Recently after having a lot of trouble with my knees i decided to follow in many other athletes footsteps and starting training/rehab and Sports Science Lab. I've watched many athletes with the most popular being Troy Polamalu have changed up there training because of constant injuries.

They have Bowflex machines which i think are great tools due to the fact that you can train in them with injuries. So you can still get some stimulus while being unable to do your normal routine. Among many other cool machines, stability ball exercises, etc.  They give a good rundown of Bowflex machines here: http://powerliftingbelts.org/best-bowflex-models/

The founders of the Sports Science Lab Marv Marinovich and Gavin Macmillan don't believe in the use of free weights. I don't necessarily agree, but through my experience i understand the purpose of their philosophy, They goal was to create a form of training to where the risk is very low and the pay off is high. It is without question that free weight exercises like squat, clean, deadlift, snatch, bench, etc have a great reward, but when performed incorrectly or done too much/ too often injuries can occur. So their low risk/high reward philosophy is spot on and i think most are willing to agree with that. But the notion that no free weights should be used i don't agree with to a certain extent. Free weights mimic external resistance which is something your going to deal with in most sports and in life. If you an athletes and your job requires to be physical up close and personal other athletes you could use a little extra ummph which can easily be provided through proper weight training.

 I think that many of the athletes that benefit from the Sports Science Lab are athletes that are already developed in there particular sport and as an athlete in general. It has limitations in that if your looking to be the worlds strongest man or something similar to that, its not gonna provide you the stimulus you need to excel in that sport but it could benefit those athletes in becoming faster and more flexible. I've only trained there for a week and i like it and will probably continue to there while still doing my workouts outside of there. I do think this form of training would great for kids because of the low injury risk and i think that young children that are competing in sports should be more worried about technique and leave the weights til later.

The last thing i will say for this post is that if there one thing I've learned in life is that balance is very important. So is Sports Science Lab the end all be all? No but it is piece of the puzzle and can be very beneficial for certain people like myself.

Sorry guys I haven't been writing more entries. I've been dealing with injuries
and now am adjusting my training. Before I seemed to be concerned with how much
weight I could do, which isnt a bad thing. But if your not in the sport of
weightlifting it can detrimental. In my case, causing injuries. Recently I read and article about Anatoliy Bondarchuk. He put strength training for athletes into 2 categories, general strength and special strength. Check it out. So general strength is still important, but once you get to a certain level it will have a less correlation to your performance than special strength will. So by the request of Chad Smith I started the 5/3/1 program to get stronger with going heavy too much.
Earlier today at Reign we did wrestling drills and went live from positions. It
was a hard practice and I felt tired but I wanted to get a good workout because
I'm leaving for Florida for 3 says to do a video/promo shoot for Bellator.

Here's the workout:

Deadlift 135 x 5 x 225 x 3
275 x 3 295 x 5 340 x 5 385 x 10(seen in above video)

Bench Bar x 10 95 x 5 140 x 5 165 x 5 185 x 10

Chest Supported Row 45lbs x 50

Workout was short and sweet which is what I need. So I can have as much time as
possible to recover for the workout on the next day.

MMA Sparring went pretty good. After the 3rd round my left knee began to bug me. I didnt hurt it during the round but if felt funny when i got up. I sometimes have that after I lift heavy near 1 RM my body is in a recovery state for a few days after so it would have been wiser to wait until the weekend. Also i have been doing alot of power cleans lately and i think my technique has been lacking, in where my feet went out in order to get up the weight instead of using good technique which can aggravate the inside of the knee which i think it did.  I don't think it was that bad though, so Im gonna go to the physical therapists tomorrow. So for now im just icing and may take a few days off to let my leg rest.

Also on another note, i think maybe changing up my training regimen maybe wise. The training itself is already physically intensive on the body so i need to build off that. Just some food for thought. But ill be brainstorming about it the next few days.

Today was good training day. I got in some good wrestling drilling and lives goes in the morning. Then after that went to rehab and got my back adjusted and laser on my knee. After that I felt good so I went to go get a workout in at JTS. I decided to go for 500lb deadlift today. So i started deadlift at the beginning of the workout.

Deadlift

135 x 5
225 x 3
275 x 3
315 x 1
365 x 1
405 x 1
425 x 1
460 x 1
500 x 1

Power Clean

135 x 3
155 x 3
185 x 1
205 x 1
225 x 3 x 3

Incline bench

bar x 10
135 x 5
155 x 3
175 x 3
185 x 3
205 x 1


Tomorrow is gonna be a hard day. Its MMA sparring day. What we do is put on our MMA gloves and shin pads then spar 5 minutes for 5 to 6 rounds with 1 minute rest in between. The sparring is grappling based but you go as hard as your partner, so if your partner feel like going hard then your gonna have a tough round. It pretty much simulates a long hard fight. Normal fights are 3 x 5 minutes but Title fights are 5 x 5 minutes. So i think its always good to be in championships shape.