I’m stoked.  After a month between sittings, my quarter sleeve tattoo is finally done and I couldn’t be happier with the finished product that you see to the right. To give you guys a little bit of background on the artwork, When I knew I wanted a piece of this size, I went to my friend and former top ranked judoka Justin Flores who also happens to be a fantastic graphic designer he came up with the initial concept drawings  and then that concept was carried out to perfection by Eric Brocious of Art Rage ink in Scranton.

When  Justin asked me what I wanted I said “just put Matt Marcinek and Disabled Grappler into art form”  not the clearest of instructions  I know, but  J-Flo  knows me  and knows judo so I had supreme confidence in him to come up with a concept I’d love and he certainly delivered.

The reason that  this tattoo appeals to me so much isn’t because I think of myself as some “Modern day Samurai” or because I’m caught up in the ancient Japanese mysticisms of judo but I do  believe that every day is a battle,  every day I  put on my DisabledGrappler helmet and I wage “ war” not just in training, but with people’s perceptions of me,  my disability, the obstacles that I face, and at times my own thoughts and feelings  and I do it all with “Doubt Me” as  my battle cry  and although our opponents may be different every one of us faces   conflicts that we need to overcome and their not always going to be easy so instead of complaining..  strap on your helmet, pick up your sword, and start working towards  victory

Recently I’ve found myself getting very into the European style of judo. For those of you who don’t know, for all intents and purposes there are two main “Styles” of judo, The Japanese or “classical” style which focuses on being very upright and technique oriented and the Russian or European style which focuses on being more bent over and Strength oriented

Now let me qualify that last statement, a lot of people think that when I say the European style is more strength based, that it is just two meatheads in the center of a mat doing a test of strength and there is no technique involved that couldn’t be further from the truth, there is a lot of technique involved in this style of judo they just choose to rely on strength more. European judo also has or should I had a more wrestling base focusing on techniques like pick ups, leg grabs, and kata guruma (fireman’s carry) . Being a former wrestler myself this style of judo really appealed to me and the more I get into it, really appeals to me today. Obviously with the rule changes of ’09/’10 outlawing leg grabs there has had to be a major shift in the gameplans of European judo players and one of the countries that I think has made the best adjustment is Mongolia.

I love Mongolian judo, I love to watch their athletes compete, before the rule changes you would see a ton of fireman’s carry’s which I personally love,( it’s my favorite technique) after the rule changes you still saw a lot of fireman’s but more of the sit out variety never having to touch the leg. I love their attacking style of judo. I can watch the highlight below for hours every day

Grappling is all about finding your style, finding the techniques that work for you, for your body type this brand of training is not for everyone The more I watch and study Russian/ European judo, sambo and wrestling videos the more I’m convinced that if I was able to walk, I would definitely learn towards that style of competing
I’d love to hear fellow judokas thoughts, what is your preferred style?
Until next time,
Matt

Being a blogger, sports junkie, pro wrestling fan and fellow “brother of the blue zone” myself  and Zach and I will chat whenever topics that appeal to both of us come across our desks and Zach is a frequent reader of DisabledGrappler.com who often takes time to provide feedback on my posts  which I very much appreciate so when Zach asked me if he could send me an advanced copy of his new book, Off Blanced,   I jumped at it.

The book, which focuses on Zach’s life from the time he was a young boy  to his college life, is a very real, honest,  sometimes funny, at times gripping look into the life of someone with cerebral palsy.

Not surprisingly in the least, I found myself really relating to Zach’s story specifically in the areas of being judged when you walk into a room  and  also in dealing with relationships with girls. Some of you might be surprised by  that statement because you read this blog and you might think “but Matt, you seem so confident” and you’re right I am. I’m  very comfortable with who I am, I’m never usually the “shrinking violet” in the room  and I’m the first person to make a handicapped joke in order to help ease any tensions someone might have. However, with as confident as I am,  there are always  those 3-5 seconds of entering a room where you feel everyone’s eyes on you and you feel like the spotlight was just shone your way  and now the whole room is captivated  by your every move. It can be pretty uncomfortable.

It is situations like this that Zach describes with pinpoint accuracy and honesty. He does a masterful job of drawing his readers  in and making emotional connections to help them understand   the trials, tribulations and triumphs he faced and overcame as a disabled person  in an “able bodied” persons world. I would highly recommend off balanced  to anyone who might be curious as to what it is like to grow up with a disability.

