Happy New Year — What’s New in 2019!

Posted on January 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

Cabal Fang is blowing up!  We’ve somehow managed to attract a couple of powerful and prestigious board members — folks who are way smarter and more talented than me — to help shepherd Cabal Fang toward its fullest potential.  Watch this space for updates or, better yet, subscribe to the Cabal Fang State of the Art Dispatch!

Cabal Fang is 100% free and always will be — but free don’t pay the bills.  I’m 57 years old you guys, and my retirement dream is to be a priest who runs a community chapel and teaches martial arts classes.  It’s gonna take big bucks to buy or build the Cabal Fang Temple.  I’m not going to earn that kind of money selling five-buck ebook downloads.

So I’m going to be teaching some martial arts classes for money.  I’m now an approved instructor of Mark Hatmaker‘s Frontier Rough & Tumble Martial Arts program.  Starting this spring I’ll be teaching that, as well as Walking Stick Self-Defense (Vigny-Lang method) through my new Bobcat Martial Arts program.

And I built a web store!  Like I said, I have to sell more than ebook downloads to pay for a building.  There’s plenty of amazing, one-of-a-kind stuff for sale already — including private lessons and seminars — but there’s more coming.  Go buy something! 

Click here to join the monthly Mystic Christian Meetup!

I’m building my church.  You have to start somewhere, right?  So just two days ago I put together a monthly meet-up at the local library called Richmond Mystic Christians and we already have six members.  I’ve been in seminary for two years, very soon I’ll be promoted to Deacon, and it’s past time I got my butt in gear.  Read more about my seminary here.

I’m releasing at least two eBooks this year.  I have five books in the hopper:

 

  1. Cabal Fang Study Course Second Edition
  2. Martial Grit: Real-World Fighting Fitness
  3. Archangel Barachiel Revealed: A True Story of Scholarship, Mystery, Veneration and Revelation
  4. The Wildwood Workbook: An Everyday Person’s Guide to Connecting with the Natural World, and
  5. Food on a Mission, a cookbook arranged by specific goals.

I’m going to get at least two of them on the street in 2019 or die tryin’.

And lastly, I’m hitting the road.  Private lessons and seminars are for sale in my new web store.  I’ve got my adventure trailer all built, and I’ll be traveling around the countryside, camping out and teaching.  So go book one!

 

If you like what I do and you want to support my mission, please click here support me on Patreon!

 

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Year-End Review: Training Involution #137

Posted on December 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

From Christmas Eve through New Years Day I don’t do much training.  Just my forms (Star of Ishtar, Fool’s Journey and my old Korean Karate forms) and my health maintenance stuff (grip health, therapy rollers and bands, etc.).

You don’t have to take the holidays off like me.  Push through if you want.  But I highly recommend you take at least two weeks off training per year — preferably in two, one-week chunks.   I usually take off 12/24 – 1/1 and then a second week in the late summer for my annual beach trip to OBX.

But, whether you’re on a break this week or not,  you should take some time to complete a Year-End Review.

If you don’t review your year, how are you going to do better in the next?

I just finished my new Action Plan for 2019 — you can look at it here.  What I do is print this thing out once per month and paste it into my training journal.  Any unrealized goals from the prior month get moved the new sheet, and all month long I put the hash marks in the “(     )” slots to keep track of how I’m doing on the daily/weekly/monthly tasks.  Here’s a pretty thorough rundown of my organizational method over on my Patreon page.

Year-End Review: Training Involution #137

Most people set New Year’s resolutions that are largely arbitrary and then fail to establish any performance metrics.  Don’t do that.  Set meaningful goals with valuable payoffs and then monitor your performance to insure progress.

  1. Get out your training log and spend some time reviewing your entries.  You do keep a training journal, right?  Training journals are not optional in Cabal Fang martial arts.  Look, we don’t have very many rules, but keeping a training journal is one of them.  So if you aren’t journaling, go get a spiral note book or something and start writing stuff down so you can do a year-end review next December.
  2. Take as much time with your review as you feel is sufficient, necessary and/or available.  Might be fifteen minutes or three hours — whatever is necessary and sufficient to make sensible conclusions and set meaningful goals.
  3. What did you well in 2018?  What did you do poorly?
  4. What are you going to do better in 2019?  
  5. How are you going to do better in 2019? 
  6. What are your performance metrics going to be?

If you’re going to make 2019 your best year ever, the future is now.

