Hi,

My name is Mike Duncan, aka “Fitness Monkey”, in this blog.

I’m 40 years old, male, married with two children. I’ve been active in my youth as long as I have been a student, but after college, working in front of a computer, and 60-80 hour long work weeks, I have developed a sedentary lifestyle. After the long working hours and office stress, I hardly had any time or energy left to exercise. And I have also developed a habit of eating junk food, like snacks, chocolate, beer, just to feel a little better after a hard days’ work.

Of course, in time, that developed into a fat belly, and low energy, and low sex drive, and a host of other health problems (like high cholesterol and hypertension). When I was 35, my doctor told me that I’d better get a healthy lifestyle, or things will only get worse from here. While I was not “morbidly obese”, he warned me that, if I did not take responsibility of my own health and lifestyle, it could mean 10 years of my life, and much suffering.

That was my wake up call. From then on, I have researched lots of different things about diet, exercise, and a generally healthy lifestyle. You see, there are lots of conflicting information and approaches about how to get fit, what to eat, how to get the best exercise, and you need to choose something that fits with your goals and personality, and schedule.

You could buff up like a body builder, but then discover that all that bulky muscles do not really translate into high athletic performance, for example. Or focus on long cardio type of exercise, but then discover that long, moderate intensity cardio actually weakens your heart and that there are 25 year-old marathon runners who die because of cardiac arrest. Not my idea of good health.

Anyways, then I thought “what could be the best example of health and fitness”? The more I thought about it, the more got into what I call “warrior fitness”, as the highest point in fitness. You know, being fighting fit. Fit like a modern day commando, or special forces member. Ready to take on a fight, run, escape, or carry a big weight (like an injured team mate) any moment, and not sweat about it.

Of course, almost all of the military-style fitness programs have one thing in common: They are designed for military people who have their whole life designed around their training, full-time, in a boot camp environment. So the question becomes, how does a normal person, busy with work, family, social life, also includes fitness and health lessons learned from those special forces style of training? Obviously, I needed a more civil approach to fitness than special forces.

Then I turned to Mixed Martial Arts type of trainings and workouts. This is probably the closest it gets to the training of a modern day warrior without full time commitment of military. You see, lots of normal people train for martial arts, and mixed martial arts is a specific type where you need to be ready for almost any type of challenge.

So, almost anyone can benefit from workouts and training routines designed for mixed martial arts, whether you are into fighting or not.

I’ll be sharing my main ideas and findings with you all throughout this  blog.