SW Portland Martial Arts teaches Mo Duk Pai (a style that emphasizes ethics, practicality and teaching) and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (a grappling and throwing art).
CrossFit Hillsdale teaches functional fitness with an emphasis on gradual progress and real world results.
Our mission is to provide students with quality instruction, love of learning, and open appreciation for all movement arts.
In case you can’t handle absorbing things in larger than one second increments, here is a compilation video from the last few weeks at the gym, including one of our kid’s camps and all the usual excitement as well.
Guard. If you look around a BJJ floor at any given time during rolls, you’re likely to see about 50% of the pairs of players in some sort of guard.
Given the frequent occurrence of the position, it makes sense to focus on it. Heck, it wouldn’t be wrong to spend about 50% of your time on guard. There’s certainly plenty of stuff to cover: closed guard, open guard, half guard, passing the guard, sweeps, submissions, z-guard, k-guard, and all the guard variants I’ve never heard of or have forgotten.
If the theme works anything like our last few, everyone will come out at the end of the month a much more formidable player. My plan is to stick to closed guard and the fundamentals of the position. Hopefully the other coaches have some fancier stuff to keep everyone entertained.
As you can see, we’ve added a new membership benefit: if you’re a paying gym member, you get $20 off a massage with one of our favorite LMTs, George Bare of Vital Integrity Massage.
Pretty cool stuff, obviously, but did you know you also get access to our whole schedule? That’s right. CrossFit classes, Yoga classes, all the various martial arts classes. If you are a paying member, they are ALL open to you. I mean, I guess don’t go to the kids class for 4 year olds unless you are actually a four year old child, but you get the idea (I hope.)
If you’ve got kids, you also get a discount on our kids camps and free access to our movie nights. You also get access to our book club meetings because, well, our gym is full of people who love to read.
Most importantly, you get to hang out with amazing people and learn awesome things.
One of the constant reminders you’ll hear at the gym is that you should be moving your body through a “full range of motion.” It’s a great idea… but what does it mean?
Ideally, it means we should be strong throughout the range of motion of a muscle. So if we’re using that exemplar of muscles, the biceps, it means we want to be strong when the elbow joint is all the way closed (fist as close to the shoulder as possible), when the elbow joint is all the way open (the arm is flat), and all points in between. The theory goes that if you’re weak anywhere in that range of motion, that is the place you’re going to get hurt, so in your training you should strive to move through a full range of motion.
Alright, so if that’s true, then why stop at the floor with a deadlift? Why not stand on a box and keep lowering the weight down until the hip joint is all the way closed? Well, turns out most of us are a lot stronger lifting from the floor than when we stand on a box and it’s nice to be stronger through that (usually) more functional range of motion (we’re not picking things out of holes as often as we are picking things up off the ground) so it would be kind of a bummer to do lighter weights in that bigger range of motion.
But what about the rule?! Full range of motion all day all the time! Maybe. I think there’s strong (pun intended) practical benefits to getting stronger in that functional range of motion where you pick things up from the ground but I also think standing on a box and gaining strength in that greater range of motion is also awesome. Why not? Life will inevitably require us to lift something out of a hole at some point so we might as well not suck at it.
One way to ease into this extra range of motion is to use smaller, metal weights like 25s. It’s kind of shocking how much harder it is to move through that extra range of motion. Go light, but give it a whirl, and then the day you’ve got to reach down and heft that random toddler from an extremely shallow well, you’ll thank me.
6309 SW Capitol Highway, Portland OR, 97239
503 432 7450
