Chapter 25

I skipped the weekly training session with my cycle team. Instead, Paul and I head to our makeshift lab. We would have done it sooner, but we wanted to make sure my leg was fully healed. On the way over, Paul comments, “You look a little worried. Are you? Is this something we should be doing?”

“Anxious, not worried. I want to see what I can do. I am a growing boy. My body is changing. Truth be told, with all the fighting I have been doing, I should have slipped up before now. Even my leg getting cut up was a calculated risk that couldn’t be avoided and he fluked out. I’m a good fighter, but nobody is that good, especially a kid.”

When I was 15 the first time, I was a bit of a scrapper. Since it was a hick town, and I never lost a fight, every time some stupid kid wanted to prove he was a man, he would attack me. An acquaintance claimed he was keeping track of how many fights I was in during the school year, and he stopped counting at 100. I got into as many as three fights a day, and not once did I lose. I made mistakes, slipped up and got injured a lot, but I never lost. In that year, I got more experience fighting than most professional fighters get in a lifetime.

As I woke up my first time in this young body, after travelling back in time, I timed everything perfectly to put Dean in an arm-bar and bust his nose. If I slipped with five pounds of pressure, his arm would have been dislocated. Twenty pounds, and his arm would have been broken. Dean was lucky that there is something different about me.

It is the first time I step into my private gym/lab. I told Kim that I wanted a cross between a martial arts gym, a regular workout gym and a cardio lab. I told her what it was for and what was needed in a cardio lab, including which equipment I wanted, and she set it all up.

At first glance, Paul is already saying, “Wow, this is better than the gym I work out at. Can the guys and I use this place?”

“The entire point of it is so I can be tested without anybody knowing. I’ll tell you what. The test equipment is portable. Have a closet for it built and lock away that equipment, and nobody will know it’s here.”

He looks at the martial arts portion of the gym and says, “This place would be perfect for training. We have been a little lax while working for you. Typically, Allied will have a team keep up their training, but we don’t have facilities on the island. In Vancouver, there is a club we can go to on occasion.”

“I take it that you want to use it to keep your men practiced.”

“If you don’t mind, I would like to do one better than Allied and hire specialists to come here and put on the odd clinic. I have also been thinking; there is no better person to protect one’s self than one’s self. I want to teach self-defence courses to your girlfriends and some of the more crucial staff.”

“I like that idea. But, you know me. I always like to take things one step farther. Go to the gun range on the Malahat (The same range Kim took me to) and see if we can’t get a company membership. Then offer to put in a gun room where people can rent lockers to store their weapons. We can gut out a mobile-home and fill it with weapon safes of all sizes, including lockups for bows and such.

“It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. I’m not about to try and justify everybody having carry permits, but if the shit ever hits the fan and one of my girls needs a gun, it means one of your men is down, and she can use his. If such a thing ever happens, I want to know my girls can handle themselves.”

“You got it, Boss. I like the way you think. Though, I shudder to think of one of my men down.”

Looking around the gym’s martial arts portion, I can tell that Kim put a lot of thought into it. She and I talked numerous times about having a gym for our staff, and she stocked this place with more than just me in mind. One wall doubles as storage with hangers for the various pads, targets and other practice equipment. Paul picks up what looks like a headband with a thin bungee cord. At the other end of the bungee cord is a small ball. He asks, “What the hell is this? I have never seen anything like it before.”

“Throw them out. There called reflex balls and are used for boxing. You put the headband on your head and adjust the ball, so it dangles to your navel. You punch the ball. The problem with them is they promote bad habits and give you muscle memory that you don’t want. It causes you to slouch, which slows you down. It is also difficult to punch level and easy to punch down, so you get in the habit of punching in a way that is easy to block. Since you are effectively hitting something with no weight to it and it can’t hurt your hand, it causes your wrist to loosen up, and you lose alignment in the arm and hand, so when you hit something solid, you break either your hand or wrist. But from your perspective, the worst is that it trains you for point fighting and not fighting. (Point fighting is a type of competition where hits are counted to score a match. It promotes bad habits, and point-fighters tend to have no strength behind their hits.) It trains you to use a weak punch since there is no weight behind it. It has all those downsides, but it is a shortcut to learning hand-eye coordination, so coaches who train people for point fights use them.”

Shortcuts in training for any sport are almost always a bad idea.

I always loved stepping in the ring with people that use such devices. If you train to have a weak punch, then you train with people that have weak punches and never learn to take a hard blow. In the first round, fools that use shortcuts like these may hit you twice or even three times as often as you hit them, but by the end of that round, they are already regretting stepping in the ring with you and quickly become gun shy. You only need to hit them a couple times, and they learn to fear your punch.

