Posts tagged discipline

I 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