Periodization Made Simple: Part I: Periodizing physical qualities

We all know people who train consistently - maybe too consistently - by doing the same thing in the gym every workout, time after time.  They might take a break for a holiday or vacation or because of injury, but they generally repeat the same type of workout - the same exercises (generally), similar rep schemes, similar number of sets, and similar tempo, month in and month out.  If they're smart they'll constantly strive to add weight, or reps, to their workout, or switch up the exercises once in a while.  You can certainly make progress with this style of training, but it's usually slow and boring and often leads to staleness and/or injury.

High level athletes realized a long time ago that if they wanted to peak for an event - say, the Olympics, or even a season of their sport - they couldn't train the same way all the time.  They'd do general conditioning for part of the year, then more specific training, and finally sport specific training for the last couple of months leading up to their event.  It didn't take long for them to realize that over the long term they'd make better gains by "mixing up" their training this way than if they did similar types of training every week over the year.

Periodization is a term that means changing aspects of your workout in a planned way in order to maximize long term progress.  Reading the literature on periodization can be kind of daunting to a beginner - articles about periodization are often filled with technical vocabulary that you really don't have to know in order to use the principles.

So I'll make it simple.  I'm not going to define a million different terms for you (partially because I can't remember the difference between conjugate and concurrent periodization), just cover the basic concepts so you can use periodization to improve your training (and you should!).

There are 2 general kinds of periodization:  Periodizing physical qualities and periodizing intensity.

You can periodize your training to focus on different attributes or periodize your intensity.  Or you can (and should) do both!  I'll address the first type here (for no particular reason), and the second type in the next post.

Periodizing Attributes:  What this means is that you emphasize different physical attributes in different training sessions.  For example, you might do hypertrophy (hypertrophy means muscle growth) workouts (8-12 reps per set, 3-5 sets per exercise, moderate or slow rep pace, moderate rest between sets, extra calories after the workout), speed/ power workouts (plyometrics, very fast movements, ballistic exercises like kettlebell swings or olympic lifts, sprints, 3-5 reps per set, 2-3 sets per movement, lots of rest between sets), strength workouts (4-6 reps per set, lots of weight, moderate rep speed, 3-6 sets per movement, lots of rest between sets), and conditioning workouts (energy system training) (circuit training with moderate weights, little to no rest between sets, lots of sets).  None of these workouts are easier or harder, by nature, than the others, they just each target a different type of adaptation.

You could work these into your program in various ways.  You could do 3-8 weeks of one type of workout (say, a session of hypertrophy), followed by another "block" of 3-8 weeks focusing on another (say, strength workouts).  The potential downside is that you could lose too much in one area while focusing on another - you might lose all the speed you gained during your speed "block" during the other blocks, since you might go 16-24 weeks without training for a particular quality.

You could try to avoid that by mixing and matching in various ways.  For example, you could do a little bit of hypertrophy, a little speed work, and a lot of strength work for 8 weeks, then a little hypertrophy, a little strength, and a lot of speed work for the next set of 8 weeks, and so forth.  Think of it as having two minors and a major in each block - you'd do enough in each minor area to maintain your ability and you'd make progress in the major area.

Yet another style of periodization (you can see why there's so much terminology around this subject - each method of periodizing has its own name and associated jargon) would be to alternate workouts over the week but focus on each quality equally.  For example, suppose you work out three times per week.  Do one session of hypertrophy work, one session of speed/power work, and one session of strength work.  That way you make consistent progress in all areas.

Which system is best?  I think a lot depends on what you're training for.  If you're an Olympic athlete who has to "peak" at a certain time of year you need a very different system than regular people - and you probably have a professional coach to help you plan that all out.  If you're just like me - someone who wants to keep improving, but has no specific targets - then I'd say try the last system.  This is also a situation where we're splitting hairs - a professional athlete, who is in a situation where a 2% improvement could mean the difference between winning and losing, has to be much more meticulous in their choices than a weekend warrior.  For us amateurs a simpler system that is easier to comply with is probably more useful than something that could serve as a Ph.D. thesis in exercise physiology.

The "attributes" in question can also vary.  Bodybuilders alternate periods of time when they "bulk up" (add bodyweight - usually a combination of fat and muscle), then "lean out" (lose bodyweight, again usually a combination of fat and muscle, but they're hoping to gain more muscle than fat, then lose more fat than muscle, and come out ahead).  And you can focus on different attributes for different areas of your body - you could combine strength for the lower body with speed in the upper, and vice versa.

I'll give my recommendations on how to periodize your training - assuming you're a karateka with an actual life - with specific examples and a training plan - after I cover periodizing intensity.

Osu!

Adding Value to Your Dojo part I: Martial Arts as a Social Activity

There are a lot of ways to think about your martial art - is it a form of physical culture, a means of learning self defense, a cultural/ historical preservation activity, etc.  None of these are wrong, and in many ways they aren't exclusive - you can train to get in shape AND to preserve a part of history that you find valuable, for example.  The way you think of your art will, however, shape your training in many ways (if you train to preserve a cultural artifact you're less likely to incorporate techniques from other arts, for example), as well as shaping your marketing (sales pitch) and the way you may structure activities around your dojo.

I've already written about how I think we can benefit from regarding our training from a physical culture perspective (and I stand by what I wrote there).  I have another perspective to share today.

I tend to do the bulk of my training alone.  I go to class when I can, which is often just once a week, but I'll practice kata and kihon or do my conditioning by myself several other times a week (by the way, this is probably a bad idea for any beginner, but I've got many years of supervised training under my belt).  There are advantages to this approach.  I have less travel time.  I can train whenever I want - I'm never late for class!  I can focus on the skills I need most and on the exercises that work best for me.

There are also some pretty obvious disadvantages.  You can't do partner drills by yourself.  It's very difficult to work on many key skills without a partner - you can get clean technique, but how do you develop your timing?  It's even harder in grappling arts, I'm sure - how do you even practice throws, holds, and locks without another body to toss around?

I think that many people will also suffer from a motivation gap.  I'm not that way personally, but for many people it's easier to show up to a class and train because someone is telling you to train, rather than trying to force yourself to practice alone in an empty room when you could just go have a beer instead and nobody would be any the wiser.

Let's put aside these considerations for now - these points all have to do with the fact that training with other people can be better for your karate.  They're valid points, but there is another set of advantages to training with a group that have nothing to do with improving your skill:

The thing is, humans are social animals.  We evolved to travel in groups and there are serious biological implications to that fact.  There is a substantial body of medical literature showing that human health is enhanced by having strong social connections - friends, family, whatever.  We can argue over some of the fine points - do internet friendships count or not (I suspect they do) - but the bottom line is, very clearly, that people are healthier and happier when they have a deep social environment.

You can get friends from a lot of places, but one very interesting social bond is created by shared physical suffering.  Anyone who's ever been through a football camp or a hard promotion test can tell you this.  In my dojo we often hug or pat each other on the back after tough sparring matches.  This is why corporations spend tons of money to take their executives rock climbing or white water rafting and call it "team building."  It really does build a sense of togetherness and bonding among people.

