State of My Arts

My surgery was 5 weeks ago today.  And for a guy still supposed to be in a sling, I’m doing really well.

Tonight I participated in a martial arts class without my sling for the first time.  As it turned out, I didn’t end up being able to participate in a large portion of the class, as the focus was on Hapkido — takedowns and falling.  I did do a couple of very small shoulder rolls on my good side, and that felt fine.  I did the exercise bike right before class, so at least I got a workout, and I did some extra kicks and ab work off to the side while the rest of class was going on.

I’ve been working on lightly stretching my shoulder.  I did some arm circles today.  Not full ones, but a respectably large circle.  I’ve been doing shoulder rolls forward and back.  I’ve been working external rotation (elbow at your side, rotate your fist away from your midsection).  And I’ve been stretching it upwards as well.  Those motions are all difficult to different extents, but nothing seems abnormally painful.

As far as my daily life goes, I’m hardly wearing the sling any more, except to sleep.  And I’m probably safe without it even then.  I’m driving without my sling, and in the last few days I’ve begun using my left hand to turn the wheel, rather than turn it exclusively with my right hand.  I’ll pick up small objects with my left (such as a glass of water), and I’ve used both hands a few times to lift two-handed objects (such as the cats’ litter boxes).

There is a little bit of a pulling sensation for a couple of movements, like trying to put my right ear to my right shoulder.  My elbow/nerve issue that I’ve mentioned a couple of times is still present, though it isn’t as bad as it had been.  And there’s just enough of an odd feeling with my shoulder that I’m aware of it most of the time, though it isn’t necessarily painful.  The incision itself is healing well, though many of the people I’ve showed it to have thought it a little grisly, despite it being a nice clean line about 4 inches long.

So I’m pleased with my progress, and will  be interested to hear what the doctor has to say the next time I see him.

Health

Head on over to Low Tech Combat for an extremely funny video.  This guy shows you how to defend yourself against muggers.

Humor

Today’s class focused primarily on sparring.  We warmed up for 20 minutes or so with the normal types of exercises: pushups, ab work, and some stationary technique combinations.  The latter were challenging to me, since most of them involved two arms.  I, of course, was still in my sling, so I worked on hip movement without throwing left-handed techniques.

When we broke down into sparring, we had half a dozen rings set up and run by black belts.  I was running one of the rings, so I could choose the participants for my ring, as well as choosing people to spar against me.  As a minor digression, there is a variety of sparring styles even within Tae Kwon Do.  Olympic-style sparring looks like the following highlight video:

As an artifact of the rules, punches are basically eliminated, and combatants drop their hands to their waists.  Frankly, I’m not a fan of that type of sparring.  In my dojang, our hands are up, and we approach it a lot more like kickboxing; punches are an integral part of sparring, and dropping your hands means that you’ll get punched in the noggin.  Not that it wouldn’t be cool to do some of the things that the fighters in the video can do, but I’d rather not work on sparring in a way that’ll get my head taken off in a more serious encounter.

Back to today’s class, I started out light by sparring against a college-aged female black belt who is probably literally about half my weight.  She’s good and quick, but the length of my limbs (and bulk) give me a good advantage.  And I knew she wouldn’t hurt me.  So, I sparred with my right lead, ending up using primarily jabbing techniques.  Turning my hips over for a left leg kicks left my bad side too exposed.  Next up I sparred against a larger blue belt, probably 6’1″ and 250 pounds.  He’s got quick hands and a quick inside-out arc kick, but isn’t very quick with his movement.  That match went fine for me, as did my final match against another black belt (who is a bit lacking in speed and flexibility).  I worked him hard enough that he was gasping for breath.

All in all, I was pleased.  My endurance still seems to be there, and I was able to toss in a couple one-handed fingertip pushups as well.  I got an opportunity to try out one-handed sparring, which was new and fun.

That was Saturday class; I was less pleased after Thursday night.  I hadn’t planned on going in, but my instructor called me up and asked if I could come by to help teach, since he was short of instructors.  I agreed, and helped teach both a beginner kids class and a beginner adult class.  The adult class was fine, I worked with three yellow belts on back, back side, jump back, jump back side, back hook kicks, back step arc kicks, and a couple of others.  But the kids class is still bothering me a bit.  I was tasked with working with a young (maybe 6?) white belt who hadn’t been to many classes.  He was not the most coordinated kid, but I thought I was doing okay with him for most of the class.  At one point we were working on punches and he told me that he didn’t want to do that any more.  I told him that he didn’t make those decisions, and kept him at punching drills a while longer.  That was around half an hour into the 45 minute class.  We switched back over to kicks for the last 7-8 minutes, and he eventually had a meltdown of the stubborn variety.  Fortunately for both of us, that was right at the end of class.  At the end, the head instructor for that class asked him if I worked him too hard, to which he replied “Yes”.  And I guess I probably did work him beyond what he wanted to do.  Had the class been 10 minutes shorter, I think it would have been fine.  But I’m left with the realization that a newer student ended up leaving class unhappy and most likely not looking forward to his next class.  His father trained briefly in the adult class a couple of years ago (and knew me), so he can probably convince the kid to come back to next class, and hopefully a different instructor will do a better job with him than I did.

