Weighted Grappling Trainer

At the peak of my Jeet Kune Do studies, I had minimal access to training partners so a lot of my training involved the adaptation and innovation of sparring techniques for solo applications. This tool that I created which I'll call the "weighted grappling trainer" was a combination of the concept of wrist and ankle weights that I was wearing throughout the day, and the concept of dynamic movement and shadow boxing. I had to adapt to the increased risk of injury from adding additional weight to fast movements. This required extra warming up and extra care to control the movements to avoid hyper-extension of joints, muscles, and connective tissues, etc. I found a workable balance and never any excessive pain, tearing, or strain. As with anything, I had to work up to the ability to push and pull a dynamic weighted load at the speed of combative grappling. Ideally this type of training tool would be used only with the supervision of a professional sports medicine doctor or staff, however in the do-it-yourself underground, I was willing to take my health and safety into my own researched hands. It's worth noting that the way to almost completely de-risk the use of such an experimental training too would be not only slowing increment adding weight, but by also starting at a very slow pace and only building up to full speed over a long period of time.

In my late 20s, at the state of overall fitness I was in, I probably accelerated in training faster than I should have, but that's part of being young and pushing limits and boundaries. Often you go to far and learn hard, painful lessons that either warn you to slow down, or simply force you to slow down due to injuries that can't be shrugged off. I'm glad and lucky to say that even when I was training hard several hours a day, I never sustained any major injuries but I had some warnings. At my current age, I'd opt for a slower and ever more controlled manner of training. The stakes for suffering the set back of injury now are higher than ever, so my training practices have become far less risky. There is a lot to be said about how to train for self-defense in as safe a manner as possible. One of the great tragic ironies is to endure permanently damaging injury not from combat itself, but from training for it. It's my mission now to design training methodologies that minimize risk and maximize the responsibility and duty to by all available means avoid injury while not sacrificing the potency and power of full force training.

To explain the tool itself, it's basically a small length of salvaged threaded metal pipe, I believe it was 3/4 inch in diameter, sliding several weights to the center, then securing them in place.