The people in your dojo a) share your interests; b) spend time with you regularly; c) share bonding experiences regularly.  They're also unlikely to be total douchebags, at least in a good school, because if you have good seniors the douchebags get their asses kicked hard enough that they either straighten up their act or quit before getting very high in rank (usually).

My point?  You should be (and probably already are) friends with your senpai and kohai.  You should hang out with them outside of class.  You should invite them to your Christmas party.  You should share birthdays.  You should be Facebook friends.  You should hang around before or after class and catch up with them.

Furthermore, being friends with your classmates is a key benefit of your training.  You might justify watching a football game with your buddies or poker night by saying that you need time with your friends - the same is true, perhaps even more so, about training.  If you're thinking about spending money on a martial arts retreat or attending a seminar or having a social function, and you're waffling, don't think of it in terms of just how much karate you'll learn - think of the benefits of that activity as a social occasion.  Karate can help fulfill your fundamental human need for interaction!

If you can (this will depend on the culture at your school), organize and participate in social activities outside of class with your peers.  Do a martial arts movie night, have parties, go for drinks after class, whatever.  And don't resist these activities because they might have limited direct benefit for your karate - that's not the point.  The point is to enhance your health and happiness by deepening positive social connections.

If you run a school, encourage your students to socialize outside of class.  Get them to do movie nights (or organize them yourself).  Be available to grab drinks or snacks after class, at least some of the time.  Put up a board in your entrance area for people to advertise get-togethers.  You might be teaching self defense, but you're also creating a social network for your students.

Want to convince someone to start training?  Yes, they'll learn to defend themselves, and yes, they'll get in better shape.  But they might also make a whole bunch of new friends, and that has an added value all its own - not just int he obvious ways, but enhancing health and longevity.

If you think you can be fit and healthy and a loner... you're probably wrong.  You can get a social life by going out drinking and partying multiple times per week, but you're probably going to last longer if you hang out with your dojo mates instead!

Osu.

Strength Vs. Speed?

There is a persistent myth among many people, perhaps especially among martial artists, that strength is somehow the converse of speed; that getting stronger makes one slower, and that gains in strength are necessarily accompanied by losses of speed.  There is a similar myth among some strength coaches that strength gains are necessary and sufficient for gains in speed - that the best way to get faster is to become stronger.  Both positions contain nuggets of truth and nuggets of falsehood, and if we want to maximize our capacity for speed we have to understand the ins and outs of the relationship between strength training and the acquisition of speed.

Both myths are based on some observations that are truthful,commonplace, and prima facie contradictory:

• The strongest people alive are not the fastest people.  Elite level powerlifters are not particularly quick.
• Untrained people who take up powerlifting or strength training often get much quicker very quickly.
• The most visibly strong people - the most muscular people - are often not fast at all.  The stereotype of the lumbering bodybuilder is often based in truth.
• When training a team the members who gain the most strength usually gain the most speed.
• Very quick people are often not successful when they try to lift heavy weights.
• It's simple physics - the stronger you are, the more force you can exert, which means you can have greater acceleration.  Hence you're faster!

How can we make sense of all this?  Does strength training make people "musclebound" and slow them down?

The answers are, "yes," and "no."  In no particular order.

We see two different kinds of errors made, depending on which myth the person works on.  Sometimes we see a karateka grinding out heavy strength workouts three times a week, for an hour or more each time, over many years, constantly pursuing another twenty pounds on his squat, deadlift, or bench.  He might practice routines found in muscle magazines - sets of 8-10 reps, done to exhaustion, with lots of isolation movements to target specific muscles.  He slows down as time goes on, but attributes that to the aging process, not his own training.  He probably thickens over time, not fighting the slight spread around the midsection because he tells himself that the numbers growing on the scale are, after all, mostly muscle.

The aging lifter's counterpart is thin and undermuscled, often female, a karateka whose most intense movement is a pushup, which she'll do in large numbers.  She does a lot of core work, and if she lifts at all, she uses small dumbells and lots of unstable surfaces - balancing on a swiss ball or hanging from straps or doing something else to make exercises harder without actually doing anything that really requires maximal force production.

Neither of these methods will maximize your martial arts potential.  To be as good a karateka as you can be you want to be strong yet supple; capable of generating large forces in very quick bursts, with an iron core that can withstand very high forces over relatively short periods of time.  You don't want to be able to run a marathon - or at least, you don't want to train for that, because doing so will sacrifice your power.  You want to be solidly built but not too bulky, because at a certain point extra muscle just means extra inertia and you'll lose the ability to move quickly.

So... how do we train for that?  How do we make our bodies generate more force without getting bulky or slowing down?

1. Once you've learned how to do a movement (when you first learn a movement you have to learn how to do it with good form - that should only take a handful of sessions, and during that time you can afford to do plenty of repetitions) aim to keep most sets in the power range: an intensity where you would fail within 5-7 reps.  That doesn't mean you always train to failure - it just means you mostly do movements where you would fail if you did 6 or 7 reps.  You can do sets of 3 with that same weight, just don't start doing regular pushups and think you're strength training when you can do 25 pushups without stopping.
2. Train mostly compound, multijoint movements and only do a few movements per workout.  Try to cover your whole body with just 5 or 6 exercises (one arm pushups, chinup, bodyweight row, kettlebell swing, and one legged squat will work your entire body, for example - there are lots of other combinations).
3. Strength train twice a week, no more.
4. Always alternate speed training with your strength training.  Don't bench press on Monday, then bench again on Thursday unless you've practiced moving as fast as you can on either Tuesday or Wednesday (or both).  You need to transfer that extra force into faster punches.
5. Lift fast at least some of the time.  Bench pressing, or one arm pushups, are fine exercises, but most people don't do them explosively.  Alternate exercises like those with clapping pushups or medicine ball throws - something hard (requiring a lot of force) but which results in your limbs moving at a high speed.  A maximum effort bench press may produce a lot of force but your hands aren't going to be moving very quickly.  Throwing an 8 lb. medicine ball as far as you can requires both force and handspeed and needs to be a bigger part of your training routine.

Strength training will not slow you down:  Incorrect strength training will.  You will meet people who trained poorly and got slow because of it - don't let that experience sour you to the benefits of proper training.

There is something you learn - a neurological ability - that you can only learn by exerting maximum force.  Nothing will add snap to your punches as much as 6 or 8 weeks of weight training for someone who has never lifted before - that newfound ability to muster force at the beginning of a punch can be remarkable.  But building up to a 400 lb. bench press won't make you continually faster - at some point the grinding strength increases become counterproductive.

Exactly where does continued strength training become useless or, worse, counterproductive?  I wish I knew the exact answer to that.  Someone with a 100 lb. deadlift will be faster and more explosive if they can get up to a 200 lb. deadlift.  You won't get the same benefit going from a 300 lb. deadlift to a 400 lb. deadlift.  Nobody knows exactly where that cutoff is.

