Wanderlust

Two weeks off. Not only from the blog but also from the training. After training 4 1/2 months straight without a break, (other than the two days off before having a fight) my body was tired. The recovery process slowed down, injuries didn´t heal well and, sometimes, I had a slight feeling of boredom when hitting the bags. It was not too much for my body for I would not have fought then; but it was time for a break.

After losing the fight by points after five tough rounds (even if I am not content with my performance) there was absolutely no reason not to lean back and get some space between me and the sport. My great girlfriend and my coach from my Team Wolfpack Cologne both arrived in Thailand at the beginning of January, so the circumstances for being lazy couldn´t have been better.

I ate everything I could find; especially a lot of pieces of chocolate cake at ´Duke´s´. They have by far the best chocolate cake in town. Seriously: This cake is massive. Throw it at someone and you´ll end up in jail for attempted manslaughter. Also, I enjoyed the beautiful nature of Northern Thailand: We went on short trips to surrounding national parks and relaxed for hours at waterfalls while simply listening to the sound of the jungle.

When you train, you know how it feels, when you have a break, right? It´s pretty cool but a part of you still wants to be in the gym. I miss the sport already and can´t wait to be on the mats again. Nonetheless, these two weeks also awoke something inside me again: Wanderlust.

Even if I wouldn´t do martial arts, I would have done the journey anyway – it´s basically just a fortunate incidence that I love a sport so much that it can be my central purpose of travelling. I travel to train; I travel to learn; I travel to fight and, on the other hand, I train to travel. That I want to compete on a regular basis requires me to stay at one place or gym for a longer period of time, so I´m not that much of a traveler like the BJJ Globetrotter, aka Christian Graugart (really cool book by the way).

during my last fight

But life is so easy and enjoyable here that you can easily get into a routine and settle down way too fast. Not in a boring or bad routine because the last 5 months have been great. I love it to train all the time, hang out with the people you know at Team Quest, doing stuff in Chiang Mai (there are still thousands of things I haven´t seen yet). But I feel that it is time to shoulder my backpack and go on. I have to use the time I have and the big opportunity to travel and learn at different gyms.

Still, I want to focus on fighting. So the chance that I will settle down somewhere else for a couple of months again is pretty high. I have to get more input from more people in the next time. I will stay until the end of the month at Team Quest and, depending on how I feel, I would like to do a last fight here and then go on. Travel to new places and train at new gyms, meet more people, listen to more concepts of life and ways of doing an armbar escape.

Getting out of my routine also means that I will not continue writing this blog ... for the moment. If I feel like sharing my experiences again, I may go on here or start a new blog; or maybe I will solely concentrate on my German blog. I have no idea – that´s the great thing of being a traveler. Today, I don´t have to know what I do tomorrow.

Whatever happens, I will inform you here where you can follow my journey and, of course, you can still contact me here if you have questions or so. So far, my trip is an absolutely awesome experience, I had a lot of fun already, fought more than I original planned to do, had great rolls and sparrings, improved my game in Muay Thai and MMA – everything is fine.

Thank you guys for following my blog! 

Hope to meet some of you on some sweaty mats somewhere on the globe.Best regards and chok dee,
Felix

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It´s good for you

It is a beautiful Friday morning, absolutely no clouds on the sky and the temperature is plesant (maybe a bit less than 20 degrees). Two weeks ago it was really cold at night and in the early morning. It was colder than it usually is in the Thai winter, often only 10 degrees. The Team Quest site was often covered in thick fog. Fortunately it has been warming up during the last days.

"Your last training before the fight on sunday!" Ni welcomes me with a cup of hot coffee in his hands. When Dylan spots my girlfriend who arrived just the day before in Thailand and is going to watch the session, he adds, directed at the coffee sipping Muay Thai trainer: "Oh! And I heard him saying that he wants a really hard workout today." Sometimes, I seriously hate trainers. Dylan grins at me.

We are just three students this morning: A beginner, a new sponsored professional fighter, Ali, and me. After the usual warm-up of having a short run, skipping, stretching and shadow boxing, we start doing bagwork. Or at least that's what I do while the other do their pad rounds. As always when I am working on the bags, I start slowly, reminding my bones, muscles, tendons and ligaments how to absorb the power when a punch or kick hits something hard. And as always I get the comment from someone to hit the bag harder. However, even if I am warmed up already, I think, give me at least one round to get used to my training partner made of leather and rags.

