State of My Arts

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was looking into several internet products on the subject of nutrition.  I decided to go ahead and purchase the Fat Loss Troubleshoot/Metabolic Repair Manual.  If you are interested in more full reviews of the product, check out the reviews at Skwigg Blog and Alwyn Cosgrove’s blog.  From my perspective, there was a lot in there I already knew, but plenty more that I didn’t.  It isn’t for everyone (especially priced at $77), but I’m hoping it’ll be a bit of a spur for me to improve my nutrition.

So far I’m just making minor changes.  What I should do is create some daily meal plans and get myself on a good schedule of measured portions.  I haven’t gotten to that yet, though.  My normal weekday schedule consists of:

Breakfast: massive bowl of oatmeal and peanut butter (nearly 550 calories)
Second Breakfast: Sliced apple dipped in 3/4 cup of 1% cottage cheese
Lunch: 700-1000 calories of over-processed, high sodium foods
Dinner: 500-600 calories of over-processed, high sodium foods (such as Lean Pockets)
Snacks (if needed): Almonds, carrots, 100-calorie popcorn
Treat: Ghirardelli 60% cacao dark chocolate square

So my lunch and dinners have been leaving much to be desired.  Lunch is often a hoagie (aka sub, grinder, or a hero depending on where you live), which is middling okay.  But sometimes I get Chinese, or Taco Bell.  Other times I get salad-by-the-pound plus a slice of pizza.  I could really improve matters by making my own food and bringing it in.  But that’s where the laziness comes in.

After I get back from the dojang (7:30-8:30, usually), I don’t often feel like making my own food.  Sometimes I’ll have another bowl of oatmeal, but over the last few months I have often been in a Lean Pockets rut.  This past week I made some healthier food (beef & couscous, chicken & pasta), and I hope to continue that trend.

My breakfