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Following on from last week’s post on the Cross Extensor Reflex, this week’s Monday self defence video is about pre contact cues. These are the signs that a punch (or other primary initiation attack) is about to come your way. Check out this video of this woman getting punched on the nose:

We’ll be discussing the pre contact cues you can see, and the recipient should have seen, in Monday night’s Personal Defence Readiness (PDR / SPEAR) class at Crossfit3D in Trafford, Manchester at 8pm.

This is the first of what will be a regular Monday post that supports the weekly Personal Defence Readiness (PDR) classes (part of Tony Blauer’s SPEAR system) at Crossfit3D, on a Monday evenings from 8pm – 9pm. Just like Crossfit, all are welcome to attend regardless of age, gender or experience.

The SPEAR System is not like many other self defence classes, in that the first 2 elements of personal protection are Detect and Defuse. Only if these skills fail you, will you be required to Defend yourself. As a result we not only teach an amazingly simple and effective system of self defence, that takes literally an hour to learn the basics of and become proficient enough to use in a real situation, but we also teach and develop the skills required to avoid violence in the first place. This is done through a variety of methods, including looking at the psychology of bad guys, for example the predator – prey mindset.

Did you know that in any situation there are only 3 possible things a bad guy wants? In a confrontation, if you were conscious of what the bad guy wanted, do you think you could modify your behaviour to minimise your desirability as a potential target?

The SPEAR system is not a martial art or other form of fighting sport. There are no belts or competitions. There are no complex skills to learn over and over. It is a behaviourally inspired, genetically wired system of personal protection. We are not interested in moves contrived in a dojo that make us look cool, only in what really happens in the real world and how people actually react in realistic situations.

Each week then we will be showing a short video of a real event, caught on CCTV or mobile phone footage, which helps to demonstrate either a point of psychology, an element of physiology or a particular scenario that might happen on the street. Each Monday then, we’ll be posting up the video that will be discussed in the evening’s class. This is the video we’ll be discussing on Monday 4th October: Take a minute to have a look at the video and have a think about what’s happening in it.

If the video intrigues you, worries you, you wonder how you’d react or wonder how it relates to violence avoidance, conflict management and personal protection, then come on down to Crossfit3D in Trafford, Manchester for 8pm Monday and find out!

Colin McNulty, PDR Coach
Karl Steadman, PDR Coach

No no, it’s not whether to take the red pill or the blue pill! I don’t normally post stuff like this, but this one did get to me. There are some brutal questions in here that really make you wake up and smell the coffee! I’ve highlighted a few that I thought were particularly meaningful:

1. How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?
2. Which is worse, failing or never trying?
3. If life is so short, why do we do so many things we don’t like and like so many things we don’t do?
4. When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done?
5. What is the one thing you’d most like to change about the world?
6. If happiness was the national currency, what kind of work would make you rich?
7. Are you doing what you believe in, or are you settling for what you are doing?
8. If the average human life span was 40 years, how would you live your life differently?
9. To what degree have you actually controlled the course your life has taken?
10. Are you more worried about doing things right, or doing the right things?
11. You’re having lunch with three people you respect and admire. They all start criticizing a close friend of yours, not knowing she is your friend. The criticism is distasteful and unjustified. What do you do?
12. If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be?
13. Would you break the law to save a loved one?
14. Have you ever seen insanity where you later saw creativity?
15. What’s something you know you do differently than most people?
16. How come the things that make you happy don’t make everyone happy?
17. What one thing have you not done that you really want to do? What’s holding you back?
18. Are you holding onto something you need to let go of?
19. If you had to move to a state or country besides the one you currently live in, where would you move and why?
20. Do you push the elevator button more than once? Do you really believe it makes the elevator faster?
21. Would you rather be a worried genius or a joyful simpleton?
22. Why are you, you?
23. Have you been the kind of friend you want as a friend?
24. Which is worse, when a good friend moves away, or losing touch with a good friend who lives right near you?
25. What are you most grateful for?
26. Would you rather lose all of your old memories, or never be able to make new ones?
27. Is it possible to know the truth without challenging it first?
28. Has your greatest fear ever come true?
29. Do you remember that time 5 years ago when you were extremely upset? Does it really matter now?
30. What is your happiest childhood memory? What makes it so special?
31. At what time in your recent past have you felt most passionate and alive?
32. If not now, then when?
33. If you haven’t achieved it yet, what do you have to lose?
34. Have you ever been with someone, said nothing, and walked away feeling like you just had the best conversation ever?
35. Why do religions that support love cause so many wars?
36. Is it possible to know, without a doubt, what is good and what is evil?
37. If you just won a million dollars, would you quit your job?
38. Would you rather have less work to do, or more work you actually enjoy doing?
39. Do you feel like you’ve lived this day a hundred times before?
40. When was the last time you marched into the dark with only the soft glow of an idea you strongly believed in?
41. If you knew that everyone you know was going to die tomorrow, who would you visit today?
42. Would you be willing to reduce your life expectancy by 10 years to become extremely attractive or famous?
43. What is the difference between being alive and truly living?
44. When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just go ahead and do what you know is right?
45. If we learn from our mistakes, why are we always so afraid to make a mistake?
46. What would you do differently if you knew nobody would judge you?
47. When was the last time you noticed the sound of your own breathing?
48. What do you love? Have any of your recent actions openly expressed this love?
49. In 5 years from now, will you remember what you did yesterday? What about the day before that? Or the day before that?
50. Decisions are being made right now. The question is: Are you making them for yourself, or are you letting others make them for you?