 

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The Hermetic Mysteries of Christmas Revisited

Posted on December 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

I’ve written about the Hermetic Mysteries of Christmas before —  here and here.  What’s a “mystery?”  In the religious sense, “mysteries” are the wondrous things we feel when we put ourselves inside a myth and allow ourselves to fully experience it as if we are there.  The word mystery comes to us from Greek musterion and Latin mysterium where it means “a secret rite or ritual.”

Within Catholic and Orthodox Christianity we see embedded the esoteric methods and essential nature of the Greco-Roman mysteries — updated to serve the goal of Christian salvation.

Four Ways to Seek the Christmas Mysteries This Year

  1. Gospel Reading Meditation.  Get out your Bible and turn to the gospel of Luke.  Read Luke 2:1-20.  Then close your Bible, shut your eyes, and regulate your breathing to a steady rhythm.  Imagine that you are one of the shepherds, sitting by the fire with your friends and brothers, watching over the flocks, when an angel appears.  Allow the story to unfold in your mind’s eye.
  2. Go to a live Nativity Scene.  Try, despite the presence of the other viewers, to imagine you are one of the shepherds as outlined above.
  3. Experience the Joyous Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Click here for instructions.  If you have never prayed the Rosary before you are in for a treat.  The basic idea is that you repeat certain prayers while you meditate on the Joyous Mysteries — the Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary, the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, the Nativity of Jesus, the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and the Finding of Jesus in the Temple.
  4. Watch this amazing lecture by Jonathan Pageau.  See below.  Jonathan is an Orthodox Christian icon carver, a skilled artisan who understands Christian symbolism as deeply as any churchman — perhaps even more deeply — having spent so many intimate hours carving these sacred images.

Experiencing the Christmas Mysteries as if we are fully present within them is the greatest Christmas “present” we could ever hope for.  

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Restricted: Training Involution #136

Posted on December 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

Cabal Fang Temple here in Richmond VA volunteered to assist Food Not Bombs feed the homeless last Sunday.  Afterwards we washed dishes. We were too INVOLVED to take pictures of ourselves, and besides, we didn’t want to brag. Here’s a shot of the spread.

The other day I posted a video about how restriction breeds creativity while freedom breeds laziness.  Don’t believe me?  Read the post and watch the video because this week’s involution is based on that premise.

Restricted: Training Involution #136

  • Warm-up completely for at least 8:00.
  • Tuck your dominant arm in your belt and do some martial fitness.  Set timer for 8:00.  Do as many sets of 4 of each exercise as you can before the timer beeps: Jump Squats, Sit-outs, Shrimps, Push-ups (on knees if you can’t do one-arms).
  • Liberate your arm to go to the Heavy bag. 3 x 3:00/1:00 max power shots only.  When I say max power, I mean Serena-Williams-from-back-court-for-match-point-with-a-grunt-level power. First round, hands only.  Second round, legs only.  Final round, all in.  Count your strikes in the final round.  Write it in your training journal.  Beat it next time. 
  • Do your Constitutional.  Cabal Fang is the only martial art that has a base level fitness requirement.  Twice weekly constitutionals are required.  Details below.  Don’t have a tire?  Get one or sub a #20 sandbag and modify — modify, adapt, overcome!
  • What have you done for Spirit Month?  Last week I suggested that you volunteer, help out a sick or elderly neighbor or relative, help a friend, etc. Did you do that?  If so, you’re off this week on the spiritual portion.  If not, restrict yourself somehow until you decide on something and put it on your calendar.  Sleep without a pillow, give up soft drinks, beer, TV, your favorite food, etc.   Out of ideas?  The restriction should help, but ask your deity, higher power  or better self for insight. Be still and ask how you can be of service. Listen carefully — something will pop into your head that’s decent and true.  Do that.

December 2018 Constitutional

Tire Sit-ups (25)
Tire Lunges (25)
Tire Passes (25 full — 50 Tire Slams if you’re going solo)
Tire Squats (50)
Tire Burpees (25)
Tire V-ups (25)
Tire Jackknife Push-ups (25)

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How to Stimulate Your Creativity

Posted on December 19, 2018 | 6 comments

It’s more than counter-intuitive.  It just plain doesn’t make sense.  And yet, here it is in all its messed up, crazy, inside-out glory — one of the most powerful and yet simple methods for stimulating creativity and creative ideas.

Try it.  Let me know how it works by commenting below.

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Involved: Training Involution #135

Posted on December 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

Why are our weekly training assignments called involutions?  What does involution even mean?

in·vo·lu·tion

/ˌinvəˈlo͞oSHən/
(noun)
  1. The act of fully taking part in an activity or task (q.v. involved)
  2. The inner path of a spiritual aspirant toward self-realization.
  3. The process by which the Divine manifests the cosmos.