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Today I actually took part in an advanced TKD class.  Fortunately for me, most of the time was spent doing kicking drills.  The theme of the day was entering in at an angle for kicks; such as stepping to the outside and arc kicking with the inside leg.  After several of those drills, we did a jumping 360 back kick, which was a little tough with an arm in the sling.  There were a couple of punching drills, which I could obviously only do one-handed.  The final 20 minutes we spent on the mats working on a takedown off a stick attack, so I did some abdominal work during that time.

This marks the first class that I’ve been to since I broke my toe in late December.  Since I broke the toe during warmups, this is the first class I’ve finished since before Christmas.  That’s a long time.

Prior to that class was the intermediate class that I teach.  I warmed them up with a bunch of arc kicks and pushups, then branched into inside and outside crescent kicks.  Normally we do axe kicks, which has the power emphasis on the downward movement, hitting with the heel.  The crescent kicks’ angle of attack is parallel to the ground, striking across the face.  Anyhow, we don’t spend as much time working those kicks, so it is good to work on them periodically.  The remainder of class was spent on sparring and forms.

But, hey, the main thing was that I made it through an hour of TKD without hurting myself.

TKD

Tomorrow marks 4 weeks since my shoulder surgery.  I’ve basically abandoned the sling (except for sleeping) at this point.  The problem with my elbow and forearm hurting because of using the sling has persisted.  In fact, the pain has gotten worse.  I’ve taken a couple of Percocets over the last couple of days due to the pain.  This morning I woke up at 4 AM and couldn’t sleep because of the pain.  I eventually got a few more hours of sleep — without the sling.  I’m still sleeping on the couch because being on a bit of an incline still feels better, and also because I snore when sleeping on my back.

My next doctor appointment is in 2 1/2 weeks, so that should be around the time I start rehabbing.

Health

Last night was another night of teaching the intermediate class.  Nothing particularly out of the ordinary (warmup then poomsae), except I introduced the class to shrimping.  MarksTraining had a good post on this very subject today.  In short, shrimping is a way to move yourself into a better position when you are on the ground.  The Tae Kwon Do-ists in the class have hardly spent any time on the ground, and the movement was completely alien to most of them.  Even some of the students who had done it before looked pretty lost.

One thing that is interesting with the shrimp movement is that there are two variations that I’m aware of; two leg pushing and “killing” a leg.  The videos in the post at MarksTraining show the two-leg push variation; both hands and feet start near the same place, and you push your butt away with all four limbs.  The other way is to straighten the bottom leg and to not use it in the motion.  The idea is that that leg is trapped (such as in half guard) and there isn’t enough space to bend the knee.  Shrimping with a dead leg allows the leg to pull out from a pretty small opening.

In BJJ, we don’t really spend time shrimping, except periodically as part of the warmup.  I’m not even sure I remember our BJJ instructor really explaining the shrimp (aka hip excape) movement in enough detail to know which way he prefers when we’re going up and down the floor.  I prefer the two-footed approach shown in the videos.  But, like any sort of movement exercise, the application is going to be dependent on the situation you’re in.  And in the middle of grappling, you just do whatever works.

Back to the intermediate class, I’m a demonstrating type of instructor, and I obviously couldn’t do much demonstrating with one arm in a sling.  Still, I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t able to convey the idea a little better.  Not that we spent more than about 4-5 minutes on the subject.  After shrimping, I had them do a crab walk.  One of the instructors dubbed shrimp + crab as “the crustaceon”.  Heh.

BJJ, TKD, Teaching

The shoulder keeps getting better.  I’ve only been wearing the sling maybe two hours per day plus while I’m sleeping over the last two days.  It is more comfortable out of the sling than in.  I’m wearing the sling while I’m teaching martial arts, because otherwise the temptation of using the arm would be too much to ignore.  The pain in my elbow and forearm that I mentioned in my last post was probably at its worst yesterday.  Today it still hurts to straighten my elbow, but not as much.  The skin around the incision still has a slightly decreased amount of sensation, but nothing big.

