when we were hunter-gatherers, we’d walk miles everyday and did strenuous chores that kept us fit. On top of that, we faced the daily threat of attack from wild animals and enemy villages. We needed to be physically and mentally prepared to face these attacks at any time, and our instincts developed in response. As life became more civilized, we learned to deal with these threats in other ways.

Fast forward to modern times. We now live in a world where these instincts are no longer needed yet they are raging within us. There is no balance, our instincts are unchecked, controlling our thoughts – how we interact, how we view the earth and how we view life. Many of our natural instincts lie dormant within us. As a way to harness these instincts and direct and release our inner animal instinct and our analytical strategic war mind, humans invented sports.

Take Football for instance – a veritable war game. Think about it… It’s about plotting and methodically taking the opposing army’s real estate until they have none left. At that point you march right into their endzone (their castle) with the football (your flag) and plant it firmly on their turf. You’re not supposed to ever get there, and definitely not with the audacity of bringing your football ie the proof of your occupation of enemy territory. By doing this, you score points in the game and leave one team superior and another inferior. It’s a very serious thing and the players basically try to kill each other within the agreed upon rules.

This game portrays the essence of sport – and it’s awesome. And so it is with most sports – a way to satiate our human instincts without actually addressing them. It’s an ideal mental and physical release that can help ease aggressions and calm the mind.

Sport has a big brother though that everyone knows but nobody wants to talk about. I’ll categorize this as martial arts – it includes wrestling, boxing and all the traditional martial arts as well as the newest one, mma. Where the objective of traditional sport is to score on your opponent by say, crossing a line, or putting a ball in a net, or a puck in a goal, it lacks the physical defeat so profound in martial arts.

In martial arts, the objective is to make the other person quit, using your body mind and spirit. Your win isn’t achieved by scoring a goal, it’s won by literally overcoming your opponent using real life scenarios. The win in martial arts is about conflict management through knowing yourself and understanding your enemy’s instincts. A skilled martial arts master will teach you their art with these points in mind. In addition to combat techniques, they will show you the intangible skills you are developing and how to integrate them into your life. Things like compassion, anger, self-doubt, criticism, judgement, hate, self awareness, these are all things you will learn under the tutelage of a master.

When you’re in combat it is impossible to be fake. There’s a saying in martial arts “fighting someone new for two minutes is worth two years knowing them.” The purpose of martial arts is self-perfection and you can achieve this if martial arts is taught mindfully with the intention of achieving this goal at the forefront. And it’s very effective because the techniques learned are used to protect you in life or death situations – its a lot more serious than any game! (Even though its the most fun!)

Perhaps the most interesting paradox about martial arts, is that at its highest level, the goal is to win without combat… but to do that, you must know fully yourself, and your opponent and understand what it is to compete and conquer. Now, contemplate that and go train!

Meet Gina Carano former womens’ MMA World Champion. She does the same physical training as everyone else who trains intensively but when she applies it the results are outstanding. That’s functional strength!

In this video Gina’s strength and conditioning trainer explains the how and why of her functional strength program.

Here are some Tips and Strategies to Train Like an Olympian

1.  Olympians train two to three times per day to stay in shape for competition.

The average person doesn’t necessarily require this much training however if it’s organized by an expert, you can definitely benefit from it. Regular workouts are designed to increase your metabolism, the rate at which your body processes food. After a workout, your metabolism returns to normal level within a couple of hours. By training two or three times per day your metabolism is never allowed to slow down, which means your body is constantly burning carbs, fat or anything it would normally store in reserve. This is the same type of training out of shape celebrities use (think Britney Spears on her comeback tour last year!) when they have a concert to do in a month.

When I was on the Canadian Kickboxing team we trained twice a day. Training this intensely increases your confidence level and muscle memory, giving you familiarity with the techniques you will use in your fight and all but guarantees that fatigue will not be a factor.

How can you do the same? Mini workouts. It takes only half an hour of exercise to increase your metabolism and it will last for 4- 8 hours depending on the intensity of your workout. If you can schedule one mini-workout into your lunch hour, one in the morning before work, and another in the evening, your body will get a much better workout than if you’d trained for an hour and a half straight.

The workout doesn’t need to be weight oriented. You can include swimming, jogging, boxing, etc., Or, ideally, you could include weights as your base workout and supplement with other vigorous activities to add variety to your training while increasing your metabolism and cardiovascular health!

2.  Olympic competitors have psychologists on their team!

Why? Because the idea that we shape our reality with our mind is true! The strongest weapon we possess is our mind, but it is also our weakest – if you’ve been beat before, it’s easier to be beat again. Your mind knows the amazing feeling of relief when you reach the end of your goal so sometimes its tempting to fast track your way to an early ending.

Many athletes benefit from professional hypnosis or pre-competition rituals such as thumping their heart with their right fist and then holding it in the air to put them in the zone to achieve their best performance. Positive routines bring out our A game.

Guided imagery techniques can help athletes in all levels of competition. These techniques include viewing your opponent as an object, as opposed to a person so you won’t feel bad about what you have to do to them to win – they are strictly there to help you improve your game. Another is viewing yourself as the hunter and your opponent as the prey to bring out your natural aggression. Another idea is to view competition as a match between two consenting adults which makes it disrespectful to your opponent to not try your best because they are trying their best too and after all, it is a mutual agreement!

You can learn guided imagery through a sports psychologist, yoga or through a good martial arts instructor – preferably one who does personal training so you can learn it one-to-one. They can show you the stages of progress your mind is going through and how to deal with it because they’ve been there before.

3. Remove distractions

Some competitors seem to cut through pressure like a hot knife through butter , but for many competitors its not so easy. Training for their ultimate test around family and friends can add pressure to an already intense situation. The mental effort, mood swings and gruffness the athlete is undergoing may be too intense to subject their families to and many have trouble even understand the situation.

What you need to do is remove distractions. Create a positive environment where everyone on your team is working together for the greater good – your health. This means trimming the fat – cutting out all distractions and anything that could possibly prevent you from attaining your goal.  A friend suggests McDonalds? They’ve got to go. Girlfriends tempting you to an extra glass of wine? Cut ‘em off. All negative influences must be turned positive or let go. Explain to your friends and family what your goals are and how they can support you, and if they can’t do that, then they may not be what you need right now. These are the only two choices in order to rate your workout at a gold medal standard.

4.  Train muscle groups

Since body-building is not an Olympic sport, most athletes don’t train for aesthetics, they train for function. Their training is designed to help them improve at their sport. This is what we call functional strength training or cross-training.

This is the same way I train my executive clients and classes because our goal is to improve performance in boxing, kickboxing and self-defence. Here’s how it works. Instead of isolating one muscle and training it for three sets of 10, we train with movements that require three or more muscle groups. By doing this the muscles learn to work together smoothly and recruit other muscle fibres to share the workload as the intensity increases and muscles fatigue. The more muscle groups involved the less energy it takes to complete a task.

For example, In boxing, when you punch, you don’t use only your arm, you use your entire body. Another example is the clean and jerk weightlifting competition in the Olympics. In this exercise you lift the bar from the ground to your chest and then raise it over your head. This exercise is so important to overall physical fitness that it has its own event in the Olympics. Every athlete who competes in the Olympics does this exercise in training because its so relevant! Make sure you get a good trainer because a good trainer will definitely have this move in their arsenal.

So we train movements, not individual muscles. Not training for movement, and only training individual muscles is like tuning only one string on a guitar and expecting to play beautiful music. Musicians know that when all the strings are tuned and played together that’s when you get the most beautiful melodies and harmonies!