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The Path of the Spiritual Martial Artist Redux

     I wrote the original "Path of the Spiritual Martial Artist" over 10 years ago for Taekwondo Times Magazine .  About a year later, it was also one of the first articles I published here at Integral Strength.  But a lot can change in 10 years - at least, on a personal note.  Although my view of Zen, martial arts, and Buddhism has not  changed in the past decade, my maturing  of it has  changed.  After all, one of the foundational views of Buddhism is impermanence, which means that everything - and I do mean everything  - is constantly in flux, and, therefore, constantly changing.  So I thought that it might be a good time to review this original Integral Strength article, and make changes where I see that changes need to be made.  I hope you find it informative, whether or not your love is martial arts, Eastern philosophy and spirituality, or both!      (By the way, I looked everywhere for the Taekwondo ...

Classic Bodybuilding: John Grimek's "Congestive Principle"

 For many bodybuilders older than myself, John Grimek is often considered the greatest bodybuilder of all time.  I personally am unsure as to whether or not that is true - I tend to have Bill Pearl in the Numero Uno spot on that particular list.  But perhaps if I was a little bit older, and had been exposed more to Grimek in all of the bodybuilding magazines, I would feel different.  See, here's the thing: if you came of bodybuilding age in the late '80s, early '90s (which I did), then you read a lot about the legend of Grimek or you "heard" his name bantered about by a lot of the top pros, especially the pro and amateurs who themselves "came of age" in the '70s, but you never actually saw that much of Grimek in the magazines, other than occasional "blast from the past" pictures in Ironman Magazine .  But, whether or not he's in the #1 spot really doesn't matter that much to me because he is definitely in my top 5 - which one of ...

Death Sets Ultimate!

Massively High-Rep Training for Massively Built Muscles (AKA: An Homage to the Late Dr. Ken Leistner)     Around five or six years ago, I was training with a good friend of mine.  Even though he and I are good friends, we rarely trained together (and still don’t) due to the simple fact that he never liked to train legs or back muscles very hard, and, unfortunately, preferred a lot more training on the “showy” bodyparts of the chest and biceps.  And, while I’m not against a nice “pump” workout for the pecs and the arms, I’m primarily going to train my legs and my back hard, even if it’s at the expense of other muscle groups.     And even though my friend could out-bench press me by a couple hundred pounds, I could easily (at least at one time) out-squat or out-deadlift my friend by 300 pounds on each lift!     That’s just sad in my book.     Now, even though my friend knew that I l...

Martial Arts and Zen: Essays on the History, Philosophy, and Application of Zen in the Martial Arts

C.S. sits on his zafu before a training session. 1 - The Journey Begins When I was a teenager, I had one great love: martial arts.  To be more specific, I suppose, would be to write that my great love was traditional Okinawan Karate-Do, which I had trained in since I was 9 years old.     I was a small kid, tiny you might even say, compared to the size of my fellow 4th-grade classmates.  For whatever reason - and perhaps schools still do this, much to the embarrassment of small boys - my 4th grade teacher would often line up the entire class against the wall of the classroom, boys and girls alike, from shortest to tallest.  I was always the shortest.  Add in the fact that, in addition to my smallness, I was something of an introvert, often bullied, and so my parents thought that martial arts might be a good way to build my self-esteem, not to mention keep me from getting pummeled on the elementary school playgrounds. ...