Training, breathing and balance — outdoors
Something practised alone changes you.
Something practised together changes the group.
The people in your team do not need more information. They need an hour in which the body works, the mind settles, and they hear one another differently from the way they do in meetings.
I build movement and breathing programmes for groups of employees — by the Black Sea, in a park or botanical garden, or in the Carpathians. All programmes take place in Romania; sessions are held in Romanian or English.
These are not martial arts courses. They are sessions in which every participant, whatever their physical condition, leaves with two or three tools they can use on Monday morning at the office.
What these programmes are not
Worth saying first, because it removes half the questions.
There is no sparring. Nobody strikes anybody. No prior physical condition is required. There is no “you managed it” and “you did not.” Nobody is made to do what they cannot do — and anyone with a knee, spinal or blood-pressure problem works in an adapted variant, without leaving the group.
Nor is it team-building with contests. I have seen enough teams in which the “cohesion activity” produced precisely the opposite.
But what is taught comes from a discipline in which nothing is obtained quickly — forty-seven years of Shotokan Karate. What remains once you take the fighting out is exactly the part that applies on Monday morning, at the office.
Where
By the sea.
Early morning, on the beach, before the working day. Breathing in salt air, slow movement on sand — an unstable surface that loads the deep musculature without feeling like effort. Sixty to ninety minutes, best at sunrise.
In a park or forest.
The accessible option, an hour from the office. It needs no facilities: a clearing, grass, shade. It works well for groups that meet rarely and need to slow down before they talk.
In a botanical garden.
The same structure, in a setting that makes silence natural. Particularly suited to urban groups with no time to travel.
In the mountains.
The most demanding. An ascent at a controlled pace, with stops for breathing and mobility. This is where real cohesion appears: the group moves at the pace of its slowest member, and that is learned on the path, not in an exercise.
What a session contains
The structure comes from the programme I run in my club, adapted to a group that does not train. Three components, in this order.
1-Mobility for the three problem areas
Anyone who spends six to eight hours in front of a monitor develops the same three patterns. I know them because most of the members of my club work exactly that way.
Area 1 — neck, shoulders, elbows, hands.
The head pushed forward, the shoulders raised and rotated inward, the forearms in a contraction that never quite releases. This is where the four o’clock neck ache comes from, the tension between the shoulder blades, and the elbow that begins to hurt without any blow having landed. We work scapular retraction, opening of the pectorals, external rotation of the shoulder and decompression of the forearm flexors.
Area 2 — cervical and lumbar spine.
Prolonged sitting shortens the hip flexors and deactivates the deep musculature that holds the vertebrae in place. The back does not hurt from weakness but from disuse. We work thoracic mobilisation, controlled extension, hip flexor stretching and diaphragmatic breathing — which is, quite literally, a mechanism for stabilising the spine from within.
Area 3 — knees and feet.
The one nobody connects to the desk. An inactive gluteus, shortened hamstrings, an ankle losing its range, sluggish peripheral circulation. We work the glute bridge, ankle mobility, activation of the posterior chain.
A secondary benefit, and not a small one: during the exercises, limitations become visible. Anyone who cannot raise an arm above the horizontal, who feels pain on a simple movement, who has a clear asymmetry between left and right — finds out on the spot. I do not diagnose and I do not treat. But I say plainly that it is worth having looked at, and often it is the first time anyone has told them.
Combined with stretching and the assisted stretches of the Thai tradition Ruesi Dat Ton — “the hermit’s self-stretching” — in which every movement is led by the breath rather than accompanied by it.
And with Mokuso, the moment of stillness. In the Dojo it lasts two minutes, enough to mark a threshold. In a team programme we build it differently: several rounds, longer, in different positions — seated, standing, lying on the back. Each position changes the breathing, and each breath changes what you notice. People who arrive agitated in the first round are no longer the same by the third.
2.Breathing from Karate
This is the part you will not find elsewhere.