I suspect that stabilizing at one dedicated grinding strength workout - doing movements like the deadlift, bench press, or their equivalents - every week or three workouts every two weeks will give you the most bang for your buck.  For your first year or two of strength training do it twice a week, then taper off the volume.  If you start losing strength, add in some cycles (6 or 8 weeks) of twice a week training again, until you find a comfortable threshold of volume for yourself.  And the entire time you must continually work on speed.

Remember, one of the fastest human beings we've ever seen, in terms of fighting speed, Bruce Lee, was not coincidentally one of the earlier advocates of serious strength training for martial artists.

So get out of the dojo once in a while and swing a kettlebell around.  Or, perhaps better, load up a barbell and really tax yourself.  Your karate will thank you for it!

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!

Mindful Exercise

The other day I ordered a DVD containing over 3 hours of information about performing a single exercise - the kettlebell swing.  I'm not plugging the DVD - I haven't gotten it yet, it might suck, all the usual reasons, and it's not a review copy (although if anybody has any materials they want to donate so I can review them, send away!)  I'm bringing it up for another reason.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine (a non-karateka), who asked me, more or less, why the hell I would pay for or watch 3 hours of material about an exercise I already know how to do.

If you are involved in martial arts you probably don't think there's anything odd about devoting 3 hours (or 3 days, weeks, months, or years) to a single technique in your art - the subtleties of timing and body positioning that make a great punch different from a good punch are complex and, yes, subtle.  But you might not often put as much time or thought into your supporting exercises.

Spending hours learning about, then many more hours refining, the fine points of an exercise are important for a couple of reasons.


Safety:  If you are moving heavy loads or doing a lot of repetitions of a movement (think of people either doing near maximum lifts or joggers - opposite but similar problems) then the injury potential for the movement becomes large.  Small adjustments to your body mechanics can greatly reduce your risk of getting hurt.  Squat with 5 lb. dumbells with your knees caving in?  Probably okay.  Do it 1000 times a day?  You'll mess up your knees, hips, and ankles.  Do it for fewer reps, but with 250 lbs. on your back?  Again, you're going to be sending your chiropractor/orthopedist/physical therapist's kids through college.

Getting your body alignment perfect won't make movement risk free, but it will greatly enhance your safety.


Performance:  You might not realize it, but there are a lot of details that go into doing even simple movements (bench press, deadlift) at a high level.  As a beginner you're going to make great gains on these movements no matter how you do them.  As you get stronger, though, you'll need to focus more and more on perfecting your technique if you want to continue to make progress.  Listen to something like Iron Radio and you can hear guys who can talk about the bench or squat for hours - it's not just "put the weight on your back, sit down, then get back up."

Performance is not just a matter of how much you can lift or how often you can safely do a movement before hitting failure - after all, you might not care if your squat is 200 lbs or 400 lbs as long as your legs get stronger.  Performance is also a matter of what the training effect will be.  If you squat a certain way you might get all the stress on your quadriceps - which is nice, but not great.  Improve your technique and you can shift the stress - and therefore the adaptions - to your hips and glutes, which will have a much bigger impact on your overall fitness, athleticism, and martial ability.


Boredom:  We all have different tolerances for going into the gym and mindless cranking away at the treadmill, Hammer machines, elliptical, or whatever.  Some people can keep that up for years; others can't.  I personally am actually pretty good at doing mind numbingly boring stuff in the gym if I think it will help me improve.  BUT we all prefer routines that are less boring.  Doing the same set of exercises while only half paying attention, listening to music or watching TV is a completely different experience than working to perfect a complex motor skill.  That's why people enjoy golf and videogames and bowling in a way they don't enjoy pedaling away on an exercise bike.

Working on the skill of doing exercises - striving to perfect your technique, adjusting to the daily variances in your body's stability and mobility, fully concentrating on the moment you're in - that's not boring.  Pushing away at pads on a machine can be.


Brain Health:  You, like many people, may be convinced that doing exercise in an engaged way might be less boring, but you'd still rather just watch TV from your treadmill and reap the health benefits of exercise.  Sadly, you'll be missing out on a big chunk of those benefits.  Your brain, just like any other of your body's systems, gets crapped out with disuse.  If you aren't constantly forcing your nervous system to adapt to new demands it will slowly lose the ability to do so.  If you stop learning, you eventually lose (or at least decrease) your ability to learn.  If you stop acquiring and refining new motor skills you lose the ability to acquire, and to even maintain, motor skills.

Not worried about it?  You're okay with growing old and not being able to improve your golf game?  That's fine - but if your motor control declines you won't just lose your ability to sink a putt, you'll slowly lose your ability to run, then walk, then get out of a chair.  For fun, go into a nursing home and ask the residents how cool it is that they get wheelchairs so they don't have to move around under their own power anymore.

Will kettlebell swings prevent you from ever being incapacitated?  I'm not sure.  But mainaining your neural efficiency is a big part of maintaining your ability to move yourself around, put boxes on shelves, walk through an airport, have sex - do any of the things that make life worth living.  If you're in your twenties that may seem like a pretty distant concern, but the way to be healthy and have a high quality of life (and a well functioning nervous system) in your old age is to start building up your body - muscles, tendons, bones, ligaments, and nerves - now.

Mindlessly pumping away at machines or cardio equipment is just that - mindless - and it doesn't exercise your mind at all.  Now doing machine circuits at Curves is certainly better than nothing, but it's nowhere near as good for you as a mentally engaging workout where you are constantly working on form the way a professional dancer is always working on her basic movements.


Summary:  The age old machines vs. free weights debate may not have a clear cut answer about which is better for your muscles, but there is no doubt that free weights are better for your nervous system.  Be engaged in all your exercises - really focus on form when you do pushups (pack the shoulders, tighten the core, screw your hands into the ground), not just when you do punches, and keep your nerves responsive and healthy!  As an added benefit, you'll get stronger and more resilient as well.

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!

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.

Summary: Blog so far

I've recently noticed (I know, I'm a little slow) a huge surge of traffic coming from Dan Djurdjevic's awesome blog (thank you very much!)  Welcome - the kind of people who read Dan's work are exactly my target audience.  For you new readers, and anybody else new to my blog, I thought I'd write up a summary of the key points I've been trying to convey.

KC Philosophy:

I began training in the late 80's.  I took a 12 year break and when I got back into training in 2006 I found that a few things had changed.  I was in worse shape (not as strong, not as flexible, with less endurance, less resistant to injury) at 35 than I had been at 21 - and I had never been what you'd call an athlete.  I had less time and energy for training - a family and a full time job can really interfere with two hour training sessions.  But, (and this turned out to be my saving grace), I was connected to a huge body of information about training that I hadn't had access to before, all thanks to the internet (thank you Al Gore!).

I've spent a considerable amount of time over the past 5 years reading and looking at books, magazines, blogs, websites, videos, and DVD's about diet and training - not just about martial arts training, but about training for athletes in all sports, and every minute of it was devoted to figuring out how that information could make me better at karate.  I learned a lot - I learned how to become and stay more flexible throughout the day, how to get faster and stronger, how to improve my health, how to dramatically improve my endurance, how to practice my skills, all without having to train more than a few hours a week.

