Good Class

I enjoyed my Tuesday night class--a great change from a week ago. We were working on slipping after punching and then moving or throwing combinations. This is very interesting stuff to me.

I've begun kicking, another step in recovering from ACL surgery. My leg feels fine. One thing I'm not doing yet--torquing my left leg (i.e., no roundhouse kicks with the right leg).

This weekend, according to my schedule, I should try interval sprints. We'll see, it's a very busy weekend.

My New Sensei asked me to hold hand pads for him to demonstrate punches during class. As minor as that sounds, it communicated to me that he's getting to know me and has confidence in me, which felt great.

As it's Wednesday, I'm taking today as my rest day from working out.

Card-io

I tried New Sensei's push-up regimen today. I went through 18 cards of a deck, and did about 157 push-ups until I finally couldn't finish the 19th card (the joker). (Only 36 cards to go.) When I moved onto the elliptical machine right afterwards, I was primed--my heart rate was already raised, it was in cardio range in no time.

I did hands-wide push-ups (the easiest for me), shoulder-width push-ups, and a few diamond push-ups. Man, are my arms tired. This is a lot for a middle-aged guy.

I'm going to be surprised if my arms recover enough to give a decent showing in martial-arts class Tuesday night, which will be embarrassing.

Aging Martial Artist: A Perspective

There's an interesting essay by Bob Orlando (whom I've never met), who runs a martial arts school in Denver, on a natural progression in types of martial arts to pursue with age. His template is the progression in Taoist Chinese martial arts from xing-yi, a very linear, meet-force-with-force art that sounds like karate, to ba-gua, which introduces more circular-type motions (sounds like aikido, though I don't know for sure) and finally to taijiquan (tai chi chan), see photo.

Orlando says there's no loss of effective self-defense in that progression, and that there are ways to make that progression outside the Taoist Chinese martial arts.

It makes a lot of sense to me. It makes me wonder about taking up, say aikido at some point (though I do worry about the falls aikido requires).

However, the vigor of the hard martial art I'm pursuing is great for my physical condition. And I'm eager to return to sparring. And I do want to get that black belt. So my thought is to continue down this path as long as I'm able, knowing though that if my body won't let me any farther, due to age or injuries, there are alternatives to dropping training entirely.

I'm off the training wagon for the past four days due to illness, a martial-arts-school holiday, and demands on my time today from family and others. Monday's a new day.

I took a spinning back kick to the gut from a virus Thursday--fever, aches, and stomach distress that I won't divulge in detail. I missed work and evening martial arts class, and I worked from home today.

No class on Saturday either. Maybe that's a good day (if I'm close to fully recovered) for starting this deck-of-cards training routine for push-ups.

Toughest

Tonight was, psychologically, my toughest night since returning to karate classes three weeks ago after ACL surgery. I'm nowhere near the level I want to be at, and it will be so much work to get there. I'm not up to the abilities, physical and in terms of form, of some other people in class, because of my layoff and, frankly, my age. To top it off, work's been tough and that carries over. I was so tired sleeping on the train home I was dreaming.

I made it through the class.


I talked to my new sensei about it afterwards, and he said it was understandable that I would feel badly in comparing myself to other other students, but that I'm not even back a month, I have limitations because of my knee, and that by applying myself 100% to the class it would make an impression on people as well. And for the push-ups, he wants me to take a deck of cards, and on my off days--that is, not my karate class days, when I may do 100 push-ups--to do as many push-ups as cards I turn up in the deck, to the limit that I can do, until I can finally do an entire deck of cards. (Face cards count 11, Aces 12, Jokers 15.)

I don't quite know WHEN I'm going to do that--for instance, tonight I've got a meeting that lasts from when I get home to when I have to go to bed--and I worry about hurting my arms. My new sensei said I do need to be careful about not getting hurt while doing so many push-ups, but I don't know if he realizes how much lower a threshold I may have for injury than he has. (He does two-and-a-half decks of cards.)

I don't know whether a 51-year-old slender guy can do all this. I'm going to try.

Cardio and King Lear

That's Sir Ian McKellen (aka Gandalf, Magneto and, in the photo, King Lear) on the left. We'll get to him in a minute.

Today I went to the gym, after missing karate class yesterday to see a contractor about a leaking roof. I did:

Stretches

Resistance training:
Four sets of 20:
Push-Ups with one hand on a medicine ball
Scissors kicks with legs raised
Crunches
Bicycle crunches
20 lat pull-downs, 80 pounds (new for me)

Physical therapy for my knee, post ACL surgery:
30 leg presses, 160 pounds
30 single-leg leg presses, 80 pounds
30 calf raises, 80 pounds
30 side-stepping squats, with a resistance band
30 front and back lunges, with a resistance band
30 knee bends with my right leg on a Swiss ball
6 across the room fast defensive-stance gallops

Cardio and knee:
Ran 1.5 miles on the treadmill, plus two minutes warming up and two cooling down.

Tomorrow my plan is to go to the gym downstairs from my work for crunches and cardio.

Funny, this afternoon I planned to watch the new Contender TV show, but I ended up watching a DVD of King Lear instead. I had read about Ian McKellen in the role now in New York (no tickets left); the NY Times loved him, the WS Journal less so. So I watched the Ian Holm (aka Bilbo Baggins) Lear from 1999.

Last year, I was able to watch the Contender episodes on my long commute on my iPod. Alas, this year, ESPN isn't putting the episodes for sale on the iTunes store, to my disappointment. They're on too late during the week for me to watch; I guess I won't see 'em. My real boxing buddies didn't like the show, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Push-Ups

Push-ups are the pride and bane of my existence.

Well, actually my kids rank higher on both the pride and bane scales. But push-ups are pretty high up there.

They're a source of pride because people's eyes tend to bug out when they hear that I do, say, 80 or 90 push-ups in the course of a karate class.

They're a bane because they're hard and painful to do.

To get a black belt, my school requires people to do a set number of push-ups and sit-ups, in excellent form and quickly. Good form means, among other things, your body needs to be straight--you can't stick your butt in the air--and you need to get down low enough.

The number depends on your sex and age. For push-ups, adult men need to do 75, women 35. However, "senior" men and women, 50 and over, do fewer--50 for men, 25 for women.

The push-up requirement was introduced after I had already been in the school for a while, I think I was a green belt (my school goes white, blue, yellow, green, red, brown, black). And until that point, we hadn't emphasized push-ups in class. I was NOT good at them, and it was a lot of work to build up to the right level.

I'm not Mr. Upper Body. Some of my buddies in the school, including Hulk and Gumba Frank, as their names suggest, are blessed with lots of upper body strength. They can crank out the push-ups. I tend more to the model of the lean, mean fighting machine--Terry, a former black belt at our school (now in another state) used to say I had go-go-gadget legs, they could kick so far. But I have really had to work on the push-ups.

At one point, my Old Sensei--more of a mesomorph than an ectomorph like me--was trying to get me to do 200 to 300 push-ups a day, in sets--increasing the number of push-ups I could do in sets. He said when I could do 200 push-ups in five sets of 40, I would be able to do 75 for the test. "Your arms will be so big, you'll have a wife AND a mistress," he said. "But then you'll have issues." I tried, and I did boost the number of push-ups I could do. But my shoulder was beginning to hurt something ferocious, interfering with the push-ups. Once I did 75 push-ups in good form and without stopping, but that was a peak I never attained again. Instead, I turned 50, and needed to do only 50 for the test.

I have typically put my hands pretty wide for push-ups, rather than right next to my body. They're just easier that way for me--I am not sure what different parts of my body these wide push-ups engage, but I think they work the shoulders more and the triceps and chest somewhat less. Lately, I've been trying to do more tight-in-hands push-ups, and doing other exercises to strengthen my triceps. No surprise, my triceps have hurt since my last class Thursday.

I have been treating push-ups like weight lifting--I give myself a day off in between. Now that I'm back in core karate class again, and now that we do even more push-ups than we used to, I use those classes (three a week) for my push-up workouts.

Before, in physical therapy, the therapists suggested push-up variations, like putting a medicine ball under one hand and then switching, or putting my legs up on a bit Swiss Ball. I did find a little variety made the push-ups more bearable.

I'm missing karate class today because a contractor is coming out to look at our leaky roof--something that has to get fixed. I may see if another location in my program has Sunday hours I could attend, or else I'll make it to the Tuesday class.