In Karate, breathing does not accompany movement — it creates it. The short, controlled exhalation at the moment of effort raises intra-abdominal pressure, and that stiffens the trunk and transmits force from the ground into the extremity. The mechanism is documented in spinal biomechanics, quite independently of martial arts.
What this means for someone who will never strike anything: breathing is the infrastructure, not the decoration. A person who learns to exhale on effort lifts a box off the floor differently. A person who learns the four-second pause before answering enters a meeting differently.
We work abdominal breathing, synchronisation with movement, kiai as a release of tension — and the discreet techniques, usable at the desk without anyone seeing.
- Breathing on the punchbag
The most demanding element, and the most requested.
There is no contact between participants. Only the bag, gloves, basic technique. The aim is not the correct strike but the coordination of breath and effort under intensity: how you exhale on each execution, how you avoid holding your breath, how you recover between sets.
Nobody is obliged. Anyone with high blood pressure or problems in the hands or shoulders works on mobility in parallel. Wraps and gloves are worn, and the sets are short, with rests.
The effect almost every participant reports: release. Not from aggression — from the fact that tension carried for months finally has somewhere to go.
The book, personalised for your event
BREATHING — Body. Mind. Kaizen Philosophy.
188 pages · ISBN · Intelligent HiTech Service
The book contains a chapter devoted entirely to the working environment: why abdominal breathing answers precisely the problems of desk work, the respiratory dysfunctions that appear in meetings, the three-minute ritual before a demanding activity, a five-day Kaizen programme for the Monday-to-Friday rhythm, and breathing in leadership.
It is not a book written for companies and sold to them. It is a book written for practitioners, which has a chapter about the office because most of the people I work with come from one.
Three levels of personalisation
Level 1 — Dedication.
A title page with the company name, the name of the event and the date. A dedication text of your choosing, up to roughly sixty words. The company logo can be included, in monochrome.
Level 2 — Dedication and foreword.
Everything in Level 1, plus a page signed by you — or a short company presentation — addressed to the participants. Here the book is no longer a gift received at an event; it is a message from the company to its people, with 188 pages behind it.
Level 3 — Dedicated edition.
Everything above, plus: on page four, the company logo and a short description of the occasion — the event, the celebration, the completed project; and a section written by me specifically for your team: the programme applied, the exercises actually worked through, with guidance for continuing at home.
In practice, the participant receives a personalised workbook rather than a general book.
The outer covers remain in their published form at all three levels. Personalisation is on the inside — I do not turn the book into promotional material, because then it would not be kept.
Conditions
The minimum print run is 100 copies, for reasons of printing. Lead time for a personalised edition is approximately four weeks from approval of the texts — printing takes the time it takes and cannot be hurried.
Each copy can be hand-numbered with the Japanese seal of the edition. On request, signed.
Without going outdoors: the book as a gift, and sessions on your premises
Not every occasion calls for travel, and not every budget allows it.
The book as a gift for employees.
The personalised edition can be ordered independently of any event — for Christmas, for the New Year, for a company anniversary, or as recognition at the end of a project. The same three levels, the same minimum run. A gift that is read rather than put in a drawer.
Sessions on your premises.
For smaller groups — from eight to fifteen people — the programme can be held in the office. No gym is needed: a meeting room cleared of tables is enough. We work mobility for the three areas, breathing and the part concerned with stillness. Only the punchbag stays out, since it needs space and a mounting.
Duration: sixty to ninety minutes. It can be done recurrently — once a month, at the same hour — and in the recurrent version the effect shows most clearly, because the exercises settle in.
What remains afterwards
This is the difference from any other team activity, and it is worth explaining in detail.
The techniques.
Every participant leaves with four or five breathing exercises usable during the working day, in the discreet variant — the ones that can be used in a meeting without being seen. The sixty-second reset. Releasing the neck and shoulders. The decision pause. These are not relaxation exercises; they are working tools, and the difference shows in the second week.
The book.
An object that stays on the shelf, not a pen lost by Friday.
The memory.
