Mike's Mixed-Martial Arts Cardio Training Audio Download

I made these MP4 files a few years ago to assist me with doing Tabata protocol before we acquired our fancy timer. The first track is an introduction (which you should be hearing now) that describes the protocol and the different tracks. Essentially there are two five minute rounds composed of 10 "mini-rounds" of 20 second on and 10 second off cycles. Between each round there is a 30 second pause/break.

1. Introduction
   
2. Rounds with coaching and music intervals
   This track has both the buzzers, music for rest periods, and tells you what to do for the next round.
   
3. Rounds (with music intervals but without coaching)
   This track drops the coaching allowing you to design your own work-out.
   
4. Rounds (without coaching or music intervals)
   This track provides you with freedom from the corny music.

The Curly Ronin's second bout at the 2009 TBA MTC

Before they announce the decision, choose a victor.

2009 Thai Boxing Association Muay Thai Classic, Des Moines, IA

Off to Des Moines to coach my fighters...

Cro Cop Interview

mirkointervju
by hutaisij

Interesting look into the motivations of a seasoned professional like Mirko "Cro-Cop" Filipovic

Peoria Athletic Club May Fight Camp

Tiger Muay Thai Facility, Phuket, Thailand

WOW!

R.I.P. John Wynn

I met John in practice on the occasions he came over from Terre Haute. John was not a fantastic athlete but he had the heart of champion. It was always surprising training with John, he didn't wrestle like most teenagers, rather than trying to muscle his way through positions, he played with technique beyond his years. John competed in sport jiu-jitsu and even fought mixed martial arts. But John was more than fighter, he had a quiet humor and didn't have any quit in him. He was a good kid...no a good man, he will be missed as a friend, a team mate, and a brother.

Physical Therapy: Learning to Walk Again

I'm suffering from arthrogenic muscle inhibition (AMI), which is hypothesized to be due to the loss of neuromuscular innervation supplied by nerves running along side the ACL (ref). After all knee surgeries the muscles of the leg surrounding the surgery site are "stunned" and can take weeks to recover. In the meantime I've got an immobilizer on to keep me from buckling my swollen knee and undoing all the good work already done on it. My question to this hypothesis is that since I didn't really have an ACL to start with, what nerves were destroyed in the surgery?
My first session of "real" PT started today. I'd finally gotten so that I could lift my leg mostly under its own power as well as getting me to flex and extend my knee. My physical therapist took a look at my "walk" and explained the proper method for using a single crutch, opposite and simultaneous with the injured extremity. He assessed my knee flexibility, not quite straight and only able to flex it to 72° by myself and 86° with assistance. My right knee is a good inch longer in circumference, too.
I was given several new exercises as well as continued my old ones:

1. Kneecap Self Mobilizations (basically stretching the knee cap in the four cardinal directions to prevent adhesions from the patellar tendon graft) 2 sec hold x 5-10 reps, 2 sessions per day
   
2. Extension stretch (letting gravity flatten my knee with the foot elevated) 1-5 minutes, 3 sessions daily
   
3. Lying Knee Flexion (lying on your back trying to pull your foot to your butt) 1 second hold x 10 reps, 3 sessions per day
   
4. Quadriceps Set (squashing a towel flat with the posterior surface of the knee) 5 sec hold x 10 reps, 3 sessions per day
   
5. Leg Raise 10 sec hold x 10-20 reps, 2-3 sessions per day
   
6. Seated Knee Flexion (sit on a table flex the knee) 10 sec hold x 10 reps, 2-3 sessions per day

Saku HL

Evan Tanner Power of One HL

RIP Evan

This May Not Be As Easy As I Thought

Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
Don't step with the bad leg!
But I did get a shower in today and my thigh got off the floor.

Those Are Where EXACTLY

The drainage bulbs for the two Jackson-Pratt drains

I emptied my Jackson-Pratt drains after about four hours, then six hours later and they had pretty much slowed down the following morning when I was to report to the office to have the drains pulled. Just as Lan was about to get me packaged in the car, I heard a dripping sound on the floor as bright red synovial-diluted blood poured down my leg onto the carpet. One of the plungers on the drain had come loose while I had arranged my pants. I slapped my thumb over it and we managed to get me cleaned up in time. Just to make sure that I knew who was boss, I stubbed my toe as I hiked myself forward on my crutches, and my knee wiped the color from my face, the words from my lips, and made sweat sprout on my forehead. At the orthopedists office, the nurse stripped down the immobilizer, athletic wrap, Kerlex, and bandages on my knee to reveal my assaulted hinge joint.

