Pain and Fear Reactivity - why you can't do splits and shouldn't squat on a Swiss ball

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I was in a significant car accident this past July.  The greatest loss was my beloved Civic (total loss), but I also suffered mild injuries to my sternum and shoulder (mild meaning they hurt like hell but I didn't actually require any medical attention).  What made this a good story was that my test for sandan (3rd degree black belt) was scheduled for 3 days after the accident, and I really had no choice but to go through the test.

I learned a lot from this experience - I learned the value of ibuprofen, I learned how much harder it could be to get out of bed than it normally is, and I learned never to post anything about injuries on Facebook unless you're willing to be barraged by commenters insisting you see a physician (what am I, a 6 year old girl?  See a doctor just because I'm hurt?)  But the most interesting thing was what happened to my punching.

You see, the worst pain I felt was in the muscles along my right shoulderblade.  Every morning my right arm would be useless.  A few minutes of arm circles and general warming up would give me most of the function back, but I still had pain through some movements.  Nothing serious, mind you, but definitely pain.

So here's the funny part.  Pushing didn't really hurt - I wasn't setting any world records, but I could do pushups pretty much normally.  Despite that, I couldn't really punch with any force (not that my punches are normally anything fantastic).  Punching didn't hurt, I just couldn't muster up any snap with that arm.  Remember, the muscles used in pushing the punch out - my legs, my core, the pushing muscles in the arm and shoulder - were all fine, yet I couldn't snap out my punches.  The damaged muscles should only have really hurt at the end of the punch - absorbing the energy near lockout - yet I couldn't throw a punch hard enough to make that happen.

What was going on?  I'm going to steal a term from Scott Sonnon (and I'm probably using it wrong, so please forgive me for butchering the poor guy's theories) and call it fear reactivity.  To put it simply, my body was shutting down or interfering with uninjured tissues (the muscles used to throw a punch) to protect the injured tissues (the ones that would have been hurt by the force of a full speed punch).

This is worth restating:  in many cases your body (i.e. nervous system) will prevent you from hurting yourself.  That means when you try to move through a position that either causes pain, due to existing damage or a structural deficiency, or where you are weak, because the muscles are undertrained in that range of motion, you will have a reduction in activation by your nervous system, resulting in weakness, or a tightening of muscles to prevent you from entering that position.

Another place we see similar things happen is in the hip adductors (groin muscles).  If your adductors are weak when your hips are widely abducted (legs far apart), as they are in most people (because really, who the hell trains their hips when their legs are far apart?) the muscles will tighten when you try to stretch them.  That's why you probably can't get into a split.  Strengthen the muscles in that range of motion and you'll see quick gains in flexibility - not because any tissues are longer, but because they're not tightening up to protect themselves.

There are 3 different ways understanding this principal should impact your training:

1. You might make quick gains in strength (how much force you can actually produce) by doing some mobility work, especially if you're relatively new to training.  Move all your limbs through a full and pain free range of motion, and do it often - move slowly, then quicker.  This will convince your body (I really mean your nervous system) that those ranges of motion don't hurt, which can release or unlock any restrictions that are inhibiting your performance right now (this is a part of the Z-Health system).
2. Make sure you are strong in the ranges of motion you need to use in your martial art (or daily life).  If you like to kick people in the head (while they're still standing), then your hip muscles have to be strong when one leg is way high in the air, or your body will reduce the force it can exert while that leg is high.  If you train your hips with, say, squats and swings only - movements where your knees are fairly close together the entire time- then you can't expect to be strong when they're not close together.
3. If you're trying to get stronger you have to convince your body that it's safe to generate a lot of force. That means STOP SQUATTING ON AN UNSTABLE SURFACE!!!  Moving on a bosu ball, swiss ball, etc. - any kind of unstable surface - tells your brain that it's not safe to push hard.  If you don't believe me, try to do a max squat while wearing roller skates.  If you're rehabbing an injury or working on your balance or trying to activate stabilizer muscles then unstable surfaces are great.  If you're trying to get stronger, then the instability will cause an inhibition of the prime movers - the muscles that generate the bulk of the force you're trying to produce - and the exercises will be less efficient.

In the end I passed my promotion and it only took another month and a half for my shoulder to heal pretty much completely.  Next time I have a promotion (if there is a next time) I'm going to stay home for 2 weeks before the test!

Osu.

Exercise of the Week: Box Jump

The most important movement in which a karateka needs strength and power is the hip snap - the last few degrees of hip extension.  Think of what happens when you punch - the hip is driven forward by extension, and it's not from a deep squat or anything, it's right from a slightly flexed hip, the way you hold it in a casual stance, to full extension.  The same thing drives a front kick - the supporting leg snaps the hip forward, again extending the hip through a relatively short arc of motion.  Ditto for a side kick, except then it's the kicking leg that gets force from the hip snap.

My favorite way to develop this hip snap power is the kettlebell swing, about which I intend to write more at some point.  Lately I've been using box jumps to develop hip power as well.

Description:

1. Stand upright in front of a box or platform.  It has to be sturdy - not something that's going to easily fall over.
2. Quickly dip down, not into a full squat, but more into a quarter squat.  Think of a basketball player going for a rebound - they don't squat all the way down, just a quick flex of the hips.
3. Jump up quickly.  Don't pause at the bottom - dip down, then jump up as rapidly as you can.
4. Land on the box in a crouch position - knees up in your chest. 

