Catching, then Boarding, the Wagon

After my shodan promotion I took 12 years off from karate training.  After my nidan promotion I didn't do as badly - I took off maybe 6 months, and I did train a little during that time, though sporadically.  Now, after my sandan promotion, I'm in the middle of another layoff - but this one is caused by the picture leading this post.  That's what's left of my beloved Civic - and my layoff is because of the resulting shoulder injury, not mental burnout.  I'm actually quite eager to train, I just don't have full use of my arm back (though please don't worry about me, it's already 90% better and I should be fully healed in an other week).

There are various reasons we fall off the wagon - injuries and illnesses, lapses in motivation, personal and work situations that interfere with our diet or training, travel, holidays... I'm sure I missed something.  In each case your long term success depends on one thing:  getting back on the wagon.

How you go about doing that depends somewhat on why you were off track and how out of shape you are. Here are a few tips:

1.  Ease back into training.  This is super important.  There is something about the body that causes your fallloff in work capacity to happen much slower than your ability to resist the stress of training.  What I mean is, after a layoff you might find that you can do 90% of what you used to do in a workout, but the delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) will be much more severe.

This is a bad thing for several reasons.  DOMS will keep you out of the dojo or gym for a few days, slowing your attempt to get back in shape.  It's also demoralizing for some people.  Also, and more seriously, if you make yourself sore enough your muscles will adapt by building up non-contractile tissue inside the muscles - like scar tissue or connective tissue - to increase their resilience.  The last thing you want, as a martial artist, is more dead weight on your body.  A little soreness is okay; really bad soreness will have long term detrimental effects on your body.

Do less than you think you can do for a few workouts as you get back into shape after your layoff.  Keep quite a bit "in the tank" - stopping well short of complete exhaustion - until you're back in fighting shape.

2.  Ease back into your diet.  If you've managed to eat clean during your layoff, that's great.  If you haven't, though, trying to go back to a 100% clean diet might be too big of a change.  Ease your way back into eating clean the same way you did it the first time - though feel free to accelerate the timetable.

For example, suppose you were pretty close to eating clean Paleo.  Suppose you backslide by drinking diet soda, eating milk chocolate, then eating ice cream.  Maybe during your "fall" from the wagon you ate a lot of chocolate, soda, and ice cream.  When you try to get back, give up the ice cream first.  Then, a few days later, the chocolate (or at least cut back a lot).   Then the soda.  Trying to do all 3 at once is too much for most people (though if you can handle it, by all means do so, there are no physiological reasons to stick with the Diet Coke if you don't have to).


3.  Pursue different goals.  If you're coming off an injury and can't train with the intensity you'd want, try going after a different goal.  For example, I've been eating more calories to support hard training and strength gain leading up to my promotion last week.  I wanted to have the highest quality workouts I could, and I wasn't actively trying to lean out (I didn't get very fat or anything, but I also didn't get any leaner).  Now, with promotion done and my shoulder messed up, I can't do hard karate workouts even if I want to.  So now is the time to cut calories, increase my sub-maximal intensity training (more casual walks, fewer snatches), do more mobility work, and lean out in preparation for my next round of intense training.

You could also take this time to do a dedicated cycle of strength training, do some longer duration endurance training (not too much, maybe a couple of weeks worth), and focus on mobility work and stretching.

4.  Focus on what you can do, not on what you can't.  It's easy to dwell on what your body can't do.  Doing so won't, however, make you any better.  So... if your arm hurts?  Work your legs.  Back hurts?  Work on mobility.  Everything hurts?  Do visualization training, study your terminology, watch instructional videos.  Almost any injury leaves you with modalities you can train safely - it's up to you to figure them out and work them.

5.  Be patient.  After a 12 year break people told me everything would "come back to me" right away.  It didn't.  It took a long, long time for me to re-learn what I'd once known and get to be even a shadow of the  martial artist I'd been at 23 (and I wasn't very good at 23, either).  But it is possible - I'm still not very good, but I'm better than I was at 23 - it just takes a while.  Be in it for the long haul.  If you train intelligently, eat right, and drive carefully (slow down at intersections - trust me!) you can be healthy and make progress for a long, long time.

6.  Forgive yourself.  Berating yourself for sliding off your training or eating schedule is counterproductive.  I'm not trying to get all touchy feely with you, but while it's good to try to figure out what led you to backslide there's no point beating yourself up over it.  Brush off the dust and get back on the horse.

The ultimate cure for a long layoff is ending the layoff.  Motivate yourself (watch some movies, read some books, attend a tournament, whatever) and get back in there!

Osu!

The Dark Side of Accomplishment

Pop quiz:  What do Jon "Bones" Jones, Bill Clinton, and I have in common?

Answer:  A tendency to become assholes in the moment of our greatest success.

I honestly can't decide if this is a universal human trait or not - it certainly manifests to varying degrees in different individuals - but I've seen it in plenty of people.  I don't know where I read this analysis of Clinton (I certainly didn't make it up) but the gist of the theory is that every time he'd experience great success in some area of his life he'd get arrogant and cocky and do something stupid to screw it up.  I've done this myself, plenty of  times, though with much smaller consequences - I get that feeling of success and invulnerability, push the envelope a little bit, then some more, until everything pops and I wind up acting like an asshole.  If you know me, you might think that this is my natural state of being all the time, but the painful fact is that when I get high on myself my behavior actually gets much, much worse.

In martial artists this leads to some weird behavior.  You might think that the arrogant among us would ease off on training - but the opposite usually occurs.  After all, the arrogant karateka know how they got so good - by training - and they don't want to let that slide.  So they keep training very hard, but, they stop really learning.  They''ll correct mistakes pointed out by their seniors, but they won't really try to understand the mistakes or develop new insight into their technique.  The feeling of accomplishment fills their heads like wax.