Timothy Ferriss certainly seems to think so, in fact he claims to have done it:

If you’re not aware, Tim Ferris is author of the best selling book: the “Four Hour Work Week” (click here for the US version) which I have just finished reading and can say is a very inspirational book. I may just flip back to the start and re-read it immediately again, which would be a first for me.

Anyway, back to the point. As I said, Tim claims to have put on the muscle shown in the pictures (along with lose all his body hair and gain a tan! lol) in just 4 weeks. He says that his own study of muscular hypertrophy led him to:

“Follow Arthur Jones’ general recommendations for one-set-to-failure from the little-known Colorado Experiment, but with lower frequency (maximum of twice per week) and with at least 3 minutes between exercises.”

However I suspect the key factoid about how he did it is tied up in this step:

“Perform every repetition with a 5/5 cadence (5 seconds up, 5 seconds down) to eliminate momentum and ensure constant load.”

Which (I think) sounds very similar to the cadence prescriptions defined on the Optimum Performance Training blog which I know some Crossfitters are following, with great strength results.

Which brings me nicely to the germain issue, at least from my perspective: is this sarcoplasmic muscular hypertrophy or myofibrillar muscular hypertrophy? To be clear, sarcoplasmic muscled growth increases the size of your muscles, but does not increase their strength. Weird I know but true. Whereas myofibrillar muscle growth increases muscle size, but has a corresponding increase in strength.

Personally I don’t have a lot of interest in increasing muscle size. I’m not a body builder and have no intention of wasting my life working out for aesthetic reasons only. I’d rather be thin and strong, than big and (relatively) weak. So it’s a shame that Tim hasn’t supplied any strength figures.

But all that aside, is it even possible to put on such a huge amount of muscle in such a short period of time? Tim models himself as an exceptional person, which is his selling point, and maybe he did it. Certainly I’m not going to discount his story out of hand, but I doubt I’ll be following in his footsteps to see for myself. Would you?

Working away can be a pain for anyone used to the pleasure of having a local Crossfit gym to go to. God forbid you have to go to a Globo gym and try to do your Crossfit workouts there. But what can you do?

It occurred to me that there’s one group of people who are pretty athletic, that given their underground nature, probably don’t frequent the mainstream gyms, but clearly have great strength and flexibility. Parkour types (what’s the collective name for people who do Parkour??). Look and you will find and all that, so here ia a Parkour strength training video, from my very own Manchester no less.

Checkout the weighted squats, pistols, burpees, broad jumps, human flags for reps(!), deadlifts, L-sits, muscle ups, L-sit muscles ups(!!), plus a load of crazy made up body weight exercises. I like their attitude too, I have no doubt they’d do very well at Crossfit!

It just goes to show, no kit is no excuse not to exercise, and the things you can do out and about are only limited by your imagination.

Marrakech (or Marrakesh if you prefer) was always going to be hot, being a North African country that borders the Sahara Desert and all that. I wasn’t really looking forward to the mid 30’s temperatures but figured I’d cope.

Imagine my surprise then, when we realised that our week’s holiday was actually affected by a Moroccan heat wave. The temperatures stayed around 44-45 degrees C, spiking on Tuesday to 47 and on Thursday into the 50’s!! It was so hot, even the camel riding was cancelled on the Thursday afternoon! This is what my daughter looked like after the morning session:

The irony was, that for the majority of the days then, it was too hot to lay in the sun, which was no hardship as I’m not really a sun bathing person. To be honest I find that idea of sun bathing moronic, and the concept of a “healthy tan” oxymoronic. It’s the old correlation / causation argument. A tan can be evidence of a healthy, active, outdoor lifestyle, but in itself, a tan is not a healthy thing to have. If my body had thought that I should have darker coloured skin, it’d grow some!

Marrakech is an interesting place, with a lot of history and just 3.5 hours flight from Manchester. We did the touristy thing and visited all the palaces and tombs etc. And wandered through the souks (market) in the Medina. There’s a lot made of the souks, that there are some 6000 shops there, many selling stuff that’s been hand made on the premises, and for that reason, it’s an interesting place to go. E.g. seeing a teenager making chess pieces with a hand bow lathe (no electricity) and his feet! But in reality, there are not really 6000 stalls, there are 6 stalls, each copied a thousand times. Once you’ve seen one leather slipper stall, you’ve seen them all. They are all the same, selling the same tourist tat.

And boy do you know you’re a tourist in Morocco. Everywhere you go, you’re hassled either for tips or to buy some tat. You can’t even take a photo or go to the loo without someone wanting paying for it. When we went out to Ourika valley, there was a gang of local tat sellers literally following the coach around on scouters and hassling us every time we stopped to get out.

I’m fairly convinced that every guide we had was on the take too, even the official ones. Mostly by telling us where not to buy, and only taking us to shops where they were on *very* friendly terms with the owners. Rarely are goods priced, and haggling starts at ridiculous numbers: 5-10x the price they should be. For English people in particular, haggling can be intimidating and they know they’ve got you before you even start. I wanted a small pendant and a belt and the guy started at £50 GBP for them! That’s not that far off an entire months national average income.

Do I recommend going to Marrakech? Yes.
Would I go back? No.
But if you do go, don’t go in mid summer!

I’m very pleased to announce that having got my certificate through, I’m officially a certified Personal Defence Readiness (PDR) Coach:

If you don’t know what that is, it’s the general public side of Tony Blauer’s SPEAR system of self defence. But “self defence” doesn’t really come close to describing it, as that phrase implies it’s all about fighting and techniques, and it’s so much more than that. Using the techniques taught in the PDR classes that Karl Steadman and I are putting on at Crossfit 3D on a Monday night, the chances of you detecting and avoiding or defusing any confrontation increase significantly. It’s our aim to teach you to avoid violence wherever possible. Violence Avoidance and Conflict Management would be a better description. Of course if it comes to it, you’re also going to get amazingly simple yet astonishingly effective self defence skillz.

Take this simple example: my daughter has been doing karate for coming up on 2 years now and they do self defence sessions where they teach how to defence against a knife attack. I thought I’d see how she was doing, so attacked her with a “knife” (actually a pair of socks!). She got “stabbed” 3 times out of 3; she didn’t know where I was going to try to stab her as I changed it each time.

So I spent 2 minutes showing her how the SPEAR tactic also applied to a knife attack and we tried again. After just 2 minutes training, my 9 year old daughter successfully defended herself from 2 out of 3 knife attacks using what I taught her. That speaks volumes as to the simplicity and efficacy of the SPEAR System. It’s not about tapping into your potential, i.e. what you might be able to achieve after years of training, but teaching you what you can do now, with the capacity you have at your disposal today. Tony’s system has made my family safer, it’s as simple as that.

Just to be clear, I’m not dissing karate or martial arts here. I fully believe that they are a great thing to do and will continue to send my daughter to karate classes and potentially other martial arts in the future if she wishes. I also regret not doing a martial art when I was younger and have seriously considered doing so as an adult (and one day I might). However martial arts are sports, and I don’t believe that an organised sport is the best basis on which to build a realistic system of defence from a street attack.

And it’s realism that’s at the heart of PDR training. We look at what your body does and how it reacts to real life situations. By body, I mean you mind as well as your physical reactions. Answer this question (feel free to post an answer in the comments):

In a street attack, where is the first place you get hit?

This weekend I had the privilege of attending what I believe was the world’s first Crossfit Kids instructor’s certification outside of America, at Crossfit3D in Trafford, Manchester. In attendance were the entire Martin clan, the progenitors of Crossfit for Kids and by that I mean the first instructors and the first students, because Jeff and Mikki Martin first trained their own kids in Crossfit.

I’ve really struggled with where to begin to describe the course, as there was just such a wealth of knowledge imparted by the training team, it’s almost too much to take in. We covered a vast array of material that draws on nearly a decade of experience in teaching children, from as young as 3 through to 17.

Of course there’s the material on what exercises are right for what age range. Including when to add weights, how much and in what increments. How much of a focus to put into form and how to get it across to the right ages for example, you can’t say to a 5 year old who you’re trying to teach the shoulder press to: heels under your shoulders, toes pointing out a bit, hands to shoulders, elbows in, mid section tight, now press, head forward, shoulders to ears etc. But you can tell them to jump up and down a few times, point their elbows at your knees, then push the sky up!

