Combat Sports Academ
Combat Sports Academy
For the past couple of years I’ve had the pleasure and honor of teaching strength and conditioning at world class martial arts academy in Copenhagen, Combat Sports Academy Copenhagen (www.csa.dk). The gym was started by two enthusiastic young martial artists, Christian Graugart and Carsten Ettrup, who wanted to teach combat sports in an environment they would enjoy themselves. The result is a gym with probably the best training atmosphere I’ve ever encountered. There is always cool music playing, a nice playful and friendly competitiveness along with a fun loving approach to the sports.
Here Christian explains the thoughts behind MMA, while you get a nice view of the gym too (it’s in danish).
This has attracted a great amount of people who enjoy martial arts and combat sports, but doesn’t enjoy rituals and strict ranking systems. Some have argued that this philosophy is removing martial arts from it’s roots and thus eroding the philosophic and ethical foundation. I respectfully disagree, since a core belief of mine is that the art of moving is at it’s heart supposed to be play. Being playful and having fun is not the same as making it easy. Anyone who knows anything about mixed martial arts know that being successful requires discipline, talent and time on the mat, so while making it fun may enhance the learning experience, the time and effort is still the same.
So the bottom line is, if you are looking for a place to train thay boxing, boxing, grappling, brazilian jiu jitsu or mixed martial arts I highly recommend you come by the gym. Should you at the same time be interested in rebooting your movement skills and learning in my little branch of the RKC school of strength, then the match is made in heaven.
CSA was the first gym in Denmark to recognize kettlebells as a valuable training tool, and Kenneth Jay, Master RKC, started the first Danish Hardstyle kettlebell class in the gym. Since then I’ve picked up the gauntlet from Kenneth and have expanded so that we now host 9 classes of Hardstyle kettlebell conditioning and Rosstraining (conditioning class partly inspired from the works of Ross Enamait).
Here is a video of Kenneth teaching kettlebells in the gym back in the day:
Here you can join the CSA facebook group for more pictures, videos and news.