Two drainage ports and the staples over the area where they took the patellar tendon segment

The nurse then removed the drains, carefully and slowly. I could feel the uncoiling drain dislodge within the joint, the burn as rubber tubing moved past raw flesh, and I turned a shade of light green. With the removal of the second drain I felt much better whether it was because I intellectually knew that yet one more foreign body had been removed or the relief from the insult of having something inside my knee joint.
After getting home I worked on my rehabilitation exercises which include knee flexion and extension as well as hip extensions. Extending the knee was simple, it'd been nearly in that position with immobilizer since that day before. Knee flexion with great effort my knee crept a little above horizontal, scant degrees of horizontal. As for hip extension, I strained to failure and my leg didn't even move.
I've got a lot of work to do...

Bow Before the Impotent Agony of Knee the First

The night before surgery was like any night before a big tournament, I was ready to go, telling my body to slow down and my brain from running itself in circles. The weekend and day prior had been a frenzy of preparation to get the house clean, laundry done, and groceries stocked. With four refreshing hours of sleep I reported to the SurgiCenter at 7:45 AM and then went through the standard pre-operative preparation. I had my vitals taken, an IV was established, and they shaved my knee. The anesthesiologist made the fact that his nurse anesthetist was going to knock me out and breath for me sound mundane, while my orthopedic surgeon was pumped to start rearranging the internal geometry of my knee. A bag of ceftriaxone was hung along with some dexamethasone for nausea.
From my highly positive physical exam the plan was to visualize that I indeed was missing an ACL then clean out the meniscus rubble. My surgeon would then use a central piece of my patella tendon to replace my ACL, boring a hole through the bones proximal and distal to the joint. Shortly after chatting with my surgeon I was wheeled into the OR, the nurse anesthetist introduced herself and slapped some oxygen on my face.
I started waking up to someone really far away telling me not to fiddle with the oxygen in my nose. My right knee was a huge, uncoordinated, painful thing down at the end of the bed. As I regained a semblance of consciousness I pieced together that my surgery was done and that the annoying thing in my nose was a nasal cannula with oxygen. A shot of morphine and an antiemetic allowed me to down some ketorolac and hydrodone-acetaminophen. My pain got a lot better and I started to perk up, the nurse brought me something to drink and some toast. As the medications tenacious hold slipped away, they transferred me to the next level of recovery and brought my saintly girlfriend, Lan, to come talk to me. She showed me the arthroscopic pictures, evidence of the beating I had given my knee for the past decade. In my intoxicated state she also almost convinced me that we weren't dating.

Before picture, showing torn meniscus

After picture, everything smoothed out

Getting me from the gurney to the easy chair demonstrated profoundly that my knee was impotently pissed off. The slightest vibration was nauseatingly painful but from my hip flexor down my leg hung like a limp noodle. With the added fortification of some cranberry juice and apple cinnamon muffin we attempted the next stage in the right knee saga, getting home. Fumbling against the vestiges of the anesthetic and gravity I was deposited in a wheel chair and moved out to the car, where I was able to prop myself unceremoniously in the back seat, my right knee like so much extra unwieldy baggage.

Before picture, there's supposed to be an ACL between those two lines there	After picture, voilá a new ACL

At home Jarred had swung by with faux pansies and some milk shakes, and he helped get me inside. I had to figure out how to urinate again and will have to optimize the technique necessary to get the appropriate orifices over the correct waste receptacles with one leg that's a painful, rigid, brittle log. For the next 24 hours Lan watched over me. I spent the remainder of the day dreading having to move, but forcing myself to pump my calf to prevent a venous thrombosis (no thank you 6 months of warfarin). I drowsed in and out of consciousness as the stress, medications, and lack of sleep collided. We emptied the two Jackson-Pratt drains that drew a mixture of blood and synovial fluid from somewhere deep under the bulky immobilizer. Toward night I hopped up the stairs and with Lan's help got myself arranged in bed. I managed to sleep some more.

is trying ping.fm to update...well...everything

Never has something so simple looked so beautiful

After only a few short months of me saying: "It is my professional medical opinion that not securing these mats with an edge of some sort constitutes a significant potential health hazard," the powers that be did something spectacularly beautiful. One can only conjecture that such safety engineering might mean I only would need unilateral ACL repair.

