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Saturday, April 26, 2008

Shoulder Surgery and the One armed bandit

As some of you from class may know, I finally closed the book on 30 years of inadequate rehab, bit the bullet, and got arthroscopic surgery done on my right shoulder. Man, does this sucker hurt! The surgeon surprised me after I woke up because what we both assumed from the MRI was a simple tear and a 2 point reattachment...turned out to be three times more damage that required 2 more hours of surgery and 6 total reattachments once he got the scope in. So if you've been suffering like I have since college (30 years ago) with shoulder pain that comes and goes, thinking "I can fix this myself".... you may help yourself by getting that MRI you've been avoiding.

'Course now I'm looking at 9 months rehab til I can really go at it again but after that--watch out! I'll be tearing phone books in half and throwing big Mike thru the window (in my dreams!) In the meantime, good thing they invented Vicodin! Anybody else gone thru the shoulder 'scope ordeal? How'd it turn out? All I know is there's lots of one-armed contact flow in my future... I'm going to have to work on drills that don't screw up the surgery. One lesson I can take away from all this is the importance of warming up and not leaving your brains in your ass. The original injury was from lifting weights--and then going out and throwing 300 passes in a football game. Couldn't lift my arm for a week. That got better, but I kept re-injuring it. The final insult was 3 months ago when, after breaking my personal record in pull-ups, I decided to celebrate by immediately doing an hour of intense contact flow. Snap. After 30 years I think I finally learned my lesson. Maybe.

P.S. Just to put my whining in perspective, John needs double knee replacement and two shoulder surgeries and he's still devastating.
--Matt

Sunday, April 20, 2008

New expanded 2nd edition of our book coming...

Hey everybody--

This is Attack Proof co-author Matt Kovsky. You know how you can have an important face-to-face conversation with someone you don't see very often, and then, on your way home, you realize all the things you forgot to mention? Or you're on your cell phone in the car, trying to get directions before you hit that dead spot on the road ("can you hear me now??"). Well that's kind of what it was like when we put out the first edition of our book. The publisher had a deadline, a page limit, and their own ideas about what the book should be (and look like, and be titled, etc...
an interesting story in itself...) 'Course now, since we sold 20,000 copies and are one of Human Kinetics best sellers, things are a little different! it's really exciting because the 2nd edition of Attack Proof is finally going to have everything we originally wanted in it...and more.

Without them saying "oh, you have to cut this, this is too long, you have to have a section that says things this way..." we can give you full, detailed explanations of this admittedly esoteric free-form art so that there's no question what we mean when we talk about Sensitivity, Sphere of Influence, Equilibrium, "Riding the Vortex"--all that stuff that you feel instantly when you're in class but hard to get from a book (though it seems we've been getting a lot of emails lately from people who've been practicing with nothing but the book and surprising their formerly superior teachers and training partners--and getting that look from them--you know, the kind that says "what the hell have you been doing??).

There's going to be a complete groundfighting training guide, footwork and balance regimen, jetliner hijacking survival guide, point-shooting drills, exhaustive contact flow variations, total Slambag training...it's gonna be packed.

It would've been nice if we could've finally called it "In The Eye of the Storm"... but people'd walk right past it...