Martin Boonzaayer

THE WARRIOR
Judo and Bodybuilding Champion
Martin Boonzaayer Personifies True Power
for MUSCLE MEDIA, November 1998

In Japanese, judo means “The Gentle Art.” But there seems to be nothing very gentle about the way Martin Boonzaayer, bodybuilder extraordinaire and would-be-Olympic judo champion, practices the sport. He has crushed bones, tossed opponents in the air, and taken violent falls. Yet he has never slackened in his urge to be both competitive – and a winner.

“Competition’s always driven me,” he observes. “There’s a tremendous satisfaction that comes when you do something right. I remember the first judo tournaments where I threw somebody and it felt effortless. I did it just right; and to see this person – this opponent whom you respect, who is a good player – all of a sudden, with what looks like no effort, fly over the mat onto their back – there’s a tremendous satisfaction in that.”

Off the judo mat, he is just as determined, approaching his specialized training with an almost all-encompassing energy. He works 8 to 5 at his electrical engineering job at Motorola in Chicago, and then will spend hours at the gym, lifting weights, throwing opponents, and perfecting the fine art of judo until 10 P.M. nearly every weeknight. On weekends, he is often found traveling to judo or bodybuilding competitions.

Boonzaayer, 25, is a rare bird: a bodybuilder champion who practices judo. He has placed well in body competitions: first in the Natural Michigan in 1993 and second in the Mr. America contest in 1997. And he has also succeeded in judo face-offs: two-time national champion in 1996 and 1997, winner of two silver medals in the U.S. International Invitational match in 1996, and winner of the Rendezvous Montreal in 1997.

He approaches it all with an intensity that is laudable, yet once out of the gym, he is softspoken and self-effacing, a man who plays the violin for relaxation and has a masters degree in computer programming. You can call him unusual. You can call him the “peaceful warrior.” But whatever you do, don’t call him a quitter.

“I hate the idea of giving up,” he says. “I told myself that I want to do judo long enough so that when I’m done with it all, it’s termed retirement, not quitting. Usually to get that distinction, you have to get somewhere, to win something. And that takes work.”

The challenge is what appeals to Martin Boonzaayer. “I am good at academics, at my job, at bodybuilding,” he observes. “But for judo I have no natural ability whatsoever. I have to work for every improvement. In spite of my successes, for every step forward i make, it seems like I have ten frustrations, ten losses. I’ve had lots and lots of setbacks and it’s been really hard but it makes me appreciate succeeding all the much more. I just really want to be good at something that I really have to work for.”

Boonzaayer’s near-obsession with competitive sports began when he was a boy. His father, a baker who emigrated from the Netherlands, encouraged young Martin to excel in anything he attempted, be it studies, athletics, or even learning a musical instrument.

“I grew up in a family that enforced good study habits,” he recalls. “It was all about discipline.” That included the discipline of learning the violin. “My parents encouraged all of us to play musical instruments. There were trumpets, clarinets, flutes in family.” Boonzaayer earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering at Western Michigan University, which he attended on an academic scholarship. In his senior year, he was selected as outstanding computer engineering student of 1993-94.

As one of nine children growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, competition was a given; naturally enough, Martin gravitated to a competitive sport. At 11, he began studying judo. “My dad enrolled me because he did it when he was a boy in the Netherlands. Judo’s a real big sport over there, so he thought it would be good for me. I really liked it but I didn’t compete that much. The tournaments were on Sunday and my family was religious, so I couldn’t take part.”

He continued for five years, but frustrated by his inability to find training partners, he stopped judo when he was 17. Nonetheless, he had already taken on a new activity: bodybuilding. “While training for judo, I had started lifting weights in a casual recreational way.”

Martin competed in the Iron Man Contest in Flint Michigan in 1992. He won in the heavyweight division. “It was exciting. It was fun. After that first show, I was hooked. I got the post-show size increase. I was obsessed with the idea of getting stronger and bigger.”

He trained regularly and has seen gains. In his first show as a teenager, the 6’1” weight-lifter checked in at 200 pounds. He is currently 275 pounds of solid muscle.

