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Welcome to the first installment of the Sitan Gym Chronicles!

This blog will be dedicated to recording and sharing the day-to-day existence of Sitan Gym Arizona. After all, it’s not only when major tournaments come around that there are stories worth sharing. Remarkable moments occur daily, and they’re every bit as inspiring as any title fight.

With the next Bounded Fist coming up, there’s truly no better time to focus on than the present. We’re now in the second week of Fight Camp. Even though I know the fighters’ current regimen is meant to build them up for competition on the 19th, it’s hard to imagine anything rougher than what’s been going on nightly from 7-9 pm.

During Tuesday night’s session, the fighters definitely set some kind of record for number of cubic liters left behind on the mat. After two hours of running, sparring and and an offensive number of kicks, Will set up a suspension trainer along with a handful of accompanying weights. (My personal favorite: the training vest, a severe-looking contraption of straps and buckles slathered in cartridge-size weighted pockets, which looks like something out of a Christopher Nolan movie). A few of the guys proceeded to stay an extra hour, doing all sorts of intensified push-ups, shoulder presses and wall-sits. Brutal stuff:

 

Watching sessions like this, it makes you think about the idea of talent, and what truly makes for successful training. If all you see is the end result, it’s natural to assume that winning fighters have some kind of innate advantage. But Fight Camp begs the question as to whether what we think of as talent is the least of it. These next couple weeks will be asking something else from the fighters, something beyond natural ability. Maybe it’s a kind of generosity, a willingness to give themselves to whatever the training demands in each and every session, leaving it all behind on the mat for the rest of us to ponder.