Greetings and welcome my name is James Noble Young I am 49 years old married with two beautiful daughters. My journey in martial arts started 36 years ago.
I started my training with a Mas Oyama book and lots of Bruce Lee movies. My dojo was any piece of grass and any tree that would work as a Makiwara board. I trained myself for about two years before I stepped in my first dojo.
At the time of my enrolling it was a school called Al Garza’s Americanized Tae Kwon Do. I had my first formal class on a Wednesday. That Saturday I went to my first tournament. I won first place and I was hooked.
The next 7 years I spent fighting the AOK circuit and by the age of 18 I was fighting PKA and was slated to fight Guy Metsger for the amateur state championship. My record at this time was 10 fights 10 wins all by knockout with one fight ending in the first minute of the first round with 3 hits and 3 knockdowns.
The fight never happened. I moved a lot as a young person. The next 20 years was a hit and miss situation with my training. I share this with you to understand why there are so many gaps in time in my martial arts career.
In the year of 1983 I fought against a man out of Pasadena Texas named Ray “The Bulldog” Cavendar. Ray weighed 300lbs with a body fat ratio of less than 10%. While I never could have imagined the power that this man had I went into the fight underestimating this opponent. During the fight Ray broke my nose with the first hit. During the fight I also broke both my feet. It was the hardest hitting opponent that I had ever encountered.
Ray went off to the military shortly thereafter but our paths were to cross again. In 1993 Walt Mason called me and ask if I wanted to fight Ray again in Round Rock Texas. I said yes without hesitation. Little did I know that while Ray was off in the military defending our great country he was being recruited to the US Army boxing team. Ray went on to become the US Army European Boxing Champion with 29 fights and 29 knockouts. I was the only man Ray never knocked out.
So as I began my training for the second fight between Ray and myself I knew one thing that if I had any hopes of winning I would have to have some punching power. Have you ever hit a man with everything you have and he taps his jaw and says do it again. That was Ray taunting me. The fight went the distance with no injury to me this time. The judges awarded the fight to Ray. The next morning while we were in the lobby of the hotel room Rays trainer said he had never seen anyone take Rays punches like that and as far as he was concerned I won the fight and there would not be a rematch.
This fellow athlete was the birth of The Fish and Kangaroo Machine. I knew getting ready for the fight that I needed power. I weigh 220lbs and wear a size 15 shoe. I can hit and hit hard but it wasn’t enough.
I started by increasing the size of my punching bag. I went from a 100lb bag to a 200lb bag. My drills consisted of what you may describe as straights punches from a horse stance with trying to punch through the bag to develop more power. This helped a lot but it wasn’t enough.
Over the next 5 years I spent all my training time thinking about what would give me the power to impose my will on my opponent at command. I determined through past experiences that a person needs an exercise that would have a full natural contraction or going to a full natural extension. Since “all behavior is learned behavior” I had to decide what was a “natural full contraction and a natural full extension”. The thing that came to me was a baby crawling. The baby has no preconceived thought process to the it’s motion. Thus the fetal position and have of course a natural full extension would be the baby laying on their stomach with its hands and arms fully extended.
With this the motion was identified. Now I needed to determine how to apply resistance. The first and most obvious was motion in water. This would give you smooth easy motion with resistance. The problem became the limits to the resistance. So as I continued to look for means to create an exercise with these principles the Fish and Kangaroo started taking shape.
The first prototype was completed in 2001. It was made out of garage door rails and wheel assembly. We custom made the racks for the weight resistance with 350lbs on each stack set. You could tell I was ambitious. The first prototype did not have a stomach support and the chest support was a ¼ steel plate needless to say comfort was not part of the design. With the first working prototype I was eager to try the machine that was going to set me apart from all other fighters.
I set my weight preference for each pedal and with enthusiasm climbed on. It was laughable I could hardly breath my chest wasn’t used to the pressure of laying on it and constricted my lungs. The weight was a joke I couldn’t move it at all.
Well my first day with this new exercise machine did not go as planned. It took three months before I was able to stay on the machine and breath for more than 3 minutes and so it began.
My new machine was horrible at best but it worked. I spent every available minute on the machine building time and weight.
I started looking to book a fight I had to try my newly found strength. Saul Soliz was in Dallas putting flyers on cars at a grappling tournament that we were attending. I approached this “man” and said do you know how I can contact Saul Soliz? He said that’s me how can I help. I told him that I was looking to fight on his card.
That was about February 2004. Saul called me and said I have some one for you to fight his name is Mike Altman. I said sure I’ll take the fight. Over the next several months Saul called to make sure I was training and going to be ready in November. Saul would call and ask me “James are you sure you want this fight” and for the life of me I didn’t know why he kept asking me that. After the fight I found out that while Mike Altman had held the world title 3X as a world champion with 39 professional fights one might think that I was in the wrong place. This was however exactly were I wanted to be. I had 125 hours logged on the FK machine and couldn’t wait to show my new found conditioning.
The bookies would have had me down and out in the first round. Little to everyone’s knowledge I had a fish and kangaroo machine. The fight went the distance and during the fight I instructed my corner not to put a stool in during the breaks. This was to make a statement as to my condition. The fight was awarded to Mike by a decision. While I did not have the power I knew could be delivered by conditioning on the FK this was a very good indicator. No one would have predicted me to make it out of the first round much less go the distance and the crowd is undecided as to who won the fight.
