What isn't measured isn't improved. Getting the most performance out of yourself requires experimenting and reporting. This past week, I ran a little experiment on myself. I have published my fitness routine a few weeks ago here, but I wasn’t entirely happy with it. You see, most of my exercise was non-martial arts activities. I would get 2-3 training sessions a week, with only 1 that had rolling in it. The other sessions were technique sessions. Why? Because I found that the wear and tear of sparring was too much. With weight training, conditioning work, stretching and mobility, plus runs and walks – the sparring just was too much to stack on to that. In the weight lifting world, they use a term called Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV). MRV represents the amount of physical output your body can perform and still recovery from optimally. Typically, your MRV is high for young athletes, and goes downhill as you age. Unfortunately, this is a real phenomenon that has to be respected. So I noticed in the past few weeks that I seemed to be having a harder time doing my workout routine. Last week, I decided to remove everything and just focus on doing grappling. The goal was to get 3 good session in and see how my body responds. I managed to sneak in a 4th one on Sunday, and made it without injury. Yes! I made it through without injury, but I will say on Monday I was sore. Particularly, certain problem areas seemed to just get worse after each session. These areas only seem to get aggravated by grappling. So this week, I’m going to work to get 3 martial arts sessions in, 2 weight training sessions, 2 conditioning sessions, 3 walks, 3 leg mobility sessions, and 3 shoulder mobility sessions. This might sound like a lot, to add on, but previously I was doing about 50% more outside of the martial arts. I’m also switching my focus on weight training. Continued in comments https://www.instagram.com/p/CTiFb5yvisY/?utm_medium=tumblr