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Admin

Admin has written 423 posts for The Black Belt Blog

The Head to Toe of Injury Prevention for Grapplers: Part 3, The Shoulders

Let’s talk shoulders this time. I had originally planned to have this post be an all encompassing arm and shoulder one, but the scope of the shoulder and the myriad problems caused by just this section of the body in grapplers warrants a full post. This is by no means comprehensive, since a comprehensive post … Continue reading

A nice thing happened this weekend- I got promoted to brown belt by my coach Robert Drysdale on his visit to Dublin. we had spoken over the weekend about the evolution of the gym, about my own evolution as a coach and practitioner, and the recognition of that evolution is nice. But if I’m honest, … Continue reading

Training Philosophy Central

I was asked the other day what my “training philosophy” was. I think everyone who has been around a while gets asked this from time to time. People want to know what the sort of central idea behind what you do is. I know that it’s something that interests me, and I suppose it’s a … Continue reading

The Head to Toe of Injury Prevention for Grapplers: Part 2- The Neck

So let’s talk about the neck a bit, but first, a warning from our legal team.* While I am an exercise professional, I am not a doctor, nor am I a qualified medical professional of any kind, although I did once correctly guess that a friend had crabs from the way he was walking. Perform … Continue reading

The Head to Toe of Injury Prevention for Grapplers: Part 1, the ears

Believe it or not, when I asked for requests on what common injuries they would like to avoid, the majority of people wanted to know how best to avoid cauliflower ear. I really had no idea that people felt this strongly about their ears, and I hadn’t originally intended to write at all about this … Continue reading

Injury prevention ideas

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of committing to paper a series of prehab articles with video and pictures on the most common grappling and MMA injuries. I may run it as an article on another site (work!) or on here, depending on the format. Possibly the way I will do this is to put … Continue reading

Inspiration or Exploitation?

There’s a current trend in social media that gets me riled up. It’s where someone posts up a photo of a disabled person or an amputee performing a physical task along with the tagline “what was your excuse again?” It’s particularly popular among gym goers and trainers of the sort who also like to post … Continue reading

And we’re off and ranting…

Lots of things have been irritating me now for quite a while, but they’ve been just on the edge of my mind. I haven’t quite been able to grasp what it is yet but there’s been a niggle there. I don’t have a name for it, and I don’t even  think it’s something that has a name, … Continue reading

How I Coached (well, this time at least)

I had thought about putting this together as an article for VPX, but I decided I’d stick it here, since the blog has had a fallow period and this might seem a little long and jumbled, and I really don’t want to spend much time organising it. Think of this as a stream of consciousness … Continue reading

A letter to Kyuzo Members

This one is just for the Kyuzo members. Everyone else can tune out. A chara, We’re coming up on one year’s residency in our new home, and one year since the birth of the Kyuzo name and the new team that has come with it. I thought I’d mark it with a new blog post, … Continue reading