The box should be high enough that you barely reach the top - you're not trying to jump up very high, then come down a long way and land on the box.  You're trying to just barely reach the box, and you should have to land in a deep squat position.  If you can land in an upright stance the box is too low.

Programming:

Don't do a ton of reps.  Try 3-5 jumps each at 3 different heights.  The first 2 heights are warmups.

Use these at the beginning of the program, after your warmup, mobility training, and dynamic stretching.  DO NOT do these when you're tired, it's both counterproductive and dangerous.

Do these maybe twice a week at most.  Once a week might be better.

Benefits:

I like this exercise for a few reasons.

• This really encourages you to generate maximum power.  Jumping higher is very compelling.
• This movement is functional in the sense that you're training for and learning to jump onto high objects.  You might very well have to do that - in an emergency, when running from or after somebody, etc.  Jumping onto things is part of real life in the way that bench pressing just isn't (I mean, it's possible that a perfectly balanced cylindrical object could fall across your chest as you lie on your back, but I think it's more likely that you'll have to jump onto or over something at some point in your life).
• The hip snap is followed by a very rapid hip flexion (the movement of quickly bringing your knees up to your chest so your feet clear the box).  I find that very little in my routine trains hip flexion, especially at speed, and nothing will improve your front kicks more than some improved hip flexion strength.  Box jumps give you twice the bang for your buck - and this is one way they improve on the kettlebell swing.
• You can find plenty of videos online of people doing box jumps onto specially designed plyo boxes, but you can also use low walls and ledges or anyplace outside where there are elevation changes.  Kettlebells are expensive; walls are often freely available for our use. 
• If you just jump high, or jump over something, then you have to land.  Landing can be hard on the joints, especially for us older folks.  The landing in a box jump is very soft - remember, you don't fall down onto the box, you just barely catch yourself on it at the top of your jump - and you're free to climb down rather than jumping down if your knees aren't up to a pounding.
• The primary muscles working to fully extend the hip are the glutes.  And really, who doesn't want nicer glutes?  

I don't think you should totally ignore hip strength in a deep squat - you need to be strong through the entire range of motion of the hip, for safety reasons if nothing else.  But given how rarely you get into a deep squat in combat or sparring situations, you should focus more than half of your hip training to developing that fast snap.  Swings and box jumps are two of the best exercises I know of to do that!  Plus, being able to jump up onto high things is another cool party trick to pull out when people get tired of seeing you do one arm pushups.

Osu.

Exercise of the Week: Overhead Squat

I don't use this as a conditioning exercise, or really a strength exercise, but more a combined warmup/ mobility/ movement prep sort of thing.  I'll do maybe 2 sets of 10 reps with very little weight (unless you want to count my fat behind as weight) before doing my kata-centric workout.

Description:

1. Walk up to a straight bar - could be anything from a bo to a broomstick to a loaded Olympic barbell - and set your feet at least shoulder width apart, toes pointing out slightly.
2. Pick up the bar, hands pretty far apart - not shoulder width, they have to be farther out than that, and get it overhead, either by snatching it or just lifting it (it's kind of pointless to snatch a broomstick).
3. Keeping the bar directly overhead perform a full squat (keep your lower back straight or even arched a little; make sure your knees travel over or outside your toes, not caving in).  I like to have a mirror to the sides to make sure I'm not letting the bar travel the the front or back.  From the side your arms should be pointing straight up the entire time.  If this feels like it's stretching or cramping your upper back, it's okay - you're loosening up your thoracic spine and activating lazy muscles in that region.
4. Stand back up; repeat.  Your arms don't bend - the distance from the bar to your head doesn't vary at all - all the motion is at your hips and knees.

Benefits:

People do this with higher weights and more reps as a conditioning exercise, and I'm not opposed to that in theory, it's just not how I use the movement.

The squatting movement is super important for your hips - a deep squat is probably the most important movement pattern for any athlete.  Getting that full range of motion ready before your workout is a big deal for maintaining performance and hip health.  

Keeping the bar overhead as your butt moves backwards requires a decent amount of thoracic mobility.  Basically, your thoracic spine has to arch to keep the bar from traveling forwards and falling.  Good thoracic mobility is important for good shoulder and lumbar health.  Very few of us do enough thoracic mobility work in our karate workouts.

There's nothing magical about this exercise, but it's great for hitting three problem areas at once - hips, thoracic spine, and shoulders - and getting them all warmed up and prepped for the workout.  

Try doing these before your next workout.  The pinch in your upper back will tell you how badly you need to do more of them!

Osu.

Exercise of the Week: Straddle to Stand

I'm sure I didn't invent this exercise - I've seen Tom Kurz do it in some videos of his - but I'm not sure if there's an official name.  So I'll stick with "Straddle to Stand" for now.

Description:

1. Stand on something that allows your feet to slide/ move around freely.  You can stand on Valslides, put your feet into gymnastics rings or stirrups of a suspension trainer, or even wear socks on a very slick linoleum/ hardwood floor.  The less friction the better.
2. Let your feet slide out to the sides into a straddle - as if you're trying to do a split.  If you can do a split, then great.  If not, go as deep as is comfortable.  If you need to hold onto something for balance, do so, but don't hold yourself up with your hands.  Also, it helps to tilt your pelvis forward (anterior pelvic tilt) - as if you're sticking your butt out - to clear space in your pelvis.
3. Once you've gone as deep as you can, hold briefly, then pull yourself back up using just the strength of your hip adductors (the muscles in your groin and along your inner thighs).
4. Repeat.  Do up to 5 reps.  As you get stronger, try going deeper, or holding some weight while you do it.

Benefits:

This exercise is specifically for karateka or other martial artists.  It's designed to build up strength in your adductors with your legs spread far apart.  To be honest, this isn't a range of motion that is important for most athletes - you don't really ever see football players in that position, at least not on purpose!  

But if you want to have good high kicks (and don't we all?  Regardless of how impractical high kicks are for self defense?) then you need to be both flexible and strong in your hip adductors - so your kicks are high and you remain stable in the high kick position.  Very few exercises target these muscles in this range of motion.  

Do Straddle to Stands twice a week.  Combine them with daily dynamic stretching and some evening passive stretching (while cold) and you'll be kicking people in the head in no time! 

Osu!

Reflections on Gasshuku and Promotion

I had an interesting week.  I learned a few things, re-discovered a few more, and made a ton of new friends.

First, a short list of things NOT to do before/ during promotion:

1.  Get into a car accident.  I got hit (driver side front corner) going through an intersection last Tuesday morning (promotion was Friday).  Being both male and a little bit stupid I gave my statement to the police, then walked about 15 blocks to work.  Then another mile or so to the car rental place where I got my replacement vehicle.

My instructor forced me to get medical attention the next day (she threatened to block me from promotion if I didn't get checked out, which isn't entirely unreasonable, but I still wasn't happy about taking an extra half day off work).  It turns out that I'm okay - sort of.  I have no actual injuries - nothing that should hospitalize me - but my chest and shoulder were seriously banged up.  As in they hurt enough to make me cry when I try to roll over in bed.

Instantly I went from hoping to do really, really, well on my test to just hoping I wouldn't completely embarrass myself and my instructor.  Even when I was doped up on ibuprofen, though, I could feel that I'd lost about 50% of the speed and power in my right arm.  That's one of the big things they deal with in Z Health - your body shuts down motor units when you're working through a painful range of motion, to protect itself, which is why mobility work and soft tissue work can often unleash a ton of strength you didn't know you had.

Final result:  car completely totalled.  I walked away.  The woman who hit me was hospitalized.  I'm still sore but getting better daily.  And I survived promotion!

2.  Work yourself into a nervous frenzy.  I stressed myself out again, worrying.  But I did a lot better than last time...  so, progress, I guess.

3.  Complain.  I have to admit I can be a fun burglar.  When I'm too hot, or bitten by bugs, or whatever, I have a bad habit of getting bitchy and complaining.  I make myself miserable, I make everyone else miserable, and I have a terrible time.  This promotion was at a camp at a monastery.  No air conditioning, sun beating down on us, waking up at 4 AM to meditate outside, mediocre food, long drive to get there... you get the idea.  I found myself a couple of times running a little loop of bitching in my head - but for once in my life I was smart enough to snap out of it.  I very consciously decided to NOT complain, on the inside or the outside, and try to enjoy the good stuff that was happening.

It's a good thing I did, because the good stuff was amazing.  The weather was fantastic - just as the final 2 rounds of kumite for sandan candidates (including me), the capstone of promotion, started, the skies opened up and it just poured rain on us.  I got two big guys - both bigger, stronger, and far more skilled than I, to spar with (one at a time), and they kicked the crap out of me, which was good, because that's what's supposed to happen during promotion.  The next morning we got to meditate and watch the sun rise.  We did all kinds of camp - team building type of stuff, the kind I usually hate, but all the people there were just so nice, so supportive, so skilled and diverse, that I had the time of my life.  I got to make new friends and get to know old friends much better.  I had to write song lyrics and make an ass out of myself onstage (we had to produce skits).  I got too little sleep, too much food, too much sun and bug exposure, and I had an awesome time.


In the end I also got my sandan (third degree black belt).  Better yet, my teacher says I didn't embarrass her, and while I think she's just being nice, I'll try to believe it might be true.

Weirdly, a handful of people there recognized me from reading this blog, which took me totally by surprise.

If you're a fellow Seido practitioner, Osu!  Welcome to my blog.  Please note that everything I write about here is my personal opinion and NOT the official "line" of our style.  If I write about the correct way to punch it may not be the right Seido way -  it's my opinion, and I'm NOT an instructor!  Especially if anything your teacher says should contradict my writing, listen to THEM (please!)  Of course, you can think about what I write, but I'm no authority on our style.

Here's something I've re-discovered:  the people who practice in my style are nice.  I don't mean they're weak, or soft, or anything like that, but... they're nice.  I've met a ton of people who train in Seido and pretty much all of them are super nice, super supportive, and just great to be around.  Everybody does everything they can to make everybody else better - not to show up anybody, not to show who is stronger, but just to nurture everybody else's karate.  That doesn't mean you won't get hit during kumite - but it won't be out of malice, it will be out of competition, as a part of training.

It's amazing to be in such a large group of people, all tied together by their love of what amounts to a system for dishing out violence, and almost without exception they're all super nice people.  I wish I knew how this was managed - I wish there was a reproducible recipe for this kind of karate.  I'll think about it some more, but in the meantime I'm just very glad that I lucked into this family (the karate club at my college was a Seido club, run by Shuzeki Shihan Chris Caile, who is a fantastic guy, but in all honesty I trained there because it was the only type of karate I could get to without a car - it wasn't the result of exhaustive research or analysis on my part, just blind, fantastic luck).

Bottom line:  If you ever get a chance to spend 3 days training and hanging out with a bunch of karateka, do it.  Even if there's no air conditioning, and you'll be sleep deprived, and you have to drive 16 hours to get there and back, and you'll get bitten my mosquitoes, and you're recovering from an injury, and you can't really afford it - do it anyway.  From your deathbed I bet you'll remember listening to crickets from seiza and forget all the traffic you hit on the way home.  I bet I will.

I'm thinking about what it means to be a third degree black belt.  I'll write about it at some point.  In the meantime, I have to take a break from training to let my shoulder heal, then it's back to training!

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!

Countdown to Promotion: Penultimate Week

My promotion for sandan (third degree black belt) starts next Friday (July 8).  I wish I had another six months to prepare, or better yet a year, but I don't.  If you're new to the blog, here are the important details:  Promotions in my style are fairly rigorous physically (but not insanely so - we don't regularly hospitalize people during promotions or anything) and are taking place this year over a three day weekend.  I've been training since 1988, but I took a 12 year break from 1994 - 2006, and another year from late 2008 to late 2009, so I'm nowhere near as skilled as I should be.

Assuming you're trying to peak for an event like a promotion, a major tournament, or whatever kind of karate event you're participating in, there are a few things you should be doing.  Note that I'm going to assume that you: a) are not a professional athlete - no 3/day workout schemes here, I assume you have a real life that can't be put totally on hold; b) not a beginner - if you've been training for 3 months and you're testing for your first yellow stripe or whatever in two weeks, you need to just keep on training, not peaking; and c) not injured.  If you're hurt then you need to be dealing with that injury.

The first thing is to come to terms with what you can and cannot do in the last two weeks before a promotion.  If you've been training for years you're not going to get siginificantly better, skill-wise, in two weeks - you're not getting any better at kicking and punching.  You might be ablea to fix some technical errors of memory - for example, suppose you tend to punch with the wrong hand at a certain point in a kata - that's something you can work on, but if you just suck at something, you're probably still going to suck when the test date arrives.

You're also not going to get significantly stronger in two weeks.  Unless you are brand new to strength training (which you shouldn't be) neurological adaptions are slow to come by, and you can't build much muscle tissue at all in such a short time.  Getting stronger takes years, not weeks.

Your'e also not going to get much leaner in two weeks.  If you still have bodyfat to lose it's not going to happen now - putting yourself into a serious energy deficit at this point in time will leave you depleted and weak for your test, which is NOT how you want to present yourself.  If you're competing in a weight class event that's another story, but otherwise don't run yourself down by cutting back on food.

What you can do is improve your conditioning.  Maybe not by miles, but you still have time to add a few extra percent to your endurance while maintaining your skill and strength.  Here's what you have to do:

This week do some planned overtraining (sometimes called over-reaching).  Here's how:

• Every day do a hard session of skill training.  Don't focus on any one thing - remember, you're not going to improve much.  Do a few reps of everything in your syllabus - every kata, every combination, etc.  This is the time to make sure there aren't any kinks in your skills.  You're not going to develop wicked spinning kicks now, but if you haven't done any in three months you can sharpen them up quite a bit.  If you want to devote some time to really focusing on one thing, like your punches, do it after the test.  If you are sparring keep the pace high but the contact very controlled - this is NOT the time to do hard full contact sparring (because of the injury risk).
• Follow each skill session with a serious conditioning session.  As always, think in terms of doing high intensity intervals - work very hard for 10-45 seconds, rest, repeat.  Jump rope, sprint, do kettlebell swings, air squats, thrusters, burpees, bike sprints, etc.  Rotate your efforts - don't choose the same thing every day.  And don't do exercises that you've never done before - the soreness from starting swings for the first time can really hamper your efforts the rest of the week.  Also, do more than you think is probably good for you - really toast yourself.  And DON'T use karate skills for this part of your workout - don't do kicks until you're gasping for air.  It's bad for your kicks.
• Do just enough strength work to maintain your strength levels.  Maybe twice this week do an even more abbreviated session than usual - and follow it with skill training and more conditioning.
• If you can handle it, add a second conditioning session in the morning.  I try to get in a 4 minute workout - Tabata style sets of swings and thrusters with a kettlebell (Tabata protocol means 20s work/ 10 s of rest/ repeat).
• Do light stretching every day.  You're not going to work yourself into a split for the first time, but you want to work near the limits of your range of motion for all your muscles every day to stay limber and help with recovery.
• Eat plenty of clean food.  DON'T cheat by chowing down on ice cream and candy - instead eat plenty of protein and carbs in the form of meat, protein shakes, and starchy root vegetables - think lots of steak and sweet potatoes - to keep glycogen stores high and to improve muscle recovery.  This is NOT the time to try to trim off some excess weight - for two reasons.  First, cutting calories will hamper your body's ability to adapt to the training and make it more likely that you stay sore or get some mild injuries.  Second, if you managed to change your body composition now you'd throw off your balance and technique and you won't have time to adjust before the test.
• Make a special effort to cut back on possibly inflammatory foods.  Even if you think you're okay with dairy, this is not the time to push it.  Cut back on dairy, grains like rice and corn (you shouldn't be eating wheat ever anyway), vegetable oils (again, you shouldn't ever eat them, but...) and peanuts. 
• Do a TON of recovery work.  Foam roll yourself, use a self - massaging tool on sore spots (even better, get a massage or two, if you can afford them), sleep extra, eat more often (this is the week to be less than strict on your intermittent fasting schedule).
• Supplement with creatine, beta alanine, and acetyl-l carnitine to improve endurance.  Will they help?  Maybe, maybe not, but if you have the money this is the time to splurge.  Remember, we're peaking!

I'll write another post about the last week before promotion, but the general idea is we're going to taper off our training a lot and give our bodies a few days to heal, recover, and adapt to all the training.  If you time it right you can come into your test in the best shape you've ever been - and that's pretty much all you can ask for.

Move with Intent

I've been posting haphazardly lately, for which I apologize.  I started a new job and did some traveling, which has left me with less time for blogging than I'd like!  On the plus side the job has been a nice change (not that I disliked my old job).

I now sit in a cubicle for eight hours at a time and on some days I literally never have to leave my chair for work reasons.  When I do have to get up, it's to walk 50 feet (or less) to a meeting and get into another chair to sit still for another hour.

We all know the hazards of spending too much of your day sitting.  What to do?  In my old position I had my own office - I could close the door and do whatever short exercise routine I wanted to do, which is often what happened.  I'd knock out pushups, stretches, and even do parts of kata during my workday.  Now it's a lot less convenient to get any activity.

I haven't found a way to get a balanced routine, but I have been climbing stairs.  My cubicle is in the basement of a tall 5-story building (the 5th floor is the roof, but the stairs go that high).  Every hour or 90 minutes I get up, run up the stairs, taking them two at a time, then come back down.  It's like a cigarette break without the smoking.  It wakes me up a little and I'm hoping it causes enough of a catecholamine release to increase my body's use of fat while at rest (I'm not well versed enough on the literature to know if it's enough exercise to actually work that way).  I even put it on my to-do list in Outlook - every morning I add 5 tasks, called Stairs 1 - Stairs 5.  Every time I do a set I check off one of the tasks.

You don't have to climb stairs, but many of us have buildings where we have a place we can go to take a brisk walk, knock out some pushups, do a handful of jump squats, or something else.

There are a few things you can do to enhance this practice:

Do your activity with intensity - go fast, get your heart rate up.  You'll get a slight conditioning benefit, and a little is better than nothing.

Let's face it, this isn't going to be a ballbreaker of a workout.  You're not going to use every iota of your concentration to make it up the stairs.  So instead pay very careful attention to your form and posture.  For example:

• Keep your chin tucked and your head back (so the crown of your head is pulled up towards the ceiling).
• Keep your shoulderblades tucked back towards your rear end by tightening your lats.
• Maintain a slight anterior pelvic tilt the entire time.
• Focus on tightening the glutes with each step and not driving with quads alone.
• Tighten your core - abs, pelvic floor muscles, etc., and keep them taut through the climb.

The idea is to train yourself to maintain good posture.  Then, when you're doing challenging exercise or martial arts exercises, keeping good posture will be somewhat automatic.  There are only so many things you can focus on consciously at any one time -  the more you can shift into the subconscious the better.

You'll get a lot more out of climbing or walking with purpose, with solid posture and activated muscles, than out of just trudging around out of some impulse to just move without considering the quality of movement.

Ose

Do as I say...

Not as I do.  Sometimes.

I seem to fairly regularly include in this blog descriptions of how I do things - how I eat, how I train, etc.  The intent isn't just to entertain people - when I say "I do X" I usually mean to say "I do X and so should you and here's why..."  Sometimes I write what I do as evidence that it's is doable - I'll write about how I eat or train to show you guys that a middle aged, untalented guy with little in the way of willpower, two young children and a full time job can make pretty good progress by acting according to the right set of plans.  Then I'm really answering somebody saying that they can't get in shape, get lean, or get better at karate.  Today I'm going to write about some things that I do because they're wrong - I shouldn't be doing them.  Because, much as I wish it were otherwise, I'm not perfect!

So here are a few areas where I'm doing the wrong thing and I know it (there are many other mistakes that I'm making and don't know about, but I can't write about them... just think about it).

• I don't eat nearly enough vegetables.  My diet is pretty good, most of the time, but I don't like veggies very much and I don't eat them enough.  You should eat like me, more or less, but with a ton more vegetables included (both in quantity and in variety).
• I don't do enough soft tissue work.  I never get massages and I rarely use the foam roller at home.  I've been working my hips and legs with a self-massaging device (kind of like a stone sphere set into a handle so you can roll it over your muscles), but I don't do it enough.
• I eat plenty of grass fed beef but not nearly enough organ meat or bone (obviously you don't eat bone, but you can make broth by boiling bones in water and get a lot of good nutrients that way).  No excuse but laziness.  If I could get a ground beef that was part liver/organ/kidney and part regular meat in 1 lb. packs I'd buy it, but I haven't found such a product (if you know of one please let me know).
• I don't do enough static stretching at night.  I don't do any before working out - which is good - but I think I'd benefit from another 20 minutes a night of stretching.  I'm just too lazy.
• I don't meditate enough.  For stress relief and improving one's concentration we should all meditate every day - at least for a while.  I don't.  No excuse.
• I don't hit stuff enough.  That's changing now that I have a Body Action System in my house.  Punching and kicking air is good but you shouldn't do it exclusively.
• I don't practice sanchin or tensho enough (should be every day).  Like I said, I'm lazy.
• I don't sleep enough.  That's probably not entirely my fault - I get a little insomnia and I'm trying to fix it, and if I slept the whole time I was in bed every night it would be enough.  So it's not like I'm up all night partying.  But, end result, not enough sleep.
• I don't work out outside enough.  Partly because I'm lazy, and it's winter, and partly because I'm allergic to grass and trees (the outside, I've noticed, is full of grass and trees).  