It didn't take me too long to realize that not everybody knows all this stuff.  Plenty of wonderful karate instructors spend their time learning and teaching technique instead of poring over the latest research on VO2 Max.  Which is fine - I don't mean to criticize anybody's teaching.  I thought I had learned some things that could help other people - people like me, older people or people who aren't very athletic or don't have fifteen hours a week to train - become better at karate.  Not by showing them or teaching them karate, but by helping them train better so their karate can be better.

Nothing, or almost nothing, in this blog is original.  I stole every last idea from sources from Pavel Tsatsouline to Mike Boyle to Bret Contreras.  I've discovered no secrets, no ideas that you couldn't figure out yourself if you want to spend the hundreds of hours of reading to learn it all.  But if you don't have time for that, you can read my blog and hopefully get a few useful tips that will make your karate training more productive and more efficient.

Here's a summary of the key points I try to convey:



1.  Flexibility Training:


You should do two types of stretching: static stretching and dynamic stretching.  Static stretching means moving a muscle into a stretched position and holding it.  Think of things like sitting on the floor and leaning over a locked leg to stretch the hamstrings, or wedge your legs apart to stretch your adductors.  Dynamic stretching involves moving a muscle fairly quickly into and out of a stretched range of motion.  Think mae keage, or swinging your leg up and back, or up to the side and back. 

Do your dynamic stretching daily, preferably early on.  Do ONLY dynamic stretching before a workout unless you have an injury.  I like 2 sets of 10 leg swings to the front and sides per leg.  Do 3 sets if you're very tight or sore.

If you do any static stretching - which will gradually lengthen the muscle tissue - do it when you're cold (not right after a workout).  You can do it as often as you'd like, but you'll probably need at least 3 times per week to get any results.  And don't do it before a workout!

If you need better range of motion, say in your adductors so you can round/side kick higher, you have to build strength in the target muscle (the one that's holding you back) when it's stretched.  If your adductors are tight, get close to a split (as close as you can) adn draw your legs together - either pulling into the ground or actually pulling them together, sliding so you end up standing.  You can do various other exercises as well, but the point is to build strength in the stretched position - that's how you get the muscle to relax when it's being stretched so it doesn't restrict your movement.


2.  Skill Training:

When you try to get better at a skill (say, punching or kicking) you are making a neurological adaption - your nervous system is changing.  This process doesn't work the way, say, building muscle does.  Your nervous system learns new things best by practicing them well; and practicing them often.

That has several ramifications.  You want to practice your techniques as often as you can - every day or more would be best.  You want to practice most often while fresh.  At the end of a workout, if you're tired and drained, your technique will be relatively sloppy.  That is the wrong time to practice karate.  Instead, practice karate when you're fresh - even performing just a few minutes of drills several times a day - and save your endurance work for when you're tired.

That also means your workouts should start with a warmup, then dynamic stretching, then skill practice, then strength training, then endurance training - don't put the strength/ endurance stuff before the skill stuff or your technique will suffer.


3.  Strength Training:

If you're doing a routine you got from your typical personal trainer or the pages of a fitness/ bodybuilding magazine you're probably training wrong.  Karateka need explosive strength, not big muscles (although you will gain some size as you get stronger). 

• Focus on workouts shorter than 45 minutes in length. 
• Do exercises with enough weight/ difficulty that you can only complete 5 or fewer repetitions at a time (for example, don't do regular pushups if you can do more than 5 of them; work on one-arm pushups instead). 
• Focus on movements instead of muscles - hip extension (kettlebell swings, deadlifts), knee dominant squatting (one legged squats), an upper body push (pushups, presses) and pull (pullups, body rows) and core (next bullet).
• For your core do mostly exercises where you stabilize your core against a resistance - for example, a plank instead of a situp.  Do a ton of anti-rotation - holding your core stable while some force tries to twist your body - think one armed plank, medicine ball throw, etc.

Stay away from high rep work in the name of strength training.  If you can do 50 pushups, working up to 100 pushups won't make you stronger, just give you better endurance.  You're better off working up to 10 one arm pushups.


4.  Endurance:

Presumably you want more endurance so you won't gas out during sparring or intense kata practice.  Some people train for that by doing lots of LSD (long slow distance) - jogging, hopping on a bike or treadmill for long bouts of steady state "cardio" work.  Unfortunately, you'll get at best mediocre results from that type of training.

The name of the game is High Intensity Interval Training.  You need to work at a level of intensity so high that it really stresses your cardiovascular system.  Instead of jogging, sprint.  Instead of biking, do burpees.  That means you won't be able to keep it up for long - that's fine.  Just rest for a little while and repeat.  Over and over.  I don't know the best work/ rest time ratio - working 20 s, resting 10s, repeating is popular, I also like 15/15 - but the principle is to make the work very, very hard and not to do anything during the rest.  As you get in better shape don't extend the work intervals - don't make them longer - make them harder instead.

One other point:  you may be tempted to kill two birds with one stone and do your conditioning by working martial arts techniques until you're exhuasted.  For example, doing 500 side kicks.  Don't do that.  Why not?  Becasue if you're pushing your endurance close to its limit you're going to end up doing a lot of sloppy kicks - practicing bad technique.  You only want to practice kicks when you're fresh, then once you're getting tired, hammer away at your cardio with a non-skill movement like running or burpees or something else where you don't care about your skill.


5.  Diet:

I'm a big advocate of a roughly Paleo diet.  Put simple:  Avoid all grains (especially wheat, corn, soy); avoid legumes (beans); eat no seed and vegetable oils (corn oil, vegetable oil, canola oil, etc.); restrict any artificial and processed foods; limit dairy; and limit fruit and nut consumption.  Eat animals that are fed on the same principles - so eat only grassfed beef, pastured chicken, etc.  What can you eat other than meat?  Vegetables, fruit, root veggies (sweet potatoes, yams), some nuts and fruit, some dairy (preferably raw, preferably from grass fed cows).  Yes, you'll be eating a lot of fat.  Yes, it's okay.  No, it won't make you fat.  It might heal your gut and cure your arthritis, though.  This diet, which improves insulin resistance and lowers inflammation, will improve recovery, enhance your endurance, help you drop any excess fat, and make you healthier.

There are a lot of resources on the ins and outs of paleo eating both on this blog and in other places.  This diet has made huge differences in my personal health and fitness.  Many paleo bloggers lean towards the low carb end of the spectrum - I don't.  I find that my karate goes better if I eat plenty of carbs.  I just get my carbs from sources other than wheat, corn, and soy.  Meaning I eat plenty of sweet potatoes and rice but no bread.  Try it for 30 days and see how you feel!

 

 

That's a brief summary of the key points to improving your karate practice that I've discovered over the past 5 years.  I have posts up about all of this which cover each in more detail - if you're interested in more explanation of anything here please post questions to comments.