Team mates

On my way home today I hit a pot hole in the freeway while doing 70 m.p.h. This dented my driver's side rim and cracked the wheel, deflating the tire. I replaced this useless automotive appendage with the emergency spare, a bike tire on steroids, and limped home my regular 50 minute commute now nearly an hour and a half. I went to teach class and relayed my tale of woe to my team mates.
Travis is a blue belt who has been training with us for a couple of years, good athlete and always willing to wrestle. He's also apparently always willing to get a team mate out of a jam. Travis' non-combatitive expertise is in cars, he customizes and modifies automobiles. Without missing a beat he asked me what the radius and size of my tires where as if this was common knowledge that I was supposed to retain. He then furled his brow as he searched an encyclopedic cerebral repository of car measurements to conclude that he might be able to slap some wheels from one of his old cars onto my car until my new rim could come in.
After open roll Travis drove into my driveway with his truck and proceeded to slap two tires onto my car while giving an impromptu tutorial on tire fits and measurements. He then test drove the car with me, despite a little wobble near 75 m.p.h. his replacements were significantly more robust then my spare (and it's maximum rating of 50 m.p.h.) Interestingly Travis felt that he was paying me back for what little coaching I'd done in practice and some occasional extra sessions we've held in the Bugeishako.
I'm humbled and amazed at such friendship and loyalty, I train and coach because I enjoy it. Because of doing something I enjoy, my team mate bailed me out of a significant jam without thought of recompense. It's nice to be reminded that the closest friends we make are the ones that we sweat and bleed on.

Noujitsu

On Monday I met my orthopedic surgeon. In conjunction with my sports medicine doc they've seen a significant percentage of my team mates, all of whom have been satisfied with the results. Orthopedic surgeons perform vigorous physical exams of the joints, so when he snapped onto my leg it was difficult for me to relax. The proper response for any fighter placed in a submission is to get out of it. Anyway if I didn't need operative management of my knees (yes pleural) it was a certainty after his tender mercies. Anyway we planned for my right knee in early May and my left knee at the beginning of July. This should allow me the necessary mobility to take care of important events in my life, like my new job.
The other question was when would I be back to being well...me at least physically. I have as much restraint as a puppy despite my seemingly aging demeanor. He cautiously estimated my recovery at between six and 12 months. I'm giving it four. I'll follow instructions explicitly and rehabilitate like its my new religion, but I cannot be if I there is no do. I plan on working non-resistive technical motions within three to four weeks (I think I saw literature that said that was conceivable).
In the meantime I will train in my mind or do what I call cerebral technique (noujitsu). This is actually pretty fun after being medically advised not to be an @$$hole and destroy either knee further. I'm essentially ambulatory sensory organs and central nervous tissue. I cannot show what I want, my latent fear of genu instability coupled with the bilateral inflammation precludes any sort of graceful or effective demonstration (getting up from the mat is a foal-like struggle against gravity's tenacious charms). Instead I'm having to rely on more astute observation of optimal and suboptimal technique combined with finding verbal, tactile, and gesticular ways of conveying information. I have to describe concepts while trying to sculpt stick figure representations of technique with my fingers. I have to point and tap on limbs or bodies to mold them into semblance of technical versatility. This has been leading to even greater analysis of what I am coaching and what I see being taught. In the last week I've been sketching out functional focus mitt drills using three people...more later. As I was watching Jack teach tonight I started seeing anime arrows in my head directing the flux of competing and syncroness force vectors that effortlessly sweep an opponent or change a submission from discomforting to lethal. A fun project would be to sketch these arrows on film or video, maybe even blog about them...
One thing I'd like people to do is use technique or even roll while counting, reciting a speech or delivering a poem. If they adjust their tempo, change their tone, or get short of breath, then they are probably muscling the move rather than using effortless technique. Sensory deprivation and being benched for months may just make me a better fighter. It certainly has already made me a more grateful one.

Mauricio Rua vs. Chuck Liddell By Machinemen

Mauricio Rua vs. Chuck Liddell By Machinemen from Machine on Vimeo.

Great HL video.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a radiograph is worth a thousand dollars

Sagittal MRI of a knee showing a normal anterior cruciate ligament. Image courtesy of Carleton University Sports Medicine Clinic, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. For more about knees check this out.	Sagittal MRI of my left knee

My imaging experience today confirmed for me that getting imaged is not nearly as fun as imaging somebody else. So glad that I have a little bit of discretion and didn't try something foolhardy because everything feels pretty good.

Peoria Athletic Club May Fight Camp