This is what separates Cabal Fang from MMA, combat sports, and defensive tactics.  Sure, we borrow from all of those.  But we are involved in the process such that it becomes a spiritual endeavor.

We should always be asking questions like,  “How is this martial activity making me a better person?” or “How can this technique activity be fully contextualized?”  Instead of just learning the HOW of our techniques, we should be exploring the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE and WHY of them.

Involved: Training Involution #135

Our martial focus this month is Spirit — which means putting your spirit in action! — and our internal focus is prayer. So…

  • Get involved.  If you are in the Richmond, Virginia area, join Cabal Fang Temple as we feed the homeless tomorrow at Food not Bombs.  We’ll be meeting at RVA Createspace, 607 Wickham St, Richmond, Virginia 23222 at 3:30 PM to help haul, serve and clean up.
  • Not in Richmond?  Do something else.  Don’t just donate money.  Actually do something. Volunteer somewhere.  Do a chore or cook a meal for a sick or elderly neighbor or relative.  Ask someone you know if they need a hand with something.
  • Don’t know what to do?  If you’re atheist, ask your better self, otherwise ask your deity or higher power for insight.  This is called prayer.  Be still and ask to know how you can be of service.  Listen carefully — something will pop into your head that’s decent, true and kind.  Do that.
  • Complete this month’s constitutional.  If you don’t have a tire, use a #20 sandbag instead.  Or help clean up the planet by finding one of the tens of thousands of tires that are tossed into streams, left in medians and thrown into the woods every year.
  • Subscribe to the new Cabal Fang YouTube channel.  

 

 

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A Rough and Tumble Buck Walk in the Snow

Posted on December 9, 2018 | Leave a comment

Last month my martial arts club and I stared down the calisthenics nightmare known as Self-Destruct Sequence. World renowned coach Mark Hatmaker decided to play along and do it right along with us.

So when Hatmaker suggested I try his Rough and Tumble Buck Walk, I couldn’t say “No!” Video below. Now, to be fair, I butchered it a bit. It was supposed to be as follows: 100 yards of Lunges while going uphill and carrying an Olympic weight bar overhead. Every tenth Lunge, as a “rest,” complete three Swing Cleans. Then do it again 100 yards back downhill.

On account of the snow I couldn’t go to the park to do it on a 100 yard hill, so I did three, seventy-five yard circuits my yard which is sloped but not really hilly. And I didn’t have an Olympic bar, so I used my #20 digging bar. Honestly, if I had gone to the park and tried this thing with a proper bar and a proper hill, I don’t think I could’ve finished it. Legs? Maybe. Arms and shoulders? No way. She’s a shoulder killer.

Thanks for the adventure Mark!

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Action Figure: Training Involution #134

Posted on December 8, 2018 | Leave a comment

The Cabal Fang external focus of the month is Spirit and the internal focus is the Rose (prayer).  How in the world, you may wonder, can an external focus be Spirit?  By putting your insides on the outside — by putting your spirit into action.  Here’s an excerpt from the Cabal Fang Study Course:

In Mettlecraft month you harden that which is soft; in Spirit Month you temper that which is hard so that it becomes flexible. As the old sage Lao Tzu said, strength and hardness are associated with death, while softness and flexibility are associated with life.  Aspire to maturity and strength without being jaded and inflexible, to being childlike and full of life without being naïve and helpless.

Spirit month means that you show your spirit in action.  The month the group here in Richmond is collecting food and money to feed the homeless.  We’ll be delivering what we’ve collected to the local chapter of Food not Bombs next Sunday 12/16, and then we’ll be hanging out to physically prep and cleanup a meal.

What are you going to do this month?

Action Figure: Training Involution #134

  • 30 minutes of action.  Warm up thoroughly.  Then set a repeating timer for 10 minutes.  For the first 10 minutes, complete as many sets as you can of 4 Jackknife Push-ups (HSPUs if you’re advanced), 4 Sit-outs, 4 Jump Squats, and 4 Wrestling Shots.  For the next 10 minutes, go at your heavy bag, punching and kicking with constant contact.  Then, for the final 10 minutes, go for a run.  Advanced players, add a weighted vest (I used a #5).  Constitutional trial rules apply for the entire half hour: take as few 12-count breaks as possible — push!
  • Pray for 10 minutes.  Even atheists can pray, because “to pray” simply means “to ask.”  Assume your posture of choice, regulate your breathing, and spend 10 minutes in prayer.  Ask your god or higher power what you could do, personally, this month, to physically put your spirit into action for the benefit of your family or community.  If you’re an atheist, pray to Truth and try to tap into your subconscious.  When you’re done, formulate a plan.  Actually set a date for whatever you decide upon doing.

