More than just Martial Arts
Fitness
Wow.
0I mean, WOAH. Did I fall off the earth, or what?
So, here’s the story, and I’ll try to be brief.
I got hurt, and now I’m less hurt.
…What? It’s brief.
Ok, if the brief version isn’t enough, then here’s the long version:
At some point around the time of my last post, I applied to grad school to study psychology (specifically, health psychology). Rather a drastic career change from some people’s point of view, although less so from mine. I was accepted, and started school in January. In the mean time, I think I was a little burned out from posting on two blogs at once, and I decided to take a break. Apparently that got out of hand (sorry).
The other, more salient thing that happened that probably had more of an impact on my not coming back to writing, was a chronic foot injury that’s had me sidelined for over a year. It’s a chronic overuse type of injury, and I can’t really say how it happened with any certainty. What I do know is that in September I started noticing some pain in my left foot that would flare up after workouts, but go away over the weekend or any time I took a couple days off. I figured it was no big deal, it didn’t hurt that much, and I basically ignored it (kids, don’t ever do that).
Obviously it didn’t just go away, it got worse. In December I went to a doctor who told me that “I don’t really understand what you do, so I don’t know what to tell you.” He confirmed that it wasn’t broken, told me to wear shoes and sent me on my way. Thanks, Doc. As you can probably guess, that didn’t help either.
So I kept working out on it, but with shoes, and it kept hurting…a lot. I tried taping, which got me through my workouts, but eventually even that wasn’t enough. In February I finally hit my breaking point. I went to a different doctor, who sent me to physical therapy, and I stopped working out, hoping that a few weeks of rest would help it heal (hint: it didn’t).
That brings me to the other downside of this stupid injury: food. We’ve discussed how I like food, yes? Well I went from working out 9-10 times a week (seriously, I was doing P90x and kickboxing at the same time – I was a bit of a beast) to doing NOTHING overnight. My eating habits did not adjust as quickly, and my body is still paying the price. After a few weeks I was at least able to stop the crazy gains, but even then I kept slipping – a pound a week, on average, no more, but no less. Let’s just say I have got a lot of ground to make up.
The worst part was I didn’t know what to do about it. Diet changes, yes, but I suck at that. I tried and failed. And failed. And failed. And this whole time, I was barely able to walk. Somehow after I stopped working out, my foot locked up, and it got worse instead of better. There were times I could barely walk across the room, and I could never walk without pain. Frankly, I couldn’t sit without pain. Pain was background noise to my life. Add to that the fact that I’d lost my number one stress relief in workout out, and I was not a happy person.
I had never thought much about chronic pain before I had it…believe me, it’s no joke. Not that I thought it was before, but I never appreciated how much it messes with your head. I was cranky. I was beyond cranky, I was unpleasant. I was unhappy, I was in a Funk with a capitol F. That didn’t help the eating situation any, let me tell you (especially with grad school plus freelancing taking my stress levels to 11). I couldn’t find anything that didn’t hurt, except for swimming, and quite frankly it hurt so bad just to get to the gym and into the pool that I quit doing that, too. It was always ‘just a few more weeks’ until I would be back, or so I told myself. I had to, or I would have lost it.
Ok so enough of that. Where am I now? After 5 doctors, 2 physical therapists, 2 orthopedic specialists, and 2 chiropractors, I seem to be getting out of the woods…for real this time. The real difference makers? The second ortho guy (foot and ankle specialist, referred to by the first ortho guy), who finally gave me a diagnosis and put me in a night splint. And after that, my sent-from-heaven chiropractor. The night splint helped the plantar fasciitis aspect of my foot (one of three ‘itisis’ that I have), but that, the orthotic, and the stretches he gave me still weren’t touching the rest. The chiropractor does this crazy thing called “Active Release Technique,” and it’s a-ma-zing. Hurts like a son of a …gun… but it works. I’ve literally made more progress in the last month than I’ve made in the last year combined.
So how’s that for a novel? I have taken all of the inserts, pads, and orthotics out of my shoes. I am finally back to some activity, and I can walk around without pain or a wonky gait. Doesn’t sound like much, but for me it’s like a miracle…like having my life back. I usually still tape my foot (I have become good friends with Kineseotape), but I don’t even do that every day. I have to use a lot of ice, and do a lot of stretching, but things are looking up.
Coming up: Part II of my return (Oh yes, there’s more. There’s BOMBSHELLS, people. It’s been a year and a half, it’s a lot to catch up on!)
Finito
0Alright, enough of this experiment. It’s been enlightening, but it’s stressin’ me out. Final tally, after one month; I’ve lost about 5 pounds, and almost 2″ off my waist, and things fit better. I also stopped randomly snacking on everything in sight, so overall I’ll call it a success. I didn’t do as well at adding variety as I had hoped, but with less crap and more working out I think I’ll survive. I’m still tracking what I eat on my own, so there will hopefully be more progress from here out.
I will still be around, posting when I feel like I have something to add to the world, instead of every night. Every night leads to boring posts about my day, and it’s not fun for any of us. I will also try to get back to doing my form occasionally, although with kickboxing keeping me in shape I’m feeling less pressed to practice for health’s sake and more to make sure I don’t forget it. That approach is kind of lazy and needs much less practice time, but I’ll try. Until next time, stay well amigos.
A Day
0Have I told you that I like kickboxing? Just kidding, I think I tell you that every day. But I do, in case you were wondering. My shoulder doesn’t think so today, too many push ups this week, but it will survive. It’s so close to being better, but I’m only a little bit good at keeping it rested. I rest it when I’m at home, right? That should count for something.
No workout tomorrow, though, I have places to go and my shoulder needs a break. Saturday, maybe, if I’m feeling motivated. As miserable as the last time was, I’m not feeling too keen, but I don’t like going the whole weekend without a workout either. One of the things that sucks about working out is how fast you can lose conditioning. Even just missing a couple days last week, I felt it when I got back to class on Tuesday. So anyway, we’ll see what happens over the weekend.
Food:
I could summarize this part by saying ‘yesterday, again’
Breakfast: PB&J
Lunch: Tacos. Although I added some beans, so maybe they’re burritos now. I was never really sure where that line is.
Other: Milk, 1/2 a can of Dr. Pepper (the other half went all over my coffee table and almost got my laptop…good times)
Mexican food is delicious, but the difference between most of the dishes is nuanced at best.
Current Weight: 161
Meaningful
0Oh hai! Sorry about that. I disappeared a little. I apologize.
The wedding weekend was great, I saw so many old family friends that it was like going to a reunion. I also got the opportunity to hang out with two kids who I knew very well, both through my church and from babysitting them for around 10 years. I haven’t seen them in 5 years (they were 12 and 7 then, they’re 17 and 12 now) so it felt like being put through a time machine. I always had high expectations for them, but I was completely blown away. They have become the most beautiful, smart, and incredibly personable young people…I feel grateful to have had even a small part in their lives.
I’ve spent so much time working on ‘real job’ kind of things for the last few years, but I look back on it and it doesn’t mean anything to me. Those two kids mean everything, and every other kid that I’ve taught or mentored in the last few years…Some pixels on a screen pale in comparison to that. It’s why I’ve always loved teaching Taekwondo, and why I miss teaching it now. It’s not so much what’s being taught as the impact that it has on kid’s lives.
So anyway…after that. I went to my final ballet class last night – it was almost a relief. As much as I would love to have the abilities of a dancer, I don’t connect with the experience of training the same way I do to martial arts. I enjoyed it while I was there, but I didn’t find myself practicing in my off days, or really wanting to go back to class the way I do with Taekwondo. It was a fun and worthwhile experience, but I’m glad I don’t have to rely on it as my new hobby. Maybe I was wrong, and what’s being taught does matter…passion matters. It took me one whole paragraph to change my mind on that subject.
Tonight I had kickboxing, and even though it is much more brutal and exhausting physically, I would much rather be there. The fact that I have friends who take class with me is a factor as well, but it’s where I want to be. I’m glad that everything came together to get me into that class – it was a hard decision at the time, but it’s been the right choice by far. I’m wired to kick things, or something.