I'm sure there are others I couldn't think of (I"m not saying this list is the sum total of all my flaws by any stretch).  What's the point of this list?  Well, first of all, you should get that when I describe my lifestyle I'm not bragging, I'm quite aware that I fall very far short of what I ought to be doing.  I'm just doing better than I was doing, say, a year ago, and better than most people my age who don't pay attention to these things.

Keeping a list like this is also a key to making progress.  As time goes on I try to work on these things - not all of them at once, but in small groups.  This list was a lot longer a year ago.  I identified things I could fix and changed them.  I'm still doing that.

You, my reader, should write out a list like this (of your mistakes, not of mine).  Then pick a few of the items and start working to improve them.  Like my "I don't hit stuff enough."  I saw that on my list, asked for a BAS for my birthday, and now I hit it almost daily.  Every once in a while I need to re-do the list and pick new things to work on.  I'm about due now, actually!

Don't expect to eliminate the list completely, at least not in a short period of time.  Expect to add things to the list as often as you take them off, as you learn about new things you should be doing for your health and performance.  Stay on the path to perfection, don't worry about reaching perfection.

Osu.

How to Kick Higher

I realize that head kicks have questionable self defense application.  There are some obvious disadvantages to throwing one leg high up into the air during a street fight; whether or not head kicks can ever be useful in live combat is a question better left to more experienced people (I haven't been in a streetfight in, well, ever!)  Regardless of their utility, high kicks are cool.  And fun.  And impressive at parties.  And good for sparring (people often don't defend against them, and if you throw a couple they'll often hold their hands higher, opening up their torsos for kicks and punches - fun!)

Few of us can kick high as well as we'd like.  I would like to offer a few tips.  This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch (no pun intended), but it may help you out.

1. Prioritize your dynamic flexibility.  Many people focus on stretching by sitting on the floor or in a near -split and holding the position; this is nice but shouldn't be your main focus.  Instead, stretch by swinging your leg and quickly moving it in and out of its farthest range of motion.  Do mae keage and yoko keage (leg swings to the front and side) in sets of 10 or so for each leg.  If you're going to do static stretching, don't do it pre-workout.  Do it at night, with cold muscles.  Holding stretches weakens the muscles - stretching them cold will do more to lengthen the tissues.
2. Get stronger abduction (spreading your legs apart with force).  Try simple exercises like slowly kicking, as high as you can, while wearing ankle weights or with bands hooked onto your feet.  Do NOT do full speed kicks with heavy weights - that's asking for trouble in various ways.  You need strong hip abductors, and they need to be strong when your legs are spread far apart, a position most of us aren't in very often.
3. Get stronger adduction (pulling spread legs together with force).  This is good both for moving around and to increase the limits of  your flexibility.  Basically, weak adductors will contract when they're stretched (it's a protective reflex).  To avoid this mechanism you need your adductors to be strong when at the ends of their range of motion.  How?  Get into a deep horse stance - really, really deep, as close to a split as you can manage - and squeeze the ground.  Hold, squeezing as hard as you can, for 30 seconds. Or stand on Valslides or the handles of a suspension trainer, lower into a split, then pull yourself back up with your adductors alone. 
4. If you have anterior hip pain (pain on the outside of your hips):  try stretching your piriformis.  Sit up straight. Put your right ankle over your left knee (like half a lotus position).  Gently press down on the right knee so you feel a stretch on the outside/ back of your right hip.  Why does this help?  If that muscle is tight it pulls the femur against the outer edge of the hip socket, limiting your mobility.  Loosen it and... voila.
5. Kick with a slight anterior pelvic tilt.  That means if you throw a side kick or roundhouse kick, tilt the top of your pelvis forward a bit, as if you were sticking your ass out at somebody.  This will help align the femur and hip joint so bones don't hit each other as your leg moves high and to the side.
6. Practice high kicks often.  This one is obvious.  Whenever you get a chance, try to have one leg up high in the air.  Hold a chair for balance of you need to.  You need to convince your nervous system that having a leg way up high, close to the limit of your hip mobility, is not dangerous.

For me, the anterior hip pain is a real issue - it's the limiting factor in my ability to get close to a split.  Stretching out the muscles on the back/ outside of the hip, to allow my femur to re-center in the socket, has been a big help in getting my kicks higher.  

If you have other good tips, put them in comments, please!

Osu.

Happy Holiday! Training while Traveling

I don't know how much I'll be posting over the next week and a half due to some holiday traveling.  I wish you all a happy holiday, if a holiday you happen to celebrate is coming up soon!

Don't forsake training just because you're traveling.  There's lots you can do in short bursts of time without equipment:

• Get your dynamic stretching in.
• Do pistol and one handed pushup ladders - do 1 for each arm or leg, then 1 for the other, then 2 for each limb, then 3, then 4... until you can't do anymore.  Then start again with 1.  Do 3 or 4 rounds of the whole thing.
• Shadowbox for 20 second rounds. 
• Get into as wide a horse stance as you can and isometrically tense your adductor muscles (squeeze the ground between your feet).  Relax and sink into a deeper stretch, then repeat.  
• Jump as high as you can.  Land (important!).  Repeat.
• Practice spinning kicks until you fall over.
• Do 10 burpees.
• Try clapping push-ups.