Plus, they become assholes.  In a way that is usually tempered by dojo etiquette, which makes it subtler, but still present.  Even if it's just the way they look at the lesser mortals around them - they're still being assholes.

There are several cures.  One is to be around much better karateka than yourself - this helps cure our overconfidence.  If that's tough to find, try YouTube.  If you're really one of the best in the world, and can't find anybody more skilled than you to temper your arrogance...  then kudos to you, sir, and may I ask why you're reading my blog?  In all seriousness, however, I don't think anyone is so skilled in all areas of martial arts that they can't find someone to look up to in some area or ability to make them feel humbled.

I had a moment like this last weekend - for about 90 seconds I was pretty happy with my skill as a karateka (this was after promotion).  Luckily, I was alone in my room, so I didn't get a chance to do anything super obnoxious before snapping out of it (if I was obnoxious to you last weekend, I apologize, but that was just my normal personality, not the super obnoxious me I can become when I'm feeling cocky).

Moments to be careful of include (but are not limited to): achieving new ranks, mastering new kata/ techniques/ skills, winning competitions, and successful sparring sessions.

The annoying thing is that walking around all the time feeling down on yourself because of how much you suck at martial arts, comparing yourself to the great masters and always feeling like a loser, is equally counterproductive.  Being too humble can be demotivating, and giving your own opinions too little weight can make it very hard to advance in your understanding of martial arts.  The trick seems to be finding a happy middle ground, and if I knew exactly how to manage that I'd absolutely tell you.

Bottom line:  try not to be an asshole.  When you're feeling best, and most accomplished, is exactly when you are most likely being the biggest jerk.  If you're reading this and think I meant you, I didn't - I really wrote this about me - but if you think I meant you then maybe you have some self examination to do.

Osu!

Countdown to Promotion: Ultimate Week

For reasons I'll explain in a future post this entry has been delayed.  Sorry!

It is normal to want to train very hard in the days leading up to your promotion/ event/ competition/ whatever.  You're probably in great shape, you're worried about losing the edge off your skills right before you need them most, and you're psychologically probably very "up" for your chosen field.  I have one very general piece of advice:

Resist.

The last few days (and I have no scientifically precise data on the exact number, let's say 3-6) before your peaking event should be mostly restful.  This is not when you're going to make gains - this is when you can rest, heal, recover, and make the most of the hard work you've been putting in at the dojo.  Here's what you need to do:

Gently increase calories.  You need to eat at or even a little bit above maintenance this week.  You don't want to get fat, but unless you really pig out you're not going to gain noticeable amounts of weight in 3 or 4 days.  You don't want to be depleted at your event.  You don't need to eat giant bowls of spaghetti or whatever each night to refill glycogen levels, but you do need to make sure to get a moderate amount of carbs each day while avoiding heavy exercise.

Don't train heavy.  No heavy strength work starting at least 3 days before your event, no high intensity intervals in that same time.  You're just not going to get de-conditioned or weaker in 3 or 4 days - your body isn't that plastic - but you might hurt yourself or just get sore and depleted.  This is not the time to get in shape - the 3 months before this were the time to get in shape.  If you did your work then, you'll be fine.  If you didn't, nothing you do in the last week is going to be enough to matter.

Meditate and relax.  Your mind is very possibly your worst enemy now.  You're probably stressing a lot about the competition.  If you have to think about it, actively visuallize yourself being successful - acing your kata, winning a trophy, meeting your own personal goals for the event.  If you can, avoid thinking about it altogether.  Spend time each day meditating.  Enough anxiety will ruin your performance just as quickly as a physical injury - maybe more quickly.

Stretch and do light skill work.  You don't want to train heavy so your body can heal and regenerate, but you also don't want to let it stiffen.  Keep your motor patterns grooved with short, light workouts.  You're not going to get any better at anything in this last week, but you can easily avoid backsliding.  Go over kata in your head - visualize the moves - which is both good for your technique and very good for remembering the sequences.  Do lots of light, dynamic stretching to keep your body limber.  If you have to wring your shirt out after a workout you're working too hard.

Don't do anything new.  New movements/ techniques lead to soreness, which you don't want to deal with on your event day.  This is not the time to take up hill sprints or Olympic lifts. 

Sleep lots; do soft tissue work.  Get an extra hour or two a night if possible.  You're healing and recovering.  If you can, get a massage - even an amateur massage - get in as much sex as you can handle, and do extra sessions of foam rolling or whatever myofascial release work you prefer.  You're preparing your body for an event, treat it the way a Formula 1 team treats their car the day before a race. 

For me, the mental aspect of this week was the toughest.  As I mentioned before, I get nervous, and if I let myself I'll run through doomsday scenarios in my head and generally work myself into a nervous frenzy.  Then, when the time comes, I forget an astounding percentage of what I used to know.  This is bad!  You have to do whatever it takes (other than binge drinking) to take your mind off the event or to think positively about it.

If you have to travel a long way to your event, bring clean food to eat and try to arrange the schedule so you get as much sleep as possible (not always possible, I know).  Pack early.  Stay calm!

Remember, the last week is the time to recover and relax, not to make improvements.  As hard as it is to do, focus on recovery and not training for a few days.  This works - when I took my nidan promotion (not this one, for reasons I'll explain later) I was in my all time best shape - because I spent 3 months kicking my ass in the dojo, then took a week to recover enough to feel how much I'd improved.  You can certainly do the same.  Stop the heavy training, sleep and eat, and you'll be fine for your event.

If you're reading this while preparing for some peaking event in your life, good luck! 

Osu!