Jab, cross, right kick – cross, jab, left kick – teep, teep (the Thai word for frontkick) and slowly, my body awakes. The punches become harder, the footwork faster and the combinations more fluent. Two jabs, hit the bag lightly and my cross smacks into it with all the power I have. As I dot that, I take a long step forward. A long bleep sound calls for the break and then following bag work. Wow! These three rounds passed by fast!

I climb into the ring and touch gloves with Dae, who is a new trainer, and prepare myself for the coming three rounds of padwork. "Okay! Fifteeeeeen push-ups!" Ni shouts. "Same procedure as every day" I think as I do what he asked for. Then Dae holds the pads to his side "10 times!". 10 kicks with the left leg and then 10 kicks with the right one. I am expecting to go on with punches now but Dae has different plans for me. Again, he holds the pads to his left side "Nine!". Again, I switch my stance and make my shinbone smack into the pads as fast as possible, trying to keep the breaks as short as possible. He will count down since there is no time limit. The round is over after completing 10-9-8...-2-1 kicks on both sides.

I am taking a deep breath in the corner. Since I have managed to do two rounds, the last one won't be a problem. Instead I should give even more than before.
The sweat is dripping from my rashguard and shorts, the shinbones and the top of my feet got a slight red color and my breathing is fast. "Seven! Harder! Harder!" Dae shouts at em. I give my best "More hip! More hip!" - "Ozz! Ozz!" I breath out fast, with every kick – "Two! Come on! Hard!" - "Ay! Ay!" - "One!" - I move my hip in more than before, create more power and then the pad work is over.

"One more round!" Dae informs me.

"Damn it! Ok, what ever the coach says" I think silently. "At least, I am able to do this now, a few months ago I would have died already."
The next round is as hard as the one before. And it was not the last one. Again, I have to do another one. During the break that follows, I put my arms on the ropes and try to take deeper breathes in order for me to recover faster, but it does not work that well. I feel slightly dizzy but nothing bad.
"Come on!" Dae calls me over – the more tired you are, as shorter breaks seem to be.

But I do the fifth round as well. I perform well and climb exhausted out of the ring. I count the kicks: 550 kicks in five rounds with breaks, less than a minute in between. Not bad. It wasn't fun but not bad.

When I check the time I am a bit worried: We have nearly an hour left? Holy... "Clinchsparring!" Ni commands, and Ali and me climb back into the ring, kneeing each other in the stomach and throwing each other around. After ten minutes, Dae stops us "Ok! Get your shoes!". Running. Probably sprints.

With forty-five minutes left on the clock, we are getting on the track: Jogging with bringing your knees up high to the wall, jogging to the mid of the track, sprinting from there to the other side and jogging back again, to continue. Dae does not tell us how often we have to do this. Us two fighters sprint next to each other, competing, and thus, guaranteeing that neither of us will give up or run slower than he possibly can. After eight rounds my legs hurt even when jogging back to the start point and Dae motivates us by telling us, at last, we are just facing two more rounds.

We shout on the last meters of sprinting, pushing harder, trying not to lose the race, but Ali is faster than I. Nonetheless, I try to keep up with him. 10^th round -- finished – time to relax.

"No!" Dae says with a slight grin on his face. "Side-steps to this line, touch the ground, back to the start, side-steps to the second one over there, then sprinting again!". Five more sprints. I have the sentences from a famous motivation video in my ear when doing one sprint after the other: "You CAN push a little harder, and you CAN run a little faster!". It motivates me to go on – to continue to run.

The second last sprint. My legs hurt and even if I try, I cannot run as fast as before. Another one of the sentences from the video pops up into my head "And the loss of physics is merely a suggestion!".

Done. I am done. Really. This was definitely the hardest coditioning workout I have ever done. Finishing it with push ups and sit ups seems relaxing compared to the running before. The problem with conditioning is, that it does not get easier as better you become; instead, the grind is simply longer then.

But I have progressed. I am in great shape. I could not have done that a few months ago.

I am well prepared for the first fight of 2014.

supplementation

It is the first day of 2014 and with every new year people make good resolutions – from doing more sports, to eating healthier or quit smoking. The most common one may be to finally lose weight. Well... I am not a nutritionist nor is this a blog that shall help you get into shape. It´s enough when I do this and write about it. But I started a little ´experiment´ approximately two months ago and which I am going to write about today.

If you are training martial arts or another sport competitively you automatically get introduced to supplements. The list of the effects the manufacturers promise is even longer than the list of supposedly magic potions on the nutrition market. Since I've had the idea of studying sport science in my head for a couple of years now, and compete in MMA, I have a huge interest and desire to understand how the performance of an athlete is linked to his or her nutrition.