I ran the warmups for the beginner TKD tonight.  There were 17 there tonight, which is a pretty large showing.  We had some of the blue folding mats out, so I used those as the base of a different kicking surface.  Some calisthenics, punches, then spent a decent amount of time isolating some of the basic kicks.  Some of the white belts still want to drop their hands when they kick, so that was one of the points of emphasis.  Once we broke down into smaller groups, we worked on poomsae and one-step sparring.  It was a productive class.  And afterwards, as part of my normal Tuesday routine, I hit Kali sticks for a little bit.

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Last night I took a Percocet for the first time in a while.  Interestingly, I’m experiencing more pain now, but it isn’t at the shoulder.  The nerve running down my forearm to my index finger has gotten used to my elbow being bent.  Now when I straighten my elbow I’m getting a large amount of stretching-type pain.  Hopefully stretching it out will bring it back to normal in a couple of days.

My range of motion has been increasing, not that I’ve really been doing much with it.  I’ve been trying to keep the shoulder in a relatively neutral position most of the time when it isn’t in the sling.  Still, I’m lifting my hand over my head at times to stretch things out.  I’m using pain as my guide, and there isn’t any pain doing that.

On the exercise front, not much has changed.  After the exercise bike today, inspired by one of the videos over at Martial Thoughts, I put on ankle weights for my side and arc kicks.  I kind of liked that, so I think I’ll continue using the weights.  Speaking of those videos, the first one wasn’t particularly well produced, and it drives me nuts when people bounce when stretching, but the kicks were good.  Second one was pretty well done.  They used different terminology than we do, and a couple of the kicks (such as the front heel kick) aren’t in our repertoire.  Third one, well, that’s just nasty, and don’t watch that if you don’t want to see a leg break.  And, of course, the fourth one was Bruce Lee, which is always good.

As my shoulder gets less interesting, I’m planning on actually having some martial arts content on this blog, so we’ll see how that goes.

Health, TKD, Training

The last two days have been much the same, as far as the shoulder goes.  Yesterday, I spent much of the day not wearing the sling.  I ran the warmups for the intermediate class, doing a number of kicking drills, then working on wheel kicks and spinning wheel kicks.  I was pleased that I could still demonstrate them, even with an arm in the sling.  The remainder of class was primarily kicking drills and sparring with a little poomsae mixed in.  The final 10 minutes of class involved single and double stick Kali drills.  I took part in the single stick drills, but obviously not in the double stick ones.  I also rode the exercise bike and did my calisthenics.

Today, I was much lazier.  I spent much more of the day wearing my sling, though I left it off during the commute to and from work.  When it is 15 degrees outside like it was today, it is good to zip up the coat.  My legs were tired, so I took a pass on the exercise bike.  Not sure if it was due to overdoing it yesterday, or underdoing it today, but my body is aching enough that I took a couple of Tylenol this evening.

But still, it is going well.

Health, TKD, Teaching

I haven’t posted a shoulder update in a couple of days, because there is becoming less to write about.  I’m gradually doing more and more.  I’ve been able to tie my own shoes the last few days.  I’ve spent more and more time out of my sling, because it doesn’t hurt me to take it out.  I haven’t taken any pain medication in several days.

I’m consciously trying to avoid doing too much with my arm, and sometimes I’ll put my sling on because I’m starting to use it too much — carrying a glass of water, opening a door, that sort of thing.  Two weeks and a day since surgery, and I really can’t imagine that I’ll be wearing the sling much at all in another two weeks, much less the 4 additional weeks I was told I’d be in the sling.  The shoulder already feels much more stable than it did at any time prior to the surgery.  So it is all going very well.  I’ll definitely be sleeping with the sling on the full amount of time, because that’s the time I’d be most likely to inadvertently do something bad to it.

Tonight I led warmups for the beginner TKD class.  The aerobic portion was a lot of kick-1-2-3 (kick with one leg, step, step, step, kick with the other leg), doing front, arc, and inside and outside axe kicks.  And some ab work and pushups.  I joined in on everything except the pushups (though I did do three middling one-armed pushups).  At the class breakdown, I took two of the younger green belts and worked on one-step sparring.  Then we started in on Tae Guk Oh Jang, our fifth form.  That was somewhat challenging and amusing, since I had one arm in a sling and couldn’t demonstrate fully like I normally do.  At the end of class, I found a partner for the long box Kali (stick) drill for a few minutes, which I always enjoy.

Health, TKD, Teaching