 

Thanks!

"Cheating" During Sparring

I imagine most karate schools today have some form of jiyu kumite - free sparring - in their training.  I'm sure it is emphasized in some places more than others, while the rules vary quite a bit from style to style.  I'm also sure that noboy has a "no rules" jiyu kumite.  (Why?  Becasue if you free-fought without rules your practice wouldn't last very long - nobody can take eye gouges, groin kicks, small joint locks, etc. all together without an unacceptably high rate of injury).

There is a fundamental problem with fighting with rules - no matter what the rules are, they change the way the game is played.  For example, in kyokushin, historically, punches to the face weren't allowed.  That significantly alters the stances used when compared to, say, kickboxing.  Kyokushin fighters held their hands lower, defended differently, etc.  Or compare an MMA fighter to someone fighting in a real no rules streetfight.  Look at their stance - often we'll see MMA fighters standing square to their opponent with legs spread slightly.  They do that to help defend against the takedown.  Do you think that stance would be as popular if groin kicks were allowed?  Or think about a BJJ guard.  I know that art was developed for streetfighting, but it really seems vulnerable to groin attacks.  Perhaps groin strikes weren't used by people fighting for honor on the streets of Brazil. 

Regardless of what "rules" are imposed, certain fighting styles will gain an advantage.  If you don't allow strikes to the head, nobody's going to fight with their hands in a high guard, up by their cheeks.  If everyone wears big gloves nobody's going to base their strategy on pressure point techniques. 

You have to figure out what game you want to get good at playing - do you want to have the skill set of a streetfighter?  A bar brawler who usually fights with a limited (but not empty) set of rules?  A kickboxer?  A point fighter?  A cage fighter?  I have nothing against any of those choices - I personally (for no rational reason) want the skill set of a K-1 f ighter, even though it's unlikely I'll ever step into a ring. 

Depending on what you want to be good at you may or may not be able to spar with those same rules all the time.  Even kickboxers don't really do ring-style kickboxing all that often - they usually wear headgear and extra protection for sparring purposes, at least a majority of the time.  MMA fighters do most of their sparring with extra protection as well (you see funny results from that - watch how lots of MMA fighters guard - they'll hold their fists in place up in front of their face.  Sadly, this works much better when you wear full boxing gloves, as they do in sparring, than with 4 oz. gloves, so they'll sometimes get hit, hard, and not know what happened.  I've seen Tito Ortiz do that a bunch of times.  The strategy that worked under the "rules" of big glove fighting didn't work under small glove, cage "rules.")

If you can't fight under the "real" rules (the rules of your chosen game) then you have to be careful.  It's natural to want to "win" while sparring. You want to score points/ tap out/ beat up your opponent. The problem is that sometimes the strategies that can get you a "win" in a sparring session (whether or not you keep score) don't make you better where you wnat to be better - in the "game" that really matters to you.

That's what I mean by cheating - not breaking the rules of the "game" you're playing, but taking advantage of those rules to gain an advantage.

If you want to be a good streetfighter but in the dojo you do kyokushin style full contact karate, then you have to avoid the temptation to "cheat" by leaving your groin and head exposed.  Covering those areas will make you worse at kyokushin fighting - because your target areas will be more exposed - but leaving them open will give you bad habits that won't translate well to the street.  If you want to be a cage fighter you CAN afford to leave your groin open, but you CAN'T afford a stance that leaves you vulnerable to takedowns, even if on that day you're training boxing.  You have to box with a wider, more square stance, ready to sprawl at any time, even though that makes for bad boxing.


I'm not arguing that your goal should be to be a better streetfighter or cage fighter or point fighter - only that you should pick something as your target and train accordingly.  Then, if you want to be a good cage fighter but you're in a school that does point fighting, resist the urge to "score" using little slappy hits, even if other people fight that way, and focus on only using strikes landed from a position and body alignment that would let you put real power into them.

In my style we exempt green belts from headstrike - we give them a sort of breaking in period where they have less to worry about while fighting.  Some of them fight with their hands held at chest level - and when fighting them it's easy to let one's hands drop.  I try to fight that urge - to keep my guard high, as if defending against a head strike, even when my opponent can't use one, so as to keep my habits sharp.  My goal is to be good at fighting my peers, who are allowed to punch and kick me in the head!

In short: do your best while sparring, but don't fall prey to habits that translate poorly into the domain you wish to master.  Even if you can "get away with" certain things while sparring doesn't mean you should - especially not if it's going to make you vulnerable in the type of fight you care about.
Osu.

Spirit Training

I"m not sure how common this is (though I suspect it is pretty common) but my style tends to get together for extra - intense workouts every so often in a large group setting.  We do it for the new year (Kagami Biraki), an annual beach training, an occasional black belt only training - maybe 2-4 times per year.  Not every person attends every workout, but if you're in the area you're expected to make it to most of them.

The workouts are ineveitably preceeded and postceeded by some social interactions, as people are gathering who don't normally train together, and usually some meeting type stuff - announcements, administrative stuff, etc.  Then the workout.

These workouts are not very technical - there are usually a lot of people involved with a broad cross-section of skills, and communication is often difficult due to the size of the group.  The goal here is not fine tuning anybody's technique.  We're also usually packed nearly shoulder to shoulder, so nobody's going to do much in the way of moving - think lots of punches, lots of blocks, lots of squats/ knees, lots of pushups and crunches, and lots of kiais.

If you're not a martial artist you might not appreciate how taxing it is to, say, throw a thousand punches into the air, but if you're really executing with full force that's quite a workout.  Obviously it's possible to pace yourself and kind of half-ass the whole thing, but we try not to.  After all, you're surrounded by your senpai - your seniors - and you don't want to be the guy slacking off in the middle of the group when everybody else is giving 100%.

Now if you're a regular reader of this blog you know I'm not a fan of marathon workouts.  Long workouts lead to two results - either you pace yourself, which means spending a lot of time practicing half speed techniques, or you don't pace yourself and wind up exhausted, which means spending a lot of time practicing sloppy techniques.  Either way it's the wrong kind of neurological programming.

So why do I go to these events?  There are a few reasons.  There's a social dimension to them, of course (funny story - I'm lined up, randomly, next to this guy who seems familiar.  I vaguely remember him having been around when I went for my nidan promotion four years ago.  I talk to him, and he agrees that we saw each other then, but he knows me from elsewhere.  Turns out he was a year ahead of me in high school and we were on the football team together!)  There's a certain amount of social pressure to show up - the seniors like it when you attend these events.  But there's also a useful training aspect to the workouts.

Training to exhaustion, if you do it right (and by "do it right" I mean put real effort into every technique - I mean don't pace yourself) you're going to get a few benefits.  First, you're going to practice executing technique while exhausted - there are compensations you have to make, and it's not going to hurt to be familiar with them.  Should that be a primary focus of your training?  Of course not.  But once in a while you should remember what it feels like to throw a knee when you're exhausted, and practice mustering up force in your techniques while gasping for air.