Thousands of scientific papers and doctoral dissertations were published on this topic; and for those of you who have ever entered a fitness center know that there are twice as many opinions on each of these topics. During the last couple of years, every now and again, I read dietary guides, threads in bodybuilding communities, listened to people who studied sports science and read advices of famous fighters, coaches and also scientific papers as well as summaries of studies.

Because of this diversity of way more qualified sources available, I don´t want to give advice of what you should eat or give an scientific prove why it works what I do (or why I believe that it works the way I'm doing it). Instead, I´ll simply share my experiences with you.

For me, it was always surpising how much certain studies can contradict each other – basically, science suspects a lot about how our body works, but actually knows little. The newer, more complicated or more promising a supplement is, the more different the opinions on the question of it´s effectiveness. After searching for the holy grail of ´right nutrition´ for a while, I decided to change my tactic: Instead of trying to find the ´truth,´ I want to get as much as possible out of all the different theories and put together what I think sounds reasonable and is more or less well investigated.

Personally I am a person who believes in the power of nature. I always prefer natural medicine before chemical ones. My experience has shown me that this works well for me. Basically, you can´t get any better nutrition than eating fresh, unprocessed foods. So before paying for expensive supplements, my nutrition has to be perfect already. Thus I try to eat a wide variety of foods, avoiding fast food and artificials foods, flavour enhancers. In addition, I prefer rice instead of noodles and avoid industrial sugar.

And the tuning?
I started to take supplements two months ago, because the circumstances are perfect right now: My nutrition is really, really good,,I train two times a day and my body can rest a lot – no energy is ´wasted´ on school or work. So, if supplements have a positive effect, than it´s the perfect time to try some.

My nutriton selection is basic: Whey protein, a protein complex, fish oil and BCAA´s.

I´ll give a short comprehension of why I take them – this is not a complete explanation of how these supplements effect the body or what their task is. It´s more an overview: The internet is filled with information abouth these supplements.

The proteins

If there is one thing that science knows about nutrition, then it is the fact that mucles are built by taking proteins. How much protein you need daily is controversial. Nonetheless, studies showed that, especially right after training, the consumption of whey protein (the fastest absorbed protein), leads to better regeneration and strenght growth. The process of regeneration starts faster and your muscles are repaired sooner and more effectively.
I have two shakes daily: both are taken right after each training sessions. Additionally I eat a banana in order to prevent the body from using the proteins to get energy . Instead, the body should use the carbohydrates given to it by the banana.

Furthermore I have a shake with different kinds of proteins right before I go to bed so there is no gap in supplies during the most important recovery phase, the sleep.

The fish oil capsules

The problem is that I don´t cook myself here (I don´t even have a kitchen in my flat) and so it´s impossible to get enough Omega 3 fatty acids. But these are really important for the body, inter alia for the absorbtion of vitamins, and should be part of every diet. You find them for example in fat fish, walnutoil or linseed oil. But fat fish is not a part of typical Thai cuisine and the oils are really expensive. So having fish oil capsules daily is the easiest and cheapest way.

Fish oil is simply a necessary part of a balanced diet.

The BCAA´s

BCAA is definitely the most controversial part of my diet. Studies that investigated the advantage athletes have after taking BCAA´s before and after training contradict each other because, one factor being that, it is too difficult to meassure the effects. But it is believed that BCAA´s protect the muscles from being used as a source of energy during long workouts, what leads to enhanced recovery.
First, I was sceptic but eventually I decided to take BCAA´s because of the overwhelming amount of positive reviews from different sources online. Give it a chance.


So what is the result after two months of good nutrtion + a basic supplementation? I didn´t grow huge muscles or become really bulk, nor did I suffer any negative effects. But what definitely increased is the effectiveness of my recovery process. I have less aching muscles and recover way faster after having a day off.
The supplements didn´t turn my training world up side down and they are definitely not magic potions.But combined with a natural, healthy nutrition they definitely help achieve your athletic goals.

As you see, the explanation of the effects of each supplements is really short – I thought about making them longer, but I don´t want to start a discussion about the effect, or non-effect, of certain supplements. Nonetheless, I wanted to share my experience.

I will go on taking supplements and maybe have a break to see if I feel a difference then again. To prove twice to myself that it works... or even answer the question tconcerning he necessity of supplements.

But so far, I am content with the effect they have on my recoveryprocess. I will write again about my little experiment in a few months.