Breadth and depth are the 2 words that best describe the course. Of course we covered the 9 fundamental Crossfit movements: the shoulder press, push press, push jerk, air squat, front squat, thruster, deadlift, sumo deadlift high pull, and the medicine ball clean. But each one taught with a focus on the needs and limitations of three different age groups:

• Pre-school: 3 – 5 years
• Kids: 5 – 12
• Teens: 12 – 17

There were also talks on various topics which included subjects like: the origins and aims of Crossfit Kids; how to structure classes at the different age groups; safety, learning types; coaching cues; various science lectures e.g. about the brain’s development and its relationship to exercise, and scientific research into safety in sport, injury rates and bone density etc; how to fix common mistakes in all the exercises; teaching styles; general nutrition and how to educate the kids and deal with disagreements from parents; programming at various ages; how to motivate kids of all ages, with tricks and tips; trainer ratios; class sizes and even optimal kid placement in classes; a focus on sport specific athletes; internet safety and photography; health issues; business development etc etc etc!!!

You get the point. There was a ton of information which is absolutely invaluable and necessary for anyone who has an interest in teaching fitness to under 18s. I cannot recommend doing a Crossfit Kids certification course enough, it was amazing.

Probably the most amazing was seeing the fruit of Jeff and Mikki’s labours though, in the evidence provided by their 3 fine boys: Connor, Keegan and Duncan, and their friend David. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a group of stronger and fitter teenagers anywhere. These guys epitomise what Crossfit is capable of, in terms of building incredible athletes who can apply themselves to a broad range of physical endeavours. One anecdote about David probably sums it up nicely. It was a long story, so I’ll paraphrase:

David decided he wanted to run a sub 5 minute mile, and a marathon. Coach (Jeff) pointed out that whilst the mile was a good goal, the marathon was stupid, and as he’d already programmed his next 6 weeks of training and wasn’t going to change it. That very weekend, despite having not run more than 800m at any point in the previous 6 months, David decided to do it any, in fact he decided to kill both birds with one stone and ran the first mile of the marathon in 4:47 (or something like that, it was 4: something) and continued to run the rest of the marathon, finishing in 3 hours 29 mins (or similar). Pretty impressive without any marathon training whatsoever, but get this: on Tuesday he was back at the gym doing heavy squats, and continued to achieve personal best lifts at every session for the next 10 days!

Now that’s Crossfit and that’s the kind of fitness that years of Crossfit Kids training can achieve.

As rubbish as it is to announce this sort of thing on the net, working away from home currently means that it’s the simplest way of not having to repeat myself over the next few weeks. As of yesterday (Monday 26th July) I’m no longer a member of Crossfit Manchester, something I never thought I’d ever say. As I was one of the original members when they first opened their doors, and so have been a member for 3.5 years, have long been a huge supporter of Crossfit Manchester and was a personal friend of Mark Beck, I figure I probably need to expand on that statement.

I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to say about it and also what I feel I can say about it. I am privileged enough to have been told some things in confidence, I haven’t betrayed that confidence and I have no intention of starting now. It’s no secret however that last year Karl Steadman left Crossfit Manchester in Stockport, and setup Crossfit 3D in Trafford. That event set the wheels in motion that have ended up with my decision of yesterday.

I don’t think it’s a secret either, that sadly the relationship which built the first Crossfit gym in England, soured as a result of that split. Once wrangling over who gets what in the divorce start (for divorce is essentially what it was), it’s inevitable really that it starts to feel personal and people get upset. I had hoped that I could remain impartial, as I have the greatest respect for both Mark and Karl, as I have attested to many times on this blog. They, as instruments of Crossfit, have had a profound affect on my life, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. Mark in particular spent a lot of time helping me attain my British Masters title this year, and I’ll long be grateful for that.

However it has become obvious in recent months that Mark and I were not seeing eye to eye on many things. I am not going to go into the reasons, as to do so would only give the impression that I’m airing my dirty laundry in public and I have no intention of doing that. Suffice it to say, that I’ve become increasingly unhappy this year, though no one thing was enough to tip the boat.

Fast forward to Monday and I decided that it was time to have a heart to heart, and Mark and I spent a good hour having a reasonably amicable, open and honest conversation. Mark is after all, a very nice and agreeable fellow. Someone who’s company I have enjoyed many times over the last 3 years outside of the gym environment. It was a useful conversation for many reasons, not least of which I felt it cleared the air and got stuff said.

To my surprise however I did learn that Mark and I disagreed on several more things than I’d even thought going into it, but he’d not felt in a position to say so before then. Notwithstanding that however, I was rather hoping we could work things out. Sadly, we couldn’t get past the sticking point that hopefully in the very near future, I’ll be working on a joint venture with Karl (more on that another time).

So before it came to a head, I decided to leave whilst Mark and I were still on amicable terms. I’d like to think I could pop in and say hi to Mark and Jo and the members I know down there occasionally. I still have a lot of affection for Mark and Crossfit Manchester and look forward to seeing them go from strength to strength. I certainly have no hesitation in continuing to recommend Crossfit Manchester to anyone that hasn’t got bored of my spouting off about Crossfit by now!

It’s always sad when a door closes on something that’s been a big part of your life, and I feel rather melancholic about it. Life is full of surprises though and you never know what tomorrow will bring. 🙂