Food:
Yes, food. We’re still doing this?
Breakfast: PB&J
Lunch: BBQ Pork sandwich (wedding leftovers…win.)
Other: Chocolate Milk, and I think I ate some other things but I forgot. Sorry.
Seriously drawing a blank on the rest. Ah, well, there was food there somewhere. The wedding weekend didn’t derail me as badly as I thought it might, although I certainly ate too much. But I think (knock on wood) that I’m done with crazy holidays, weddings, graduations, baby showers (did I mention the baby shower the day after the wedding? Same family, different couple ;), and the like, so I can go back to eating like a normal person for more than a week at a time.
Current Weight: 161
Love via Food
0Tonight featured the Return of the Killer Leg Workout from last week. I have no idea why they chose to torture me this way. I could have gone another month or ten without doing that many lunges again, but they seemed to think it was a good idea. I liked busting out some high kicks yesterday much better.
I’m headed out tomorrow for a wedding, back in my old stomping grounds. An old family friend is getting married, and lots of old friends are coming, so it’s becoming a reunion of sorts. I won’t attempt to blog while I’m home, so I’ll have to leave you until Sunday or Monday, when I get back.
While I’m home I’ll try to fight the good fight and not eat until I die. Seriously. My family speaks the language of food. We love with food, Holidays revolve around meals, we celebrate with food, we mourn with food…you get the idea. It took me a long time to be able to say ‘no’ to my grandparents pushing second and third helpings of everything, and I think they’ve learned not to take it personally. Regardless, it’s hard – when my family’s around the food is amazing. A-ma-zing. And I don’t have to cook it all by myself, which makes everything taste better.
Food:
Breakfast: PB&J
Lunch: More leftover enchiladas
Supper: (look Ma, three meals!) Pizza
Other: Cookies, Milk, Soda
Well hello there appetite, I wondered where you’d gone. I missed you…sort of.
Current Weight: 162
Have a fantastical rest of the week and a magnificent weekend, and I’ll be back Sunday!
Habits
0I’m not quite sure what to write about – my days just aren’t that interesting. Eat, work, work out, eat, repeat.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Psychology – The Briefer Course, by William James. Now, since this book’s original publication was in 1892, I take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still being published (this edition was printed in 2001) so somebody obviously thinks it still has value.
Habits: either helpful or nasty little things, depending on what they are. Basic premise of the first chapter: habits are a mental process – but mental processes are, at their core, physical processes. Therefore, a habit is made up of a series of electrical signals traveling between the neurons in your brain in the same path over and over – like they’re digging an electrical trench in your brain. This makes it hard to break habits, since you have to convince this current to travel a different path than the one it’s used to. Fortunately, that process can work for good as well as bad.
Habits can be complex – driving the same path to work every day, for example, or complex emotional responses – so the most important part of a habit is the beginning, the first action that triggers the chain reaction. It’s like when you start tying your shoes. Once you start, your unconscious takes over and you probably couldn’t stop in the middle and then go on without thinking about it. To change a habit, you need to head off the first spark. To start a habit, you need to define a spark.
A habit will have a better chance of taking hold in your brain if you set a trigger point; some consistent thing that you do that your brain can associate with the entire chain of actions that make up the habit. Then when it encounters the trigger, it can bypass the conscious part of your brain. Instead of you having to fight a battle with yourself: ‘I should really go to the gym some time today,’ your brain recognizes the trigger – getting home from work, getting up in the morning, whatever point you set that’s consistent – and sets in motion the habit. If you can set and keep to a specific trigger, the habit will take hold more quickly, and be easier to stick to.
To break a habit, you have to somehow divert the trigger point – give it some other path to follow. This is my own inference, but the easiest way to break an old habit may be to set a new one up to take its place that uses the same trigger. So you’re not just trying to stop the habit when it hits, you’re diverting it into some other, more desirable action.
I’m not doing the whole chapter justice here, but I picked out a bit that I thought might be more interesting and practical…and I tried to write it in English. It’s an interesting book, but it requires plowing through a lot of very dense material; you can definitely tell it was written in academia, in another era.