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye. shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh. findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” ~Matthew 7:7–8

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Mettlecraft Month 2018 Recap and T.I. #133

Posted on December 1, 2018 | 6 comments

 

The calisthenics nightmare that is Self-Destruct Sequence is a great way to find out if you scare easy.  But we stared it down.  And guess what we found out?

We are capable of more than we ever thought possible.

Everybody got it done under the 40 minute time limit.  Scott thought I was crazy — but he finished it twice.  Three of us set personal records (James 22:55, Robert 24:38 and me 24:45).  Arman set the new Cabal Fang organization record (21:15).  Two people who aren’t even in the organization were inspired to take a shot at it!  One was legendary martial arts coach Mark Hatmaker (who holds the all-time record by the way at 21:05).

tHE HARDER YOU WORK, THE BRIGHTER YOU SHINE.

And now for the Cabal Fang training involution of the week.

Training Involution of the Week #133

  • If you only took one nibble of Self-Destruct Sequence this month, go take another bite and see how it tastes the second time around.  Instructions below if you need reminding. Make sure you warm up thoroughly before you start!
  • If you took two or more stabs at Self-Destruct Sequence this month, then you deserve some rest.  Spend 20 minutes on form and technique.  If you’re solo, spend 10 minutes on forms and 10 more on the heavy bag at 2/3 power making sure everything looks just so.  If you have a partner, spend 20 minutes at half power working on Flow Drill #1.: A: Cram w/ Decolage Right to L Roundhouse Kick. B: Fade away overhook kick catch, block down foot, spiral takedown to Hanging Achilles Lock. A: Roll out. B: Follow, step over to Half Crab.
  • Walking meditation.  Go for a walk, at least 30 minutes.  Think about what you learned from Self-Destruct Sequence this month.  Now you know you’re capable of more than you thought possible.  How can you apply that to other dimensions of your life?  Are you capable of more intellectually?  Emotionally? Spiritually?  Come out of your walk with a new stretch goal.  Maybe you want to read more books or take more classes, save more money, spend more time with your kids, or to finally learn to play to guitar.  Cabal Fang is full context martial arts.  The lessons of martial arts are no good if you don’t apply them across all four dimensions.

In case you’re late to the party, here’s the challenge: Get this done in under 40 minutes.

 Self-Destruct Sequence

Zombie Squats (50)
Push-ups, diamond (25)
Jump Squats (100)
10-Count Bodybuilders (25)
Pikes/Leg Triangles (25)
Jump Squats, split (50)
Push-ups, Sit-out (25)
Bicycles (50 each side)
Burpees (25)
Twisters (25 each side)
Wall Touches (100)
Push-ups, hopping/clapping (25)

Exercise illustration video here.

 

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Training Randomness in Martial Arts

Posted on November 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

Over the years I’ve talked a deal about the importance of introducing randomness into martial arts training.  Although some things seem to mesh better with linear progression training, like lifting weights (for me at least), introducing some randomness into training has real benefits.

One of the benefits you get from introducing randomness in your martial arts training is the ability to deal with the unexpected.  Chaos is really annoying.  But its real and you to learn to handle it.

Here’s an overview of what is and is not random in my training regimen these days.

Random

Solo martial arts practice (four days/week).  I select random martial arts focuses by pulling labeled Popsicle sticks out of a pile.  Why not roll dice?  I want some randomness, but I need to cover all bases.  This method insures that, assuming I get through all the sticks in two weeks, I never get rusty at anything.

Running (twice per week).  I roll dice using the following program.  I have no idea if I’m running 3 miles for pace, half a mile as fast as I can, shuttle runs with a weighted vest, or what-have-you.

Extra calisthenics (whenever I feel like it).  I use PTDICE.  I have a few sets left.  Email me and I’ll sell you a set for $15 postage paid.

Not Random

Group martial arts training.  We stick with one  martial concentration and one constitutional (a 7 exercise deep calisthenics routine) for a full month before switching.

Weights (twice per week).  Still, I rotate out all exercises every 6 weeks.  Here’s some info about LPs.

Grip training (5 days/week).  Heath/maintenance 3 days/week,  pushing limits 2 days/week.  I’ve written a lot about this over the years, but recently I’m getting better results more safely.  More to come soon.

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