Scott Sonnon: Born to Fail - Made to Succeed

My Workout Road-Map to the 2010 World Games!

A plan is more like a magnifying glass than a road-map, but you need to start somewhere, plot a course toward a destination and then enjoy the reality that the map never matches the landscape. A training plan gets you started and paying attention to detail, because you can’t find problems if you’re not looking.

If you didn’t already read, I qualified to compete for and assist coaching the US Martial Arts Team for the 2010 World Martial Arts Games to be held in Las Vegas, September 17-19, 2010. I’ll be competing in the sport jujitsu / MMA division - a sport I’ve never officially contested. But as a USA National Team Coach for different teams, I’ve learned, over the years, that it’s what you don’t see, what you’ve not quantified, calculated, rebuilt and pressurized that comes back to haunt you on game day.

It’s been 5 years since my last official competition when I won the US International Open Sanshou Championships with my teammate Joe Wilson. There will be lots of mat rust to knock off… but what lays under the rust is what we must concerns ourselves with.

What you don’t know may hurt you, and rarely helps you. Though good fortune is always appreciated, it’s never an accident. Fortune is a product of self-effort (practice and action), timing (intuition and synchronicity), and grace (serendipity and auspiciousness).

Never able to rest on genetic laurels due to my physiological disadvantages, I’ve had to exploit every technological (training) advantage. So, though I may not be the strongest, fastest or biggest, I’ve had the good fortune of great coaching and a tenaciously meticulous - if not obsessive - mind. What others find boring and mundane - such as quantifying performance numbers and repetitious practice of basics, my genetic disadvantages have coerced me into loving.

Let me add one final disclaimer on the plan I’ll share with you. This will all look very systematic. It is, but it’s just as much art as it is science. There will be course corrections, reversals and overhauls. It’s written in pencil, not ink. For example, at the beginning it looks like this:

But at the end, it will have flown out more like this:

The overlapping pyramids represent that this is not as linear and sequential as the original plan may imply, because you come to the table with a set of prior experiences and current level of preparation. In some areas, you’ll have little to no deficits, but in others, greater and hidden deficiencies which will only be exposed by getting underway following your map.

The rotated pyramids echo the above in another fashion: certain skills need greater work than others. Because it’s a new sport, there will be new mental and emotional challenges which erode my performance under pressure. I’ll need to address these anxieties during even basic training. But because of my prior experiences in other sports, I’ll have a well-established strength of emotional control and mental toughness - specifically in other areas, as well as in general. So, I’ll have to see how those skills synergistically function and then reverse engineer them to their components to tie them together with my current deficiencies.

Training is a laboratory where experiments are performed, where hypotheses fail and where “accidents” of good fortune happen - but only because of your actual adventure of daily, gruelingly mundane, basic practice, data recording, and charting course corrections. You can have ego or progress but not both.

With those disclaimers and caveats stated, my plan for the next 9 months involves 3 skill families: groundfighting, grappling and kickboxing, with two subdivisions of each: top/bottom game, entry/block game, boxing/kicking (respectively). So, there will be 3 macro-cycles:

• Phase 1: Developing Mechanical Attributes
• Phase 2: Developing Transitional Attributes
• Phase 3: Integrating and Pressurizing Transitional Attributes

The basic model for the plan looks like this, then:

You may be asking what are these whacky little pyramids. If you missed earlier articles I’ve written on the subject, then check out:

• PART I: How to Cycle Your Training Efficiently
• PART II: How to Cycle Your Training Efficiently

And that will start you on the path to researching the even larger “Three Dimensional Performance Pyramid” which you can read and study through the RMAX Training Group Manual. You can see on this image that it’s full of little pyramids - models which help you like a legend helps you with a map.

Each of these little pyramids - my micro-cycles in the periodization schedule - involve actual, concrete workouts. I’ll be using TACFIT programs for each workout, and I’ll share those workouts with you through video on my blog over the course of the next 9 months. I’ve already posted two of them for you: TACFIT Groundfighter 2 and TACFIT Kickboxer 1.

• Phase 1: Developing Mechanical Attributes
  • TACFIT Kickboxer 1-3
  • TACFIT Grappler 1-3
  • TACFIT Groundfighter 1-3
• Phase 2: Developing Transitional Attributes
  • TACFIT Kickboxer / Grappler 1-3
  • TACFIT Grappler / Groundfighter 1-3
• Phase 3: Integrating and Pressurizing Transitional Attributes
  • TACFIT Integrated 1-3

Stay tuned to my blog for updated videos on my workouts! And best of luck to all competitors and all countries!

www.flowcoach.tv,

Scott Sonnon

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