Food:
Lunch: Enchiladas
Other: Cookies, milk, chocolate milk
My stomach is getting better, but not there yet.
Current Weight: 160
Dancin’ my dance
0…and my dance is awkward. But it’s getting better.
Hello, and happy Monday! Not a very eventful day, but nice, not insanely hot, and I felt reasonably productive. A slow day for work, but things are looking up. Dance class is funny, I’m basically the only person in the class – only once has anyone else been there. So it’s like private lessons, but for a group class price…I feel almost guilty. Actually it would be nice if it were a bigger class, more people would make it a little more energetic, but this way I get to learn on my own pace.
I’m no dancer yet, never fear. My one advantage is that Taekwondo muscles (and balance) come in handy for kicks and arabesques and all the other french words that I have to learn. It’s much better than starting from scratch.
Food:
…Brunch? PB&J
Supper: Enchilada skillet, although I bastardized the recipe to fit what I had on hand.
Other: Soda, Cookies, Milk
Mmmm bastardized recipes. It was actually pretty tasty. I swear I’m not trying to skip meals, I’ve been feeling somewhere between queasy and just not hungry, so I don’t eat. I grabbed some meds today (I have a history with this, sadly) so I should be back to normal soon.
Current Weight: 162. Ah, that beefy, cheesy enchilada thing. ‘Twas the death of me. Also, eating at 8:30pm.
The merits of a workout
0I think if I went to kickboxing tomorrow, that I wouldn’t be able to walk. Holy soreness Batman! After being in kickboxing for a few weeks now I’ve decided it is by FAR the best ‘fitness’ class I’ve ever been in. It’s mixed up well, so it doesn’t get repetitive. The music is a good playlist that’s long enough to shuffle and not feel stale. And the workout – sheesh, the workout. I think it either equals or comes close to the level of intensity that the boot camp I was in did, but without feeling so painful, stale, and boring.
Although I gained a great level of conditioning from boot camp in a short span of time, it was torture. I was counting down the days until I was done after the first day. It would have been better if it hadn’t been in the morning, but it still wasn’t fun – just work. It honestly felt like being in a sports practice, without any of the fun sport parts. The only thing that kept me in it was my desire to get in shape for MMA.
Kickboxing is work too, to be sure, but it’s also constantly changing and challenging in different ways, so it doesn’t feel miserable. It feels purposeful, stays moving fast enough that I’m not counting the minutes, and incorporates enough martial arts to keep me happy. So far, it’s been great – I have fun, I’m tired and sweaty and sore when I get done, and I love it.
But what about Taekwondo, you say? Didn’t you love that more? Well, yes, but. Taekwondo was amazing, and I did love it. But it was never a ‘fitness’ class of this intensity. Taekwondo is great for a baseline, and great for coordination and strength, but it will only get you so far. Unless you’re sparring a lot – which we usually weren’t – it’s not that cardio intensive, so I rarely felt very exhausted or sore after class.
It was good, in a way, because I started off so out of shape that it built me up at a rate I could handle. But when it came to getting past decent shape into peak condition, there just wasn’t enough physical work involved in class to get there. Taekwondo can be a very technical sport – get your foot there, pointing that direction, and your arms here, and your head looking there, and your other foot up here, and do it all while looking halfway coordinated, and then transition into the next move that’s just as technical. Your stances need to be perfect – after 81 moves, you should end up on exactly the same speck on the floor that you started from. If you jump, it’s not enough to just land on your feet, you have to land in a perfect stance.
All of that is work. It will build muscle. It will build cardio, if you do it enough. But it’s easy to let the cardio slip, and let the stances get higher and higher until they don’t work your legs. Especially once I started teaching more than training, and adult classes became an afterthought in the wake of changing priorities at my old school, I wasn’t getting much of a workout. I pushed myself to do the moves as perfectly as I could to be an example for the kids I was teaching, and I think that’s what kept me from losing ground, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.
Taking this kickboxing class is part of a change I’ve been wanting to make for a while, of getting in the kind of condition I should have been in all along. I want to be able to perform martial arts to the peak of my ability, and although I know what my moves were lacking, I rarely had the strength or stamina to fix them consistently.