This kind of training has an effect on your spirit - your will.  Think about the euphoria people express after finishing their first marathon or climbing a mountain.  Some of it is probably endorphins, sure.  But you also gain confidence in your ability to push through adversity, to push your own body to extremes, to work at your limit.  Most of your training should be done when you're fresh, in short bursts, which is great for developing skill, but it doesn't tell you anything about your ability to push the limits of your endurance.

Making it through these workouts is a bonding experience and a confidence building experience.  There might be an endurance training effect, but I wouldn't swear to it - not if you're doing these things infrequently, which is all you should be doing.

Here are the secrets to benefiting from spirit training:

• Don't pace yourself.  Really work - put everything you have into the first punch, even if you know that you'll pay for it later. 
• Focus on technique.  Don't get too, too sloppy - you want to be sore afterwards but not injured.  You're not going to be crisp on kick #273 - but don't throw your back out either.
• Sleep as much as you can the night before and after.
• Double your protein intake for the two days after the workout.  I recommend my magic recovery formula - 12 oz. milk, 2 scoops MetRx chocolate protein powder (not the meal replacement, just the protein), Rice Krispies to taste, once or twice a day.  Any animal based protein will do.  Probably not a good idea long term, but for a day or two it really helps with recovery.  If you normally do intermittent fasting, don't schedule any fasts for the days after the workout.  You need to be in full anabolism to recover.
• Double your fish oil for the same two days to control the inflammation.
• A little bit is good; a lot is not.  If you run a dojo and you try to do these, for example, every Sunday, you're doing the wrong kind of training.  Your students will start to pace themselves, and if they don't, they'll deeply ingrain sloppy karate into their nervous systems.  In my style we do these at most maybe 4 times a year - which seems about perfect to me.

The leader of our style always exhorts us to show "strong spirit" during these events.  It took me twenty years, but I think I understand at least part of what he means when he says that. 

Osu.

Posture Principles: Packing for Power

I just might have an unnatural fondness for alliteration.  I'm also a nerd for posture.  I think that proper posture is one of the underappreciated aspects of athleticism and of good martial arts technique.

Packing is a term used to refer to the appropriate alignment of a bodypart.  People might use it to refer to other things, but I've only seen the term used in two places:  the shoulders and the neck.  To my knowledge, the term "packing the neck" is very recent, and I only heard of it a few days ago from Brett Contreras' blog (which is one of my current favorites).  These terms come from the field of strength training, not martial arts, but I believe they are applicable.

What are they?

Packing the shoulder means drawing the shoulderblades backwards and together and down, towards the ground (if you're standing).  Pavel Tsatsouline says you should feel as if you're sticking your shoulderblade into your back pocket.  If you want a really nice feel for what this does to your shoulder, both in improving stability and power, do an overhead press with your shoulder packed, then try it with your shoulder hiked up near your ear.  You should feel a big difference in strength.

Note that this is quite different from the shoulder position used by boxers, who lift their shoulders when punching (on purpose) to protect the jawline.  I feel that a packed shoulder offers better transfer of power (from the hips), better handspeed, and better safety for the shoulder joint.

Packing the neck involves positioning the head properly.  You tuck your chin slightly, as if looking downwards, but pull your head backwards, to the rear.  Imagine you're trying to give yourself an exaggerated double chin.  You tuck the chin but pull up on the top of the head, elongating the spine.  For a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about look at pictures of Mas Oyama punching things, such as this one I pulled from this wonderful gallery:

You'll see a slightly similar position used in Muay Thai - chin tucked, head down, but they lower the head too much, hunching the shoulders and causing a power leak at the upper back.  They do it for protection - keeping the chin tucked into your chest makes you harder to knock out, which is the same reasoning that boxers use for elevating the shoulder.

Why pack?

There are, broadly speaking, two reasons I think the shoulders and neck should be packed when practicing martial arts (I'm not necessarily suggesting you should walk around with your neck packed at all times - this isn't that kind of posture - but you should do so when sparring or practicing fighting techniques). 

First, having a packed neck and shoulder put your body in the strongest, most injury- resistant position.  A packed shoulder is more stable (better supported) and less likely to incur injury or dislocate.  A packed neck puts your cervical spine in a good position for resisting forces, making neck injury less likely.  It also literally puts your chin and jawline in a better protected position, possibly preventing a knockout.  Think of what typically happens when someone kiais - how often does the chin lift and jutt out?  Now think about doing that while someone is trying to punch you in the face.  Not a good idea.

Second, a packed shoulder and neck are more powerful.  You will transmit power better through packed joints than through loose joints.  Don't believe me?  This is a simple experiment - punch a heavy bag with your chin up and your shoulder hiked up, then with both packed.  Or do some kind of pressing movement, with weight, and see how strong you are with and without packing.  I think you'll see my point.

Another interesting experiment is to do your pushups, pullups, or any other upper body exertions, with your shoulders and neck packed and unpacked.  I was shocked at how much easier packing my neck made my chinups and pullups.

To assist with packing, you might need to work on the strength of various muscle groups.  If your lats are weak and your traps strong you might have trouble maintaining packed shoulders.  If your neck extensors are weak you'll have trouble keeping your neck packed.  Do pulldowns, chinups, or dip holds (get into a dip position and hold it with arms straight for a period of time) to get better at shoulder packing.  For the neck I'll take a rubber band, loop it around my head, and press back against it for reps. 

Take home:  Try keeping your neck and shoulders "packed" whenever you practice techniques or perform strength movements.  Make that posture automatic enough so that when you hit things during sparring you maintain a packed alignment.  You'll be stronger and healthier!

The Tendency to Over-Complicate

I am guilty of many sins, most of them irrelevant to this blog.  One that is relevant, however, is my tendency to over-complicate things.

I've been reading Mel Siff's classic book Supertraining.  It's a fantastic book, written like a textbook for a post-graduate course in exercise physiology.  It's not the book you give your mom when she wants to lose a few pounds - it's the book you give a strength coach when he wants to compare the physiological adaptions to various exercise programs of elite athletes.  It's full of graphs, technical jargon, and actual math.  Yes, I said it, math.

If you go through the book you'll find countless examples of studies that examine the results of training, done by advanced athletes, and refined to an amazing degree.  What I mean is there's nothing about how to get stronger - but there's a ton on how to increase a very specific aspect of strength, like maximal force output at a particular speed of motion and through a particular joint angle range.

If there's one take-home point to the book (and there are thousands, but I can't remember them all) it's specificity of adaption.  For example, getting very strong at moving a big weight slowly doesn't transfer to creating more force when moving quickly.  Developing long distance endurance doesn't transfer to maximal effort.  You get the idea.

The problem with reading the book this way - and the problem is with the reader trying to get a "take home point" out of a very dense informative text, not with anything Siff actually says - is that it's easy to forget that the research Siff is working with is primarily done with advanced athletes seeking to maximize performance.  It's exactly opposite to the problem with American research, which is primarily done on untrained college students.  Let me explain.