Off Balanced is  available on the Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook. If you don’t have a Kindle or Nook, Amazon offers a variety of free Kindle reading apps that can be found here: (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

If  y’all have been  following me for any length of time, you know I’m a BIG  social media guy . I’ve got a personal facebook page, a business facebook page, a twitter account, a linkedin account a youtube page and of course this illustrious blog that you are reading right now. Through all these wonderful tools, I have been able to  keep up with  old friends, make some new ones, and  gain some great contacts that would have been otherwise impossible just a few short years ago, but  even for my affinity of all things web 2.0, there is an element of  modern marvel that I can’t stand  and that is a group that I call the “Social (Poor ME) Dia”

Who exactly is the “Social (Poor ME) Dia”? These are the people who every single time  you sign in to your favorite networking site you have to hear (or read) about  problems with their job, their relationships, their house, their car.. Every single day they have something negative to say about something and to be honest, I really don’t have time for them. I’m not saying there hasn’t been times where I needed to vent or I was having a bad day and threw something up  on facebook  or sent out a tweet to vent but  the people who do this every day they are not venting they  don’t want to just get something off their chest,  what they want is pity, they  just want someone to feel bad  for them and if you come here to look for pity I’m sorry.. I’m fresh out  and we won’t be restocking anytime soon.

I have  personally been through and have met so many people that have been through so much shit in their lives that for me to  constantly focus on the negative and not focus on all of the positive aspects of my life is a complete and utter waste of time.

And for the members of the “Social (Poor ME) Dia” who might be reading this right now   The DisabledGrappler is gonna break some of the most common complaints down for ya, fix all your problems and  get you on your way to leading a happy, healthy and more productive life  are you ready?

• “My Job Sucks”- QUIT
• “My boyfriend/girlfriend is a jerk”-DUMP EM
• “The area I live in is boring”-MOVE

Now, I can already hear what you guys are sayin “ but Matt, that’s a lot of work and sacrifice” Damn right it is but if your life is SOOO bad and things suck SOOOO much, shouldn’t you be jumping at the chance to make the necessary sacrifices  to improve your life?

Oh, and guess what? If you do complain about the things listed above and then you don’t take any steps necessary to fix them? YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN obviously you are happy with the way things are going. Its just that simple.

Well, that’s all I have for you guy today.  Until next time

Stay positive,

Matt

So, I got an email yesterday from somebody sayng that I’ve been writing a lot of “article” style posts and not a lot of personal posts  and that  they thought I should do one about what’s been going on with me. So, ask and ye shall receive…

Been gearing up for my first jiu-jitsu  tournament, The Good Fight: Tournament of brotherly love  this Saturday March 17^th in Philadelphia. I’m feeling pretty good.  I Started my cut a little over a month ago, the Monday after the super bowl to be exact.   I was 169 then, pretty damn heavy for me,  I’m about 149-150 right now which is right on weight for the 149 weight class I’m going to compete in.  weight wise health/ wise I feel really good, 169 was way too high for me, I felt kinda sluggish , I’m definitely feeling better with the weigh drop   this cut has actually been really easy, I’d like to try and stay around 150-155 after Saturday if I could.

I’ve been training  a lot more jiu-jitsu in preparation for this tournament. I feel pretty decent, like I’ve made some nice headway in my matwork skills, certain areas I feel things clicking a bit faster than they used to,  and I’m looking forward to competing again , should be pretty cool.

Judo wise, this is probably the longest I’ve gone without physically training judo in the 8 years since I started. I’m still  very involved “administratively” for lack of a better term coaching,  helping to organize things, but as far as physically participating on the mat, I guess you can say I’ve been on a bit of a sabbatical. I’m not going to lie, having a limited number of techniques, a limited amount of mobility, and no short term opportunity   to compete, has been tough  to keep my focus on training my own judo.

I’ve started to become more heavily involved in the development of freestyle judo and the freestyle judo movement. I really  thank coach Steve Scott for the opportunity to be so involved. I’ll never say that freestyle will replace “IJF Judo” (and that’s not even the goal) but with group of people and approach we are taking, I feel like we can really carve out a great niche for ourselves and really make a dent in the world of competitive judo. I’m thinking about competing in the No gi freestyle nationals july 14^th in Texas if I can afford it.

I’ve been teaching a lot more,  as you guys know  I’m one of the lead kids instructors at Scranton MMA. Still teaching the kids jits and judo classes along with my good friend Frankie . I’ve also started teaching the takedown portion of Frankie’s no gi class which has been really cool and further  helps me in my teaching development.

March 25^th, I get to do one of my favorite things in the world to do and that is train the army national guard in Sunbury, PA I look forward to that every year and it is honestly probably a bigger deal for me than it is for them. One of the greatest  honors in my life is to be able to be a part of this.

On the business side, I feel like DisabledGrappler LLC is still very much in its infancy. I’ve been working extremely  close with my friend/ web developer/ branding coach James Dalman  and I can tell you we have some great stuff planned. Its just going to take some time and you’ll start seeing some things  changing and taking shape over the next few weeks/months. Maybe I’m the ultimate optimist  but I’m very confident that this” infant “will begin walking soon ( how bout that my business will walk before I do) and it will start running after that

In the meantime, you can still book me for seminars for your to talk to your athletes, your clubs, or your business.