If I ever take the chance to do Taekwondo again, I hope I will feel like I can represent it as well as it deserves. It is a beautiful, powerful, technical sport, and I want to be an instructor who can teach by more than just a decent example and words – I want to show what there is to achieve.
Food:
Breakfast: PB&J, Milk
Lunch: Pizza
Supper: 1/2 slice pizza, Chocolate Milk
The sad fact of food when you’re single is that you get used to eating the same thing a lot. It’s simpler and more cost effective if I cook things in big batches, and fortunately I don’t mind the repetition. Breakfast….well, I have a rocky relationship with morning food. I don’t like to eat right after I get up, and my stomach has aggressive opinions about what it will accept. I go though stages where I eat the same thing for weeks because nothing else sounds good, and then after a few weeks or months there will come a day where I can’t stand the sight of it anymore, and I won’t eat it again for ages. This has happened with PB&J (currently making a comeback), oatmeal, granola bars of various brands, and so on. I’ve never been much of a cereal eater, although lately it’s been sounding better to me than it usually does. Basically I go with what sounds good, and don’t argue with my stomach.
Current Weight: 162
Monday
0I’m baaack! Back to mobile, that is. Still a few tweaky parts in my shoulder, so I may very well end up hurt again, but I’ll try not to go too crazy. It’s the downfall of sports. I could do something nice and graceful, like ballet…oh wait, I AM. Yes America, to prove that I am more than a bloodthirsty martial arts machine (and also because I’ve always wanted to), I am taking a ballet class. Please try not to laugh so hard, you’re bugging your neighbors.
That’s where I was tonight, my second class, and so far I’ve learned that I am almost as un-graceful as I feared. Taekwondo helps a lot, because I have base flexibility and balance, but man is it a paradigm shift. Part of the reason I’ve always wanted to take some kind of dance is because I’m so hopelessly awkward, and man have I proven that true, but I’m finding that it’s a lot of mind over matter. So I’ll get there. It’s fun, challenging, and definitely different.
Now I have 6 years of Taekwondo habits to learn how to turn off…hunched shoulders, bent knees, flexed toes; none of these are good things in ballet. But I like a challenge.
Food:
Breakfast: PB&J & milk
Lunch: Hot Dog & baby carrots
Supper: Umm
Snacks: PB, Chocolate milk, popcorn
I don’t know what it is about summer, but I never want to cook. I should just admit that I don’t want to and stock up on more things I can eat cold.
Current Weight: 165
Speed Reading
0Alright, shoulder is back to tolerable, if not completely better. I’m going to pretend that it’s better and go back to kickboxing on Monday anyway. I was good again today and gave it lots of rest. Tomorrow I absolutely HAVE to hit work hard, this week has not been so good for productivity. I actually felt weirdly productive today on some fronts, but none of it was billable.
I need to stop reading books within 12 hours of buying/checking them out. I always do that and then feel like I defeated the purpose of getting it. Today’s victim: Love’s Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, by Irvin d. Yalom. Yes, I read psychology books for fun. It was really interesting, a little disturbing, and I recommend it if you’re interested in that kind of thing. (also recommended: Prozac Nation, an Unquiet Mind, and the Introvert Advantage, just to name a few. Only Introvert Advantage if you’re looking for something cheerful…as a hard-core introvert, I found it rather liberating and completely fascinating. The others are interesting, but not exactly rainbows and kittens.)
The only thing I wish I could find is more exploration of the connection between physical activity and mental health: I know there have been studies on it, but of course I don’t remember where I read them and I haven’t run across much literature on the subject. Not that I’ve really looked, I guess, scanning the racks at Barnes and Noble probably doesn’t count as research.
That was a tangent, eh? I loves me some literature.
Food:
What the heck DID I eat today?
Breakfast: nope.
Lunch: Tacos. Chocolate Milk. Do they go together? I say yes.
Supper: Spaghetti.
Snacks: Cookies, popcorn, I think that was it.
Clearly I will soon have my own health craze, sweeping the nation.
Current Weight: 165