In college, he was reintroduced to judo. “I graduated from Western Michigan in ’94. At the time, I was out of judo and was bodybuilding pretty heavily.” He was studying for his masters degree in electrical engineering at Arizona State University when he “wandered into the dojo where you do judo. I hit it off with the coach. He encouraged me to start practicing again.”

Martin practiced and then won the Arizona State Judo Championship. “My coach told me I had potential and he worked with me and brought me up to the national level.”

He found judo training was both different from and similar to his bodybuilding regimen. “I still have a very heavy bodybuilding influence in my training,” he notes. “Ideally, I should completely revamp my training for judo. But the bodybuilding habits die hard. Judo training is different in the weight room. It has more emphasis on power movements, with explosion, squat, dead lift, clean, and more combination movements. It is not as much isolated movements.”

He explains that judo employs a high volume of back movements (“a lot of pulling, not so much pushing”) and also more circuit training to increase muscular endurance. “Endurance is important,” he notes. “When you’re out there for five minutes on the judo mat, cardiovascular conditioning is very important. With judo, its very anaerobic; it’s like a five-minute sprint because you use your whole body. When you’re fighting out there it can be really, really exhausting depending on how much strength you use. There’s a lot of tension in your body and you can go through a ton of energy quickly. So if you don’t have high muscular endurance you tend to cramp up out there.”

He feels the judo has helped his bodybuilding because it “has forced me to work my flexibility. A lot of bodybuilders are muscle-bound and don’t stretch as much as they should.”

Judo itself is a game of strategy, a sport of the mind as much as the body. “I’d say judo needs some physical strength but it’s very very much mental,” Martin observes. “My boss’s son does judo and he is not the most athletically gifted kid. You watch him throw a ball and you’d laugh. But he’s been doing judo – he’s 12 – since he was 4 or 5 , and this kid is good. He’s a true technician. He wins everything in sight. Judo is about hard work and perseverance. That’s what I like about it. In judo, with hard work and proper guidance, anybody can be a good player.”

The sport was originally developed about 130 years ago in Japan by Jigaro Kano as an alternative to the more brutal hand-to-hand combat known a jujitsu where every move was designed to maim and kill. Kano adapted jujitsu into judo, which means “the gentle way.”

Judo eventually became an Olympic sport, with rules to follow in order to win. Martin found that out last year when he made a crucial mistake in the world Olympic trials. There is a red, meter-wide border to the combat mat. If one combatant stands in the red area for five seconds, he gets a penalty point against him. In the battle, Martin had his opponent in the red for 4 1/2 seconds but was not aware of it.

“If I had paid attention and had kept him there for another half-second, he would have gotten a penalty, which would have put me in the lead and I would have gone to the world trials,” he says with a sigh.

The basic objective in judo is for one player to get a strong enough grip to knock his opponent down on his back. The final score depends on how flat he falls: a side or rump landing results in fewer points. If he falls flat on his back with his feet up, the match is over. “But when you have two skilled people, that’s very tough to do,” admits Boonzaayer.
Judo differs from karate, kung-fu (which uses weapons), or boxing, in that the two opponents are often locked in a tense grip for the whole match. To those watching, it is a strange ballet of battle as each searches for a misstep by the other, an unbalanced movement which will allow one of them to be toppled. “The better grip you have the better chance you have to control your opponent to get in a position from which you can attack,” explains Martin.

The grip is crucial. Therefore, having strong wrists is key. “One big difference in training is that bodybuilders use those straps they wrap around their wrists and then wrap around the weight bar,” he notes. “In judo, you don’t use those because I want my hands to be really strong. In judo it’s not hitting, it’s gripping.”

That point came home to Boonzaayer when he fought in his judo competitions. “My forearms would cramp up because I would be gripping so hard. And I wasn’t acquainted with it because I would only have to fight that hard in tournament. When I stopped using the straps, I stopped having the problem.”