“It looks like your girlfriend equipped this place as a full gym for multiple people, but there is only one speed bag, I don’t see a double ended bag, and what is that thing?”

A double ended bag is a small bag about the size of a person’s head. The top of the bag is tied to the ceiling with a rope, and the bottom is secured to the floor by a bungee cord. It is used for boxers and kickboxers to develop their reflexes.

A speed bag is a small punching bag about the same size, mounted at head level, used for hand-eye coordination.

“The thing you have never seen before takes the place of a speed bag and double ended bag.”

What he is referring to is similar to a double ended bag, except it is three steel balls hung in a line using rope and bungees.

“Double ended bags only go so far in training your reflexes. There are only a few combinations that you can train with them, and so, your fighting becomes predictable. The three balls are a lot more difficult to learn how to use, which is why most gyms don’t have them. Let’s get changed, and I will show you.”

Paul had to go back to the SUV. He never knew what I would do in a day since I often changed my plans. As a result, he learnt to keep a bag of goodies that he might need. I knew he kept workout clothes in that bag.

I never did learn what the balls are called. They are a lot smaller than a double ended bag, only a little bigger than a fist. For the most part, nobody outside of China ever used them. When I was training to fight professionally, I owned a set.

A few minutes later, we are changed and standing in front of the three balls.

I explain, “A double ended bag is easy to learn. You hit it, and it comes back at you. You can either block or hit it again. With this, it is not just a matter of hitting and blocking. You have three balls moving at the same time. As soon as you hit one, it causes the others to move, starting your sequence. In the time that it takes to hit the double ended bag once, with this, you will have hit it, dodged and parried it. You make three moves in the time it takes a boxer to do one. You don’t have to hit, parry and dodge. You can hit it three times, but I have never seen anybody that could keep up using that combination. Like the double ended bag, you can set yourself up in a rhythm and turn your brain off. Even the best fighters do that to practice combinations. The best fighters do things to change up the balls’ rhythm. That helps to change up timing in a fight.

“A double ended bag does wonders for a rookie, and then you only use it occasionally to keep your limited skills. Once you start training with these balls, you will use them more and more until you retire. Now try it.”

He looks at me confused but steps up and hits the ball at head level with a moderate strength punch. This move causes the centre ball to react, pulling the lower ball behind it. The ball he hit is the first to come back at him, and he hits it like it were a double ended bag. The next ball to come at him is the centre ball, and he blocks it. The problem is he isn’t fast enough, and the third metal ball tags him in the nut sack, causing him to fall on the floor, holding his nuts. I just stand there laughing at him.

The same thing happened to me the first time I tried using them, so I know he wasn’t hit that hard. The centre ball was already moving back, taking momentum from the lower ball.

I offer my hand to help him up as he looks me in the eyes and says, “Asshole.” It just causes me to laugh some more.

When he does get up, I say, “I forgot to mention, it is also a great way to introduce a beginner to body hardening. You have the right idea. You just have to work on your awareness and coordination. Teaching situational awareness is one thing the balls do that a double ended bag doesn’t. You need to be aware of what three weapons are doing all the time, not just one.”

“Let’s see you do it.”

I take up position, and start slow, hitting the middle ball a little softer than Paul started with. It means that the centre ball comes back at me first, and the other two balls come at me simultaneously. I block the first ball, then dodge the lower one as I punch the upper. Now all three balls are moving at different speeds. I start on a rotating pattern of block, punch, dodge then punch again. This means I don’t react to one of the balls the same way twice in a row.

Once I get my rhythm, the balls are moving as fast as Paul had them moving. The best I had ever done with them is just a little faster.

I can’t see Paul as I am concentrating, and he is behind me.

He says, “I’m impressed. You must have spent a lot of time using this thing.”

“Not really, and it isn’t as difficult as it seems. I am doing a twelve-move combination. Using it like this still makes you predictable as it is still doing a set combination over and over. We both know that a twelve-move combination will be interrupted long before the twelfth move. The trick is to change which move you start with. And, watch this.”

The next time I am supposed to block, I parry instead, causing the ball to change direction by 90 degrees The next time it comes back, it doesn’t come at me, but rather, comes 30 degrees from perpendicular. The second time it comes at me but at a greater angle. All of my blocks have become parries and it looks impressive because the balls are moving faster even though I am moving slower. Each rotation through the balls, I am only dealing with two of them, not three.