If you can find a pull-up bar, or monkey bars in a playground, do some chinups or pullups.

Don't even try to get in 20 or 30 minute workouts - try to get 1-2 minutes total, but do it as often as you can.  Every time you go to the bathroom knock out a few pistols.  Now if you can get to an open space, a gym, and have some real time, by all means do a full workout, but if you're with friends and/or family and it's not going to happen do something.  You may not improve your strength or conditioning, but you'll prevent yourself from losing ground, and you'll help shift any excess calories you're taking in from fat into muscle.  A total of 20 minutes of work spread over a week can actually make a big difference in how much you lose over your vacation.

Above all, enjoy!  Having a social life is one of those markers that correlates really well with longevity and health.  Hanging out with people you care about is probably more important for your well being than any workout you could do.

Just don't let them con you into eating gluten!  You can hang out with your friends without eating like them.  Drink more tequila instead.

In case I don't post anything in the next week, Happy New Year!

Osu.

He SAID, She SAID

You can boil all of strength and conditioning into 2 basic principles.  I don't know if there is a name for the first one - though some academic somewhere may have written whole books about it.  I think of it as Capacity Entropy.  The second principle is SAID - Specificity of Adaptions to Imposed Demands.  I'll deal briefly with the first and with SAID in more detail.

Capacity Entropy (again, this is my term, there might be a better name for it that I'm not familiar with) is the principle that your body "wants" to get rid of any capacity it's not using.  It's sometimes called "use it or lose it."  Any capacity - any ability your body has, from the ability to move, to think, to resist stresses, to fight off infection, whatever - is metabolically costly.  It takes energy to keep your bones solid.  It takes energy to produce melanin for your tan (though not a huge amount).  It takes energy to build and maintain muscle.  Your body is, thanks to evolution, adapted to surviving well in times when energy is in short supply.  In the name of efficiency your body will try to get rid of any excess capacity - any ability that it doesn't need.  Imagine a primitive hunter with 19" biceps (that's pretty big).  If he needs that arm muscle for hunting, then fine, he'll use it to hunt and his body will keep the muscle around.  Successful adaption.  But if it's not needed for hunting (or other movements that are important to survival) then in times of famine his body will shed that excess muscle as quick as it can to save energy for the important stuff - the leg and hip strength he uses in hunting, the brain capacity to outsmart animals, all that stuff.  If he's super vain and wants to have big arms (to impress the gatherers, I guess) he's going to have to do some extra work to trick his body into maintaining them.

Imagine a person who sits on the couch all day eating and changing channels on the remote.  Do you think that person's body will maintain the capacity to generate a lot of force?  To jump and run high and fast?  To move explosively?  To resist the sun?  To move easily through a full range of motion?  Will that person's bones stay dense?  No.  That person's body will maintain strength and flexibility in the right thumb and nowhere else.  That person's legs will soon only be strong enough to get their fat ass to the refrigerator and back to the couch.  The body will shed all excess ability beyond what is needed and store all the extra energy it can - by adding fat.  Don't believe me?  Walk through any mall in America.  Or do an experiment and spend six months on your couch.  See what happens.

Does that mean we're all doomed to a future of slowing turning into Jabba the Hutt?  Not necessarily, thanks to principle #2, SAID.  You see, your body is quite able to adapt itself to new challenges and tasks.  But since your body doesn't want to build up any excess capacity it will only adapt itself to the specific challenges you give it.  Hence the principle (Specificity of Adaption to Implied Demand).

If you lift weights you won't get a tan, and if you sit out in the sun you won't grow muscles.  Your body will only expend energy to adapt in specific ways to the very specific stresses you put on it.  Think of training like an argument.  You have to argue - to convince your body that it needs some capacity.  If you want a large capacity - to be very strong, very fast, very resilient - you have to make a very convincing argument.  In other words, a very intense stress of the right type applied repeatedly over time.

If you want to get good at plodding along all day, take up jogging.  If you want to get faster, sprint.  If you want to get stronger, lift weights.  All very logical, right?

Sadly, it gets a little more complicated than that.  If you're unadapted to strength training - if you're a beginner - almost any strength training will improve your strength any way you'd care to measure it.  But once that honeymoon is over your body gets a little bit more serious about how it takes specificity.  If you want to be exlposive - to be strong while moving quickly - you eventually have to start moving weights fast.  Slow, grinding movements (watch a powerlifter do a heavy squat) won't convine your body to get quick - it will convince your body to get slow and strong.  If you want to punch hard, the bench press may help a little, but eventually the bench press will make your body better at bench pressing and won't carry over to punching.

It's also easy to overstate just how specific your adaptions can be.  If you get a tan by the pool that melanin will still protect you from sunlight at the beach.  If you do preacher curls with an EZ curl bar you're going to get better at dumbell curls - maybe not to the same extent, but there will be carryover.  Need proof?  Get someone who has built up their overall strength a lot - maybe someone who's doing strongman competitions - and get them to do almost anything new involving force production.  They're going to be a heck of a lot stronger than they were when they started training.

