There are a great many reasons to get into this fitness game.
They’re almost all valid.
A huge amount of my regular members are keen amateur / recreational sports people, some very serious athletes. Most of the rest are just in it for general fitness.
Which brings the question, what does “general fitness” mean.
Because it’s got nothing to do with your numbers in the gym and everything to do with your capabilities outside of the gym.
Every so often I like to quite the French physical culturist Georges Hébert Georges categorised fitness into distinct training categories: Walk, run, jump, move on all fours, to climb, to keep balance, to throw, lift, defend yourself and to swim.
To be fair most of us have experience in most of these. We walk, we run or have run, we lift and I’d say it’d be a fair guess that we have some swimming and throwing capability.
But what about climbing?
What about defending yourself?
Self Defence is a topic I receive many questions on, I get asked to teach courses on it, I find ways to get the “soft skills” of awareness and avoidance into the heads of my clients regardless of the context we are working.
But what about when the soft skills fail you, can you throw a punch, can you repel a physical assault, can you get somebody off you? Can you give a good account of yourself in a physical altercation?
A mugger is likely to very unimpressed by your six pack abs or how much you bench. But if you carry yourself with that confidence, the confidence that you can and will put up a fight, then that will cause him some consternation.
So what do you do?
Attend some Judo or Muay Thai classes? Great idea. But if that’s not your thing, not your main training goal, maybe some basic fundamental skills and drills will be enough.
Just like you can get through your gym career with just a handful of exercises (Squat, Swing, Press, Pull) you can get cover the self defence basics with a similar number of highly retainable skills.
Skills that I have put together on video for you in the form of an online Self Defence course that has just gone live on the Virtual Training Centre.
I’ve linked to them on my shop page, but here’s a direct link:
The information in these three modules, if you take the time to train them not only gives you worthwhile skills, but is a clear focal point for that fitness training.
It’s my focal point.
It was the reason I started training in the first place, then as a doorman, now as a husband and father, my ability to fight with power and tenacity is of high concern to me.
Like all of Herbert’s categories, self defence is a life skill. Do you have it?
Regards