If you take an Olympic sprinter who can squat 400 lbs. and raise their squat to 450 you will very likely not make them any faster a runner.  The squat is too slow - what you need to do is increase their ability to put force into the ground in the incredibly brief contact period of a foot striking the ground during a sprint.  If all that required was a bigger squat then the best pound for pound squatters in the world would be the best sprinters in the world, and that's not true.  Squatting is not specific enough to sprinting.  So we learn that, recognize the truth in it, and take home the idea that squatting won't improve our sprint speed.  And maybe if we want to get faster we do lots of cool stuff but leave squatting heavy out of our routine.

But if you take a 40 year old sedentary person who can't even do a full body weight squat, get them into the gym, and get their squat up to 200 lbs., their sprint speed will probably increase dramatically.  Why?  Because a sedentary person's lack of basic strength is a huge limiting factor in their quest to build up running speed.  Increase that squat to 300 lbs and you'll get an improvement, but not as much.  Get that to 400 lbs and you might not see any further increases to speed at all.

If you want to punch harder and can't do a pushup then building up the strength to do 10 strict pushups will make you a better puncher.  Building up to doing 100 pushups - not so much.  Developing a solid one arm pushup will help also - but maybe not as much as getting good at clapping pushups (which, since they require faster movements, are close to punching in the adaptions they force).

It's easy to read through Supertraining or other higher level works on strength and think that we need to so very complex sports specific exercises to get better - that we need very advanced training with bands, Kaiser air driven resistance machines, and fancy routines to improve.  And we might be right - if we're elite athletes.  Except we're not.  For most of us (and I'm definitely including me), we just need to get stronger, more flexible, and more fit.  Most of us can improve our karate with fairly basic routines that focus on pushups, squats of some kind, chinups or rows, and a handful of plank varieties.  Heck, most of us can get better doing crunches, as long as our backs are in good shape. 

The danger is that getting too hung up on the sports specific mantra can paralyze us.  We can give up on too much - avoiding strength training out of fear that it will slow us down, waiting to develop the most advanced workout possible before doing anything.  And most of us don't need the most advanced workout - we just need a workout. 

So keep learning and keep refining your routines to make them more applicable to karate - to improve your performance in karate and to make you resistant to the injuries incurred during karate.  But while you're figuring out what that routine should look like do something to get stronger, more flexible, and more fit.  It will most likely help more than it will hurt!

Is The Training Lifestyle Selfish?

If you're reading this blog and you're interested in improving, or even excelling, as a martial artist, or any kind of athlete, I bet the thought has crossed your mind that your lifestyle is selfish.  Maybe you thought it yourself, or maybe someone close to you said you were being selfish.  Why would this thought occur?

You're probably spending time exercising that you could be spending doing something for other people (like caring for children or doing household chores).  You might be spending time, effort, and money investing in paleo friendly food to eat instead of cheap junk that's more filling.  You might be eating differently from the rest of your family to be healthy, which is increasing the work put into cooking, dishes to be washed, etc.  You might insist on getting eight or more solid hours of sleep instead of staying up late socializing.  You might be spending time and energy reading about nutrition and training instead of spending it with friends or family.

Is this behavior, this lifestyle, selfish?  We could certainly argue that it is somewhat self-centered - that is, you're spending time and attention on yourself.  But you're not the only one who benefits from your lifestyle - there are plenty of indirect benefits that your loved ones can enjoy.

First, being in good shape will undoubtedly increase your functional lifespan.  We can argue all day long about whether lean, athletic people actually live longer, but there is no doubt you'll have more years of being alive and capable of doing stuff - like playing with your grandkids and having good sex, as oppposed to spending your days institutionalized, sitting in a wheelchair and staring at the wall.

Being fit and healthy makes you more patient.  Karate is moving meditation - it clears your head, calms the spirit, and makes you a better friend and a better relative (spouse, parent, whatever).  Exercise in general makes you feel good, and when people feel good they tend to be less irritable, less violent, and better to be around.

Being fit and healthy makes you better in bed.  One or more people close to you can benefit from your improved sexual abilities.

Being fit and healthy makes you a good role model for others close to you.  You might be spending less time with your kids, but the fact that your kids see you  make exercise an integral part of your daily routine is sure to help inspire them to do the same, which will continually enrich their lives.  This doesn't always work - I know of situations where family members reject everything about the fitness lifestyle, as if to spite the person who is in shape - but that's usually a sign of a dysfunctional relationship.

Being fit and healthy may wind up giving you more energy than it takes away.  In many cases you're feeling better, and accomplishing more good with your limited time spent with family members than you would feeling lethargic and having plenty of time.  For example, if you're taking care of your kids, being an engaged, attentive parent for two hours at night might do them more good than being an irritated, inattentive parent for three hours.

Let's imagine for a minute that you're not swayed by my "indirect benefits" argument.  Let's think of this another way.  Suppose you had a bad stomachache and told your spouse/ friend that you were going to see the doctor to get checked out.  Do you think that person would call you selfish for spending that time and money on yourself, or would they be glad you were taking care of yourself?  Do people think you are selfish for brushing your teeth?  Sleeping?  Drinking and eating adequately?  Of course not.  All those activities are directed at yourself - you brush your own teeth - but aren't therefore selfish.  Every capable adult needs to take care of themselves in order to be a functional member of society.  It's like the oxygen mask in an airplane - you put it on yourself first, not to be selfish, but to make sure you stay conscious long enough to take care of the kid sitting next to you.

The reality is that an hour a day of exercise and some time spent shopping for, preparing, and cooking nutritious food and some time spent learning about nutrition and exercise should be considered just as normal a part of life as brushing your teeth or seeing a doctor when you're sick.  A hundred years ago people didn't need to do this - they did manual labor on their farm or whatever to stay in shape and they didn't have to fight to stay away from Doritos and Diet Coke because those things weren't widely available - all their food was fairly high quality.  In our society we have to put work into maintaining ourselves the way our ancestors didn't. 

For another analogy, imagine you  moved to a colony on Mars.  You'd have to spend time every day ensuring your air supply was functioning properly.  That woudn't be a selfish investment of time; it would be a necessary part of what you'd have to do to stay healthy in an unusual environment.  We live in an unusual environment (from an biological/ evolutionary perspective) and deliberate exercise and food prep are part of what we need to maintain ourselves within it.

Now I am quite certain that there are people who can take this lifestyle to an extreme that is, in fact, selfish.  If you train, cook, and read books and blogs to the point where you refuse to do any household chores or spend time with your wife and/or kids, then you're being selfish.  If you train an hour a day but expect your partner to skip training so he/she can cook for you and clean the house, you're being selfish. 

But don't ever feel bad for taking a reasonable amount of time out of your day and using it to keep yourself healthy.  You deserve it, and your friends and family deserve to have a healthy, happy, and sane version of you in their lives.

Osu.

What should rank mean?

Before I start, let me just clarify that this post is purely my opinion on this subject and is not by any means the official position of Seido Karate or meant as a criticism of any style or person in particular.  Having said that, I wanted to talk a little about what I think rank means, or should mean, in karate.