That brings us to 2011. We had presented this machine to NASA’s pre and post recovery doctors in charge of the conditioning for the astronauts in 2006. While the NASA team was impressed they wanted scientific data. We contacted U of H Dr. Brian McFarlin.
Dr. McFarlin established a protocol and guided use through the process as we got our machine in line to be tested at The Health and Human Performance Department U of H.
The protocol was set and flyers were sent out to recruit test subjects. The original protocol called for 5 minutes of exercise. The prototype that we had was built for NASA and a zero gravity enviroment so the resistances are springs and was fixed with no adjustment. The resistance for the hands was 20lbs and for the legs was 50lbs. The failure time was 2 minutes 30 seconds with the stomach support and 1 minute 30 seconds without the stomach support.
This created a problem with the protocol. The protocol was then adjusted to only one minute of exercise with a five-minute rest between bouts.
We waited anxiously for the results. I had spoke to Dr. McFarlin in great detail and wanted to make sure that he knew I was looking for something spectacular that would set this machine aside from the general plethora of exercise equipment out there. It wasn’t until I got the full report that I realized that we had something to show the world.
Our machine produced results in 1/5 of the time as all other exercise machines ever.
The Wingate Threshold Measurement: In the WANT (Wingate Anaerobic Test) they tested 139 test subjects for 20 minutes of continuous exercise with an average blood lactate of 10.02. With the FK machine, the test subjects after 4 minutes of non-continuous exercise the average blood lactate was 10.69 with an average heart rate of 175 bpm.
The report was so impressive the results have been submitted to The International Journal of Exercise Science. The article was published on 05/17/2014.
Now currently as we get ready to bring this new technology to the market I will be training to try and fight in 2014 at age 49 years old. The purpose of fighting is to show the consumer what can be achieved with this revolutionary training tool that seems to defy understanding. I will keep everyone posted with the schedule of the fight, who my opponent is and how long it will take for me to get an invitation to fight the UFC Heavy Weight Champion as a nobody at 50 years old. That is my confidence in the performance that is developed using this radical new approach to conditioning regardless of what arena you compete in.
Sincerely,
James Noble Young
Wingate test
The Wingate test (also known as the Wingate Anaerobic Test (WANT)is an anaerobic test, most often performed on a cycle ergometer, that is used to measure peak anaerobic power, as well as anaerobic capacity.[1] The test, which can also be performed on an arm crank ergometer, consists of a set time pedaling at maximum speed against a constant force.[2] The prototype test based on the Cumming’s test was introduced in 1974,[3] at the Wingate Institute[citation needed] and has undergone modifications as time has progressed. The Wingate test has also been used as a basis to design newer tests in the same vein,[4] and others which utilize running as the mode of exercise instead of cycling.[5] Sprint interval testing such as is similar to the construction of the Wingate test has been shown to increase both aerobic and anaerobic performance.[6]
The Wingate Test was developed at the Wingate Institute in Israel during the 1970’s.
In order to determine validity of a testing procedure, one must test the protocol against a “gold standard” which is trusted to elicit the “true” values. In instances where there is a “gold standard,” such as hydrostatic weighing in determination of body composition, this is an easy task.[7] There is however no such standard protocol for the determination of either anaerobic capacity or power[2] Due to this problem, the Wingate test has instead been compared with sport performance, sport specialty, and laboratory findings. These comparisons have determined that the Wingate test is measuring what it claims to measure, and is a good indicator of these measurements.[2]
The Wingate test is believed to show two things: all-out peak anaerobic power and anaerobic capacity.[1] These two values have been reported as important factors in sports with quick, all-out efforts. Short sprinting events rely heavily upon the anaerobic energy pathways during execution[2] which leads to the theories that greater performance in a Wingate test can predict success in these events. This has not been proven, and the more applicable theory would be that improvements in Wingate scores could predict improvements in sprinting times.
The Wingate test has undergone many variations since its inception in the 1970s. Many researchers have utilized a 30-sec Wingate,[8][9] while others have lengthened the duration to 60-sec[10] or even 120-sec.[11] The main purpose of this alteration is to more fully stress both the alactic and lactic anaerobic energy systems, which are the main source of energy for the first two minutes of exercise.[1]
Another alteration that has been made is the repetition of Wingate tests. In current literature, this test has been repeated four, five, or even six times in one testing session.[6][12] Repeating the Wingate test during training sessions can increase aerobic power and capacity, as well as maximal aerobic capacity.[6]
The last common alteration is the workload during the test. The original Wingate test used a load of 0.075 kp per kg bodyweight of the subject.[3] As these were young subjects, it has been suggested that higher workloads should be used for adult subjects, and several different loads have been utilized. Katch et al.[11] used workloads of 0.053, 0.067, and 0.080 kp per kg bodyweight, while other researchers have increased the workload even higher to 0.098 kp per kg bodyweight.[13] The advantage of increasing the workload can show an increased, and therefore more representative, value for peak power in collegiate athletes. Although the workload can be altered, a standard Wingate test still utilizes the original workload.