The author, a fitness and training expert, explores topics such as skills training, strength development, flexibility, speed training, tournament strategy, motivation, nutrition and more! This book will help you to put together a training regime in order to reach your full potential.

Martial Arts and Well-Being explores how martial arts as a source of learning can contribute in important ways to health and well-being, as well as provide other broader social benefits. Using psychological and sociological theory related to behaviour, ritual, perception and reality construction, the book seeks to illustrate, with empirical data, how individuals make sense of and perceive the value of martial arts in their lives. This book draws on data from over 500 people, across all age ranges, and powerfully demonstrates that participating in martial arts can have a profound influence on the construction of behaviour patterns that are directly linked to lifestyle and health. Making individual connections regarding the benefits of practice, improvements to health and well-being – regardless of whether these improvements are ‘true’ in a medical sense – this book offers an important and original window into the importance of beliefs to health and well-being as well as the value of thinking about education as a process of life-long learning. This book will be of great interest to a range of audiences, including researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in sports and exercise psychology, martial art studies and health and well-being. It should also be of interest to sociologists, social workers and martial arts practitioners. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315448084, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Weight Training for Martial Arts is the most comprehensive and up-to-date martial arts-specific training guide in the world today. It contains descriptions and photographs of the most effective weight training, flexibility, and abdominal exercises used by martial artists worldwide. This book features year-round martial arts-specific weight-training programs guaranteed to improve your performance and get you results. No other martial arts book to date has been so well designed, so easy to use, and so committed to weight training. This book is the most informative and complete resource for building muscles, speed, and stamina to enable the body to excel in judo, karate, aikido, kung fu, jujitsu, taekwondo, kempo, muay thai, and all other martial arts forms. The book provides martial artists with an abundance of easy to follow training techniques needed to be effective in the martial arts, such as flexibility, joint stabilization, balance, and muscle development. From recreational to professional, martial artists all over the world are already benefiting from this book’s techniques, and now you can too!

It has been said that a successful martial artist doesn't need size or strength, because "it's all in the technique." It has also been said that the power of a martial artist seems to increase quickly with weight, and the best lightweight fighter in the world will be defeated every time by an unranked heavyweight in a bar brawl. So is it size and physical strength that matters, or is it experience and dedication to correct technique? This book explores the science behind power in the martial arts. Once we understand the principles of physics that apply to balance, body mass in motion, inertia, direction, rotational speed, friction, torque, impulse, and kinetic energy, the need to memorize hundreds of martial arts techniques vanishes. The principles of physics apply to all people at all times regardless of which martial art we study; regardless of whether we are standing, sitting, kneeling, prone, or supine; whether we are big or small, strong or weak. Physics gives us options. Making physics our ally allows us to maximize our power, speed, and endurance and take advantage of whatever position we happen to find ourselves in. This book is supplemented by hundreds of photos, detailed glossaries, summary and review sections, and even quizzes to test yourself on what you've learned and help you gain an edge on an adversary.

The phrase “martial arts studies” is increasingly circulating as a term to describe a new field of interest. But many academic fields including history, philosophy, anthropology, and Area studies already engage with martial arts in their own particular way. Therefore, is there really such a thing as a unique field of martial arts studies? Martial Arts Studies is the first book to engage directly with these questions. It assesses the multiplicity and heterogeneity of possible approaches to martial arts studies, exploring orientations and limitations of existing approaches. It makes a case for constructing the field of martial arts studies in terms of key coordinates from post-structuralism, cultural studies, media studies, and post-colonialism. By using these anti-disciplinary approaches to disrupt the approaches of other disciplines, Martial Arts Studies proposes a field that both emerges out of and differs from its many disciplinary locations.

Risk, Failure, Play illuminates the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through the politics of everyday life as experienced through training in a range of martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Author Janet O Shea shows how play gives us the ability to manage difficult realities with intelligence and demonstrates that physical play, with its immediacy and heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Risk, Failure, Play also demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, as well as theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us and challenges us to reimagine our social reality.