I distinctly remember many years ago hearing about a policy at a particular martial arts.  This school awarded promotions, or new belts, automatically upon a student's completion of a certain number of hours of classtime. I don't remember the algorithm, but you can imagine what it looked like - take 50 hours of classes to go up a belt, maybe 500 total hours to get a black belt (I could be way off on the number, but that's not the point).

To put it simply, I was horrified.  I felt that a rank - a color of belt - was supposed to represent a particular skill level.  I imagined legions of students slogging away in class, barely paying attention to what they were doing, then beaming with pride as they accepted their undeserved black belts.  It seemed like a betrayal of everything rank was supposed to mean - mastery of a martial art.  I believed that rank ought to represent a pure indicator of skill. 

Over the years my beliefs in this area began to shift.  In college I trained with a wheelchair bound student - Kevin - who everyone should read about here and here.  Seriously, stop reading this and read those two articles, they're more important than this one.  You can come back when you're done.  I'll wait.

There are many other examples that affected my thinking.  My teacher, Christopher Caille, who is a fantastic martial artist, had some knee problems (this was a long time ago).  He couldn't kick above his waist and his movement was somewhat hobbled (although he could still kick my ass at any time).  If you walked in and, not knowing who he was, watched him perform a kata, especially one of the more athletic ones, you might think his skill less than it was.  Despite that, it would have seemed ridiculous to reduce his rank.  His situation was temporary, though - but what about aging karateka?  Eventually all martial artists lose their physical ability to perform.  Should they lose rank as this happened?

There are other examples along the continuum that made me think more.  I'm not a physically gifted ahtlete.  I can look okay doing karate, but I might never look great (in the sense of having really sparkling technique, etc.)  What if I work much harder, for a longer span of time, than a more gifted student, and still fall short of their ability? Should I definitely be ranked below them?  What about an extremely un-talented student who worked very hard for many, many years?  For them to languish in the kyu ranks forever would seem unfair.  On the other hand, promotions shouldn't be completely unconnected to skill, not if high rank is to have any meaning at all.

Recently I was thinking about this matter some more.  What should the basis of rank be - work done or ability?  Or something else?  To answer that I backed up a little anad asked: what is the purpose of rank?

I am well aware that there are styles in which there is no formal ranking system.  I have no problem with that concept, and I'm not interested in defending the idea that a formal ranking system is a good thing.  But in a style, like mine, that does have a formal ranking system, what is its purpose?

First, rank serves an instructional purpose by conferring authority on a student.  If you're a white belt doing something, and the yellow belt near you corrects your form, then a sandan comes by and corrects your form in a slightly different way, you should listen to the sandan.  Is the sandan always right?  Well, no - the yellow belt might be right in that particular situation, but in general you can count on the guy who's been training in the style for ten years to know better than the guy who has been there six months.

Who should have this instructional authority - the person who has worked more or the person who is more talented?  I believe that the person who has put more work in - who has trained harder and longer - is usually going to be a better teacher, will have more transmissable knowledge, than a more gifted athlete who might have better technique.  Why?  Because the harder worker will have to learn all the subtle tricks and adjustments to technique that make them work, while a gifted athlete will often do them unconsciously.  The best teacher I ever had, I think, in terms of teaching basic technique, was a guy who was an extremely poor athlete and very uncoordinated.  He'd had to master every "trick in the book" to get his body to do anything that resembled karate, and so if you had any kind of technical problem you could be sure that he'd faced and overcome it.

Rank also serves as a cue for modeling.  If you walk into a class and see two people you don't know doing something differently from one another - whether it be attitude-wise or technique-wise - you should probably imitate the one of higher rank.  Now, do you want to model the more talented athlete more or the harder working athlete more?

Again, I think you'd be better off modeling the person who has put in more work.  Why?  I'll put it simply - you can try to mimic the attributes of a talented karateka, but you're never going to be any more talented than you already are.  Talent isn't learnable.  On the other hand, work ethic and dedication are things you can learn, or develop.  You're going to be a lot better off following the hardest worker in class and doing what they do than following the most talented person - unless they happen to be the same person.

Rank also serves as a guide for respect.  Take my style as an example.  I know only a small fraction of the people who train in Seido Karate personally.  When I meet new people in the style, I treat them all with respect (something I try to do in general with everybody), but when a higher ranking person says something I'll listen better.  I'll listen to their stories, consider their opinions, and generally try to treat them in the classic way we're supposed to treat our elders.

Again, the question is, should this kind of deference be shown to the more talented practitioner or the one who has put in more work?  Again, I think that the answer is the one who has put in more work, for two reasons.  First, I think they will generally show more insight - understanding comes from hours of training, not an inborn sense of coordination.  Second, in general we want to show that we value hard work so we encourage our juniors to work hard - showing the greatest respect for natural talent doesn't encourage beginners to work hard, it encourages them to wish they had more talent.  Showing the greatest respect for those who have put in a lifetime of hard work encourages beginners to try to earn that respect - by working hard for a lifetime.  That is something they can hope to do, talented or not.

I can't think of a sense of rank in martial arts that ought to be based on proficiency as opposed to time and effort.  The harder working, more experienced karateka should be ranked as high or higher than the more talented, less experienced and less hard working person who may show more proficiency due to having more talent.

All of which means that, in the end, I think rank should be given according to something very similar to the formula that used to horrify me.  Hard, consistent training should result in promotion - even if the student isn't as talented or can't move as well as their more talented peers.  I'm not sure the policy should be so cut and dried - maybe not a specific number of classes - and I'm all in favor of some allowances being made for people who train more often on their own (as opposed to classes in the dojo) and for really gifted athletes who master the movements and syllabus very quickly.  But, overall, I think that hard work repeated over time should be the basis of rank.

What about the student who trains consistently but doesn't improve?  That's a problem - not with your ranking system but with your teaching.  How can a student show up class after class and not get better?  If they show up and don't work hard then perhaps you should be encouraging them to find another hobby.  If they show up and work hard yet don't improve then their instructor needs to figure out the problem.

This summer I hope to test for my sandan.  Should I get it, that extra stripe on my belt will mean something - it means that my lower ranked classmates should pay attention when I give them advice, listen to my war stories, and treat me with a (small amount of) deference.  They should do so not because I have extra yellow threads stitched into my belt or because I coughed up the promotion fee, but because in order to get that stripe I had to spend many, many hours working at karate, and while doing so I've hopefully figured out some things they don't know yet.  Will it mean that I'm a better fighter than every lower ranking student?  Not by a long shot.  But it means I should know enough to teach them all a thing or two, even if it's while I'm getting my butt kicked by a younger, stronger, more athletic student.  And in just the same way, while I listen to everybody and try to learn from everyone, I pay extra careful attention to my seniors, and indulge them longer if their stories seem boring (which is very rare anyway), and know that they all have more than a few tricks they can teach me if I'm lucky during any given sparring session.

Osu.