He found that pure strength was not necessarily an advantage. “In judo, timing is critical,” Boonzaayer notes. “Rarely can you just go out there and throw your opponent with one move. It’s almost impossible to throw on pure strength. Judo is very non-static. It depends very much on your motion and the motion of your opponent.”

Martin has had his share of injuries, too: his eye was cut open, he had somebody throw him off the mat with their fist in his back, and he once separated his shoulder. “A lot of times when somebody gets hurt, it’s their own fault,” he notes. “Tonight in training, I hurt myself. I was getting thrown clean, but I tried to twist out and hurt my shoulder. If I had taken a nice, clean fall, I would have been fine. But when you try to twist, all that weight coming down goes right through your shoulder.

“You have to do that, though. Because if you take a clean fall in competition, you lose. Whereas if you train yourself to always try and get out of every situation, then you end up doing in tournaments what you do in practice. If I can twist out and fall on my stomach, there are no points against me.”

What appeals to Boonzaayer is the idea that the art involves mind as well as muscle matter. “It’s definitely a sport that’s very mental in that you don’t need the physical package to succeed. Anybody can can do well if they’re willing to apply themselves. When you’re gripping, you can feel when they step one way and the weight’s a little bit more one way or the other. You can’t really tell anything from looking at somebody. Some guys that look kind of dumpy and slow can be surprisingly tough. When you get them on the mat, everybody moves a little bit differently. The ones who do best in judo are the ones who have incredible feel for their opponent’s movements.

“Strength is never more important than technique,” he adds. “Somebody with technique will crush somebody with strength but no technique any day. But once you get to the international level where everybody is good, power and strength can be a very important factor. A lot of your power is in knowing how to use it. Raw power and strength gives you nothing if you don’t know how to use it.”

Like bodybuilding, judo involves eating right, sleeping right, and plenty of discipline. Martin has six meals a day, each two to three hours apart: (1) a dozen egg whites with two yokes every morning, along with a cup of oatmeal; (2) a protein shake; (3) chicken, rice, and broccoli (4) a protein shake; (5) 12-16 ounces of steak, a basked potato, and a salad, and (6) a protein shake. He also eats apples and oranges throughout the day. For supplements, he takes whey protein year round and also creatine for 5- or 6-week cycles. He also has multi-vitamins and Vitamin C with his meals.
Training is more difficult in judo because, unlike bodybuilding, you can rarely do it alone. “You have to practice at least once or twice a week,” Martin notes. “You have to go to a place where they teach judo and have a teacher and classes. You can’t do it on your own. That’s what was really frustrating when I was doing it as a kid, because I didn’t really have anybody.”

Nonetheless, judo and bodybuilding are similar, Boonzaayer feels, because both involve discipline. “Part of my success as a natural bodybuilder is because I applied that same discipline to sleeping. I always get enough sleep. I’ve been eating six meals a day for six years now without fail and those two things alone made a huge difference. It’s about consistency, year in year out. A lot of bodybuilders are consistent pre-contest. Then they’re off-season and they let things slide. They enjoy fitness but they also enjoy their night life and don’t get nearly enough sleep. That’s when you make your gains, when you rest.”

Whether sleeping or training, Boonzaayer is nothing if not determined, a peaceful warrior waging his one-man campaign against failure. “The more I learn and the better I get, the more I realize how complicated judo is. So I have more respect for the people who do this and who do it well. In my mind, it’s one of the absolute most difficult sports because you use absolutely every part of your body. You have to have a combination of strength, power, quickness, agility, balance, feel, timing. I really don’t want to rest until I feel like I’ve learned and acquired that kind of ability.”

The quiet warrior is certain of one thing, however. He is going to win. “I’ve been the national judo champion in the heavyweight division for the last two years,” he observes. “My coach and I both know I’m going to the Olympics. I’ve worked a long time for this. It’s not a vague dream. This is something very real and tangible. And that’s also what keeps me going. It’s definitely why I’m not going to give up now. I’m closer than I’ve ever been. And I don’t plan to just be in the Olympics. I want a medal. I’ve always been competitive because if I do something, I really want to do it well. That’s the way you should be about everything.”