Getting back into training

Ahh the aches and pains of the morning after a hard night at training. Last night was my first “Lean and Fit” class, which focuses on cardio and muscle strength. I was amazed at how much strength I’d lost over the break. Prior to the year ending I could do roughly 35 pushups (knuckles, elbows in) and 80 situps in one go, last night I struggled with half that number. I know my starting point for the next twenty-off weeks.

I’d been struggling to make a serious start to the year, training-wise. Work has thrown up some challenges with short-deadline tasks coming up, meaning I have missed schedule training, such as earlier this week. This continues a worrying pattern from last year. Our school only has one class for Brown/Black belts. This means these classes cover both the Brown->Black syllabus and training for the Black Belts. These classes are often very fluid, with drills and techniques changing from month to month. Whilst this is great as you’re constantly learning new stuff, it also means that if you don’t attend every Tuesday night class, you may miss out on a key technique. This hit me a number of times last year; arriving at a grading and not knowing one or two techniques as they had been covered on a night I missed due to work commitments (i.e. being interstate or overseas).

This pattern continuing was my greatest concern coming into 2009; if I couldn’t make all of the Tuesday night classes I wouldn’t get the technical content of my grading to a point where it would be technically correct and automatic. But I have found out that our senior student, Jeff, will be running special technical classes to cover just this situation. This was the best news I’d had all year.

I now have a rough training regime sorted that should give me the right balance in my three key areas of concern; fitness, sparring and technical:

• Monday night – assist teaching and partner work with one of my colleagues (focus on technical content)
• Tuesday night – brown/black training (will cover all aspects)
• Thursday night – Lean and Fit (cardio and strength fitness) and sometimes green-belt training (technical)
• Saturday morning – technical revision for BB candidates (technical), revision class (some technical) and sparring (sparring)
• Sunday morning/arvo – trailwalk training (stamina fitness)

The TrailWalk training, and walk itself, will be a great leg-up for the stamina I’ll need for the 4+ hour technical grading.

For the record, I’m sitting at about 88-89kgs at the moment. I expect this will drop over the next 22 weeks.