I can tell you an all new online store and line of “Doubt me” apparel is coming … its going to be sweet if I do say so myself

As you can see, life is busy, but busy is good you throw enough darts at the board sooner or later you’ll hit a bull’s-eye

I’ll let u know how Saturday goes,

The  vast Majority of you guys (outside of New Jersey ) have probably never heard of Chris, and that’s ok, he doesn’t want you to, but Chris had a huge impact on my judo, myself and my friends had just left our  first instructor (for reasons that will not appear in this blog) and we were looking for a place to train and Chris, a shodan, had just opened up  his  own judo place in a little karate school about 45 minutes away in Stroudsburg  PA called Pocono Mountain Judo club.

From the first time we walked into Pocono mountain, we knew this was the  place we wanted to work out. The workouts were intense, the randori was hard, and the Metallica was blasting. It was really the perfect situation to enter after we made the decision to leave our original dojo and if ever a club took on the personality of its owner. It was PMJC and Chris.

Chris was a shodan, who was just looking for a good group of people to train with so he hung out  his shingle, started his own club, and that’s what he got, He was never concerned with being “Sensei” or the head man in charge, He was concerned with improving HIS judo as well as ours and figured the best way to do that was to share ideas to listen and have everyone get better because of everyone else in that room not just him.

It would be nothing for us to walk in the door, and as we were stepping on the mat, tying our belts, already  have somebody in front of us , ready to “Bang heads” and start rounds of matwork. Because we were all brown and black belts there wasn’t a high level of instruction, it was more tweaking, and refining as we went and it was nothing for our workouts to look like this 30 minutes matwork/ 30 of standing then  go home

Chris never asked or DEMANDED our respect because of his rank or achievement  he just got it because of the guy he was. He knew What the letters  J-U-D-O  meant to the three or four guys who made the 45 minute drive from Scranton three days a week and he made sure that we got everything we wanted and more but most of all he made it FUN, he helped me to enjoy judo again and remember why I started it 2 years prior

Unfortunately, like it usually does, life got in the way of judo and Chris had to leave PMJC  but it all worked out for the best because soon after that  Tom  started Gracie NEPA Judo which then evolved into Scranton MMA but I wouldn’t trade my time with Chris  and the Stroudsburg crewfor anything.

We never called Chris Sensei, he didn’t like it. He said we all learned from each other. While he didn’t like, in my eyes he certainly earned it.

The other day I was asked if I was surprised about Ronda Rousey’s rapid ascension into the elite of MMA.  Almost by auto pilot, the word “no “practically leapt from my mouth.  The person was kind of taken aback by the quickness of my answer and pushed for reasons to back up my opinion which to me was easy 1). The talent pool in women’s MMA just isn’t that deep right now (that’s not sexist, its true) and 2). As I so eloquently put It, “Dude, she’s an Olympic Bronze medalist in judo”

Now before the cries of “Judo Fan boy”  fill up the comments section, let me explain. Everybody in the United States knows that the Olympics is a big deal but I don’t think they necessarily Know exactly HOW big a deal  it really is. Obviously, I will never get to the Olympics, but I have been very fortunate  during my 8 years in judo to be able to become friends with people who  were/are Olympians like Rick Hawn, Rhadi Ferguson ,Nick Delpopolo,  Justin  Flores, Who was  the number one ranked player in the US at 66kg and a 2x Olympic alternate, and you hear the stories  of what they had to go through, the sacrifices they had to make just to achieve Olympian   status  MMA seems  pretty easy.

Make sure you read and re-read  that last line carefully, I didn’t say MMA was easy. I said it was easier than the Olympics. Think about it; a typical MMA training camp lasts 8 weeks that’s 2 months of intense rigorous, work with the payoff  being your fight, maybe a belt  and, if you’re a professional, your salary for the fight with the Olympics, its 4 years  of intense rigorous, work and  there is NO guarantee that you will even reach your desired  payout of even MAKING  the Olympics , let alone obtaining a medal.

The other factor that greatly benefits the MMA side is longevity. Ronda could lose her next 5 fights and get cut from strikeforce (not gonna happen) and some promotion somewhere will  sign her,pay her to fight and she will  work her way  back to Strikeforce or another major promotion. If you lose at the Olympics,  you either start back from square one, begin your training again for the next four years, or you go home , get a “ real job,” and  sort of abandon the thing that you have been doing since you were 5 years of age, which is you will see a great number of Combat sport Olympians making the jump to MMA after the Olympics  this Summer.