A morning on the beach at sunrise, or a climb in the mountains, does not fade from a group’s memory. And what people say to one another there, in the breaks, is not obtained in any meeting room.
And one thing no other book does.
The fourteen articles in the final chapter do not end in the book. Each has a QR code leading to the full version, published on this site — three to five times longer than the summary in print.
This means that the volume received in June is not the same volume in December.
The articles are corrected, extended, updated. When a new study appears, it goes in. When a figure everyone repeats turns out to be wrong, I replace it with the real source. I recently rewrote the articles on sarcopenia, muscular recovery and training monitoring entirely, because I checked every statistic cited and some did not survive checking. Whoever scans the code today reads the corrected version. Whoever scans it next year will read a better one.
The printed book does not change. What sits behind the codes does.
And the codes cannot break. Each passes through a redirection layer I control: if I move an article, restructure the site or change platform, the code in the book keeps working. I built that layer precisely so that what is printed never becomes a dead address.
In practice: you receive a physical object that stays, tied to content that grows. A corporate gift worth more in its second year than on the day of the event.
Organisation, from one end to the other
A programme away from the office usually fails not on content but on logistics. Which is why I do not leave you with the session structure in hand and the rest to solve.
From the fourteen group events organised since 2019 — by the sea, in the mountains, in Bulgaria and in Bukovina, with groups of fifteen to forty people — I know what matters and what does not:
- The location that fits the number. A group of fifteen and a group of forty do not work in the same space. I propose tested options, with what can actually be done in each, not what photographs well.
- Accommodation. I recommend places I have used, with what works and what does not at each. No commission and no interest in the choice — if you already have a partner, I work with them.
- The shape of the day. When the session is held, how long it lasts, what follows. The classic mistake is scheduling for three in the afternoon, after lunch. It never works.
- The bad-weather alternative. Every outdoor programme has an indoor version prepared from the start. Not improvised on the morning.
- Adaptation to the time available. Ninety minutes, half a day or three days — the structure changes, not merely the duration.
I am not an events agency and I do not sell accommodation packages. But if you would rather not coordinate five suppliers, I can carry that part through.
Experience
Since 2019 I have run the Body Grace & Martial Entertainment club, dedicated to adults over forty, and organised fourteen group events.
What matters is not the number. It is that most of the members of my club work in corporate roles. The programme here was not conceived at a desk and tested on companies. It was built the other way round — on people who came to training after eight hours at a monitor, with exactly the aches your team has. The three problem areas are not a theory taken from the literature; they are what I corrected, week after week, over six years.
I have been invited to run short programmes in corporate settings. The approach here — with the personalised edition of the book and the three-component structure — is a development of that experience, not a repetition.
About me
Cornel Liviu Giurgea. Forty-seven years of Shotokan Karate — 6th DAN FOKS, 4th DAN WSKF, student of Sensei Mircea Ungurean, 8th DAN, in the line of Shihan Hitoshi Kasuya (WSKF). Thai massage therapist, trained in Thailand.
I am an engineer and have been an entrepreneur since 1991. For some twenty-five years I ran a company of 180 employees and sixteen branches, listed in Forbes 500 Romania.
I mention the second part for a practical reason: I know what a working day inside a company looks like, and why a programme that demands large changes is never applied.
How it is organised
- Group: twelve to forty people for outdoor programmes; eight to fifteen for sessions on your premises. Above forty, it splits into two sessions.
- Duration: from ninety minutes to a two- or three-day programme.
- What I bring: the session structure, the necessary equipment, the materials. The location and logistics can be yours, or I propose them.
- Season: outdoor locations work from April to October. In winter, indoors or on your premises.
- Lead time: a minimum of two weeks for a session. Four weeks if it includes the personalised edition of the book.
The first step
A thirty-minute conversation, with no obligation: how many of you there are, what you have tried so far and what did not work. From there I propose a structure, not a package.
office@karate-bgme.club
+40 721 257 755
Physical health and spiritual balance.