So how close to our techniques should our training be?  That's in a way the crux of sport specific training.  If I had the full answer to this question I'd be a lot better off than I am now.  Just practicing techniques does not maximize your strength - it's too hard to progressively overload a simple punch.  At a certain point you'll stop getting stronger.  Just loading our techniques - punching with dumbells or bands - can be better, but it can also screw up our skills.  The dumbell or band or whatever changes the movement to the point where we might be making our punching skill worse even while we're building muscle tissue.  You need to push the  movement to the point where you're forcing some adaption without changing it so much that you're no longer specific enough to get the right adaption.

I'll post more on this later.  I'm still working through this issue.  Meanwhile:

Take home messages:  If you're new to strength training, early adaptions will be so general that you'll get better at everything as long as you put on some hard work.  Enjoy! 

If you're not new to strength training, try to focus on exercises that are close to the movement patterns you use in karate and at the same or similar speeds.  Yes, that means moving weights fast sometimes.  Yes, you have to be careful.  No, it will not kill you.  I'll work on providing some details regarding this issue as time goes on.

If you don't train some capacity - if there's a range of motion you don't use, forces you don't generate - you will slowly lose that capacity.  Which brings you one step closer to losing all your physical capacities, which is another term for death.

In other words:  Train or Die.

Stretching for Performance

Nearly every aspect of my own training has been altered by the things I've learned from books and online sources over the last five years, but perhaps the way I stretch has changed most of all.  I see many martial artists stretch incorrectly, which can cause injury or decrease performance at worst and waste time at best.  As you know, I'm not a fan of wasting time! 

There are several different types of stretching, but I'm going to focus on two:

• Dynamic Stretching:  This means moving a limb to the limits of its range of motion, then back (as opposed to holding a limb in the stretched position).  Think leg swings, or mae keage, or yoko keage.
• Static Stretching:  This means holding a limb at a point near or at the limit of its range of motion.  This is the typical sitting on the floor with legs spread, leaning over one leg or the other and holding the position for some period of time.

There are two different goals for stretching:

• Movement prep:  This is stretching before a workout, as part of your warmup, or before a performance of some kind.  Think of the stretching you do before practicing kicks.  Also known as limbering up or loosening up.
• Flexibility enhancement:  Stretching you do to increase your long term flexibility. 

Some people may combine these two goals in one session:  this is a mistake.

Look, we've all been told at some point to sit on the floor and static stretch for fifteen minutes or half an hour before karate class or other exercise.  We've been told that it prevents injuries and prepares the body for the workout.  This is just not true.  The scientific evidence behind using static stretching pre-workout for injury prevention is nil - it just doesn't work.  Holding stretches for a long time, like sitting in a near - split and trying to touch your chest to the floor for 30 seconds or a minute, significantly reduces the amount of force your muscles can generate for quite a while thereafter.  Do you think that's what you want to do - weaken your leg muscles right before practicing kicks?  Or before fighting?

On the other hand, two to four minutes of dynamic stretching will get you to the limits of your dynamic flexibility - that is, get you to the point where you can kick as high as your body will allow you to kick.  Don't believe me?  Try it.  Do a quick warm up - any movement that raises your core body temperature.  Do some planks and some glute bridges maybe (lie on your back, put your feet flat on the floor, and thrust your pelvis at the sky.  Repeat).  Then do some leg swings - 10 each leg, first 10 to the front, then 10 to the side.  Repeat for 2 or 3 rounds if you need to.  Do these fast, but not full speed - you're trying to move your leg through its full range of motion and then back, not hold it up in the air.  Total time?  Maybe 5 minutes.  Then practice your high kicks.

Does that mean no static stretching?  Well, not exactly.  There are two reasons to do static stretching.  The first is that some static stretching will help you increase your flexibility, if you need it.  And if you have minor muscle damage (tweaks, not full tears) stretching seems to help recovery.  So if you're still working towards a full split, sitting in front of the TV every night and cranking your legs apart will probably help you get there.  Do this stretching while fairly cold and preferably after some foam rolling or massage. 

The other thing to do if you're trying to improve your range of motion is to increase your strength in those muscles at the stretched position.  How? Well, try getting into a horse stance (kiba dachi).  Widen it as far as you can - keeping the knees bent, try to get as close to a split as you can.  Then squeeze the floor with your inner things - try to pull your heels towards each other.  Hold, really working hard to contract those muscles, for 30 s or so. 

You can do anything else that works those muscles from the stretch position.  My favorite?  I set up a pair of gymnastic rings.  I put my feet into the rings (one in each).  Then I lower myself into a split position, or as close as I can get, without using my hands (I'll usually keep a palm on the wall in front of me for balance).  Then I pull myself back up - so my feet come together - using my hip adductors alone. 

Bottome line:

Do only dynamic stretching before your workout.  Save the static stretching for off days or nighttime, not close to your workout.

I recommend dynamic stretching once or twice a day, every day.  There are two reasons for this:  the first is that it prepares you for mini workouts - like getting out of your chair and just throwing five or ten kicks with each leg.  The second is a self defense issue.  If you use high kicks in your karate practice and get into a fight you should be prepared to throw those kicks anytime.  No mugger (or whatever) is going to jump you, then stand aside and wait ten minutes for you to warm up and stretch before continuing the beating.

If you're curious, the core of these recommendations comes from Thomas Kurz and Mac Mierzejewski.  check out their stuff at stadion.com.