There are also other areas that the Olympics help athletes to be more successful things like media responsibility, doing interviews,  constant travel,  familiarity with  people from different  cultures, and backgrounds.

So when people say “Ronda didn’t t train long enough to deserve a title shot, I say she trained for this moment her whole life

To me, sambo is sport. a great grappling sport, like freestyle wrestling, judo, or bjj. we all prefer which sports we like to watch and participate in. many of us train in multiple sports, maybe even compete in them, in gyms like SK Absolute in Japan they teach judo, wrestling and sambo all under the same roof. the same goes for Club Boretz in Russia, and they even have a sumo program…. (I) really wish we could get past this ‘my style vs your style’ crap. It only makes sense in ’70s kung fu movies”

I really couldn’t agree more with this statement.  I was once watching a documentary on the famed “Cambo 70” gym in Russia  and one of the coolest things that I took away from it is that when they  started their training for the afternoon, they didn’t say it was time to do judo, or to do sambo, they said it was time to “wrestle” and they weren’t  talking about the sport, they were talking about the verb, in the video, the judo and sambo players trained and performed the same techniques that the Olympic wrestlers did, wrestlers put gis  (or kurtkas) on and did the  “jacket” techniques and it wasn’t about “Judo vs Sambo or the gi sports VS the no gi sports, it was about overall improvements as competitors

When I watch videos online, it’s not just of judo or jiu-jitsu  its of sambo, it’s of freestyle wrestling folkstyle wrestling, anything that I think can either help  me become a better competitor or a better instructor for the people that I teach. The way that the combat sports are set up, everyone has techniques that will work for them for their game, for their body type so why not be open minded train with other people get a different perspective. In preparation  for this jiu-jitsu tournament on March 17^th I have been consistently  training  no gi and I ABSOLUTELY love it. Will I quit training gi all together? No that’s crazy but my gi game will make my no gi game better and vice versa.

This is also one of the main reasons that I have become such an ardent supporter of the freestyle judo  movement, not just because it affords me the opportunity to compete again, but because it almost forces a competitor to be well rounded, you can win standing but if it hits the mat you better be prepped to defend yourself because you can conceivably spend the rest of the match down there so you need to train matwork to be able to be successful from bad positions or at least survive in them because you won’t be stood up  in the first 5-10 seconds and with the inclusion of no gi divisions it adds a new dynamic to the same throws which we’ve been performing since we started training.

There’s no secret that I consider  grapplers (judoka, bjj guys, wrestlers) to be some of the elite athletes in the world, from a conditioning, mental, and physical toughness stand point but there is a fine line between Elite and Elite-ist   that we have to be careful not to cross

Send me your thoughts

Matt

Being in the situation that I’m in,  a lot of people try to do things that they think will make me happy or brighten  my day. One of those things over the years, has been to give me a medal at the tournaments I participate in. Usually, it will go something like this…I end  up having a bad day, someone sees me looking dejected,  and they will walk over and present me with a medal  sort of like a “Judo medal of valor “for the day

Before I go any farther, I know what you guys are already thinking, “aw, Matt they’re just trying to do something nice..” and you’re right. You are 100% right, I cannot express clearly enough how much it truly means to me when a stranger comes up to me and tells me how my competing at such and such tournament has impacted their day or in some cases their life. It really does. However,  you have to understand, the competitor in me hates to be handed anything, especially a medal that I have worked  very hard for

In my 75 losses, I have acquired quite a few medals, either from finishing third in a division of three or from being gifted it like in the scenario above , do know how many I have in my possession? None.  My previous instructor probably has bunch and my best friend Tom probably has a bunch somewhere because I don’t even like to look at them .  Some people will say “ Don’t you want those medals as a memory?’ I don’t need em. Because the fact of the matter is, if I were to look at those medals, I might not be able to tell you where they are from, but I can tell you every loss that I have suffered in my last 7.5 years of competition and  if I I haven’t gotten to know them personally, then I can Damn sure describe to you every person that has gifted me a medal in that same time period.  Those are things that do not leave you.

As a coach, I’m not a fan of every kid getting a medal. Because if a kid  goes to a tournament, knowing that he/she will be rewarded just for showing up, then what is their incentive to work hard?  Now, I won’t lie, the first time one of my five year twins came up to me bawling his eyes out ‘cause his brother got a medal and he didn’t, did I want to do anything I could to fix it? Sure . but when that kid looked at me and said “Sensei Matt, I’m coming back to practice on Tuesday,  because next tournament my brother cant be the only one coming home with one of those” that is the type of METTLE  that I want my kids to earn and unfortunately, it is the type of thing that can only come through losing and it will definitely not come from being handed something

I’d love to hear what you guys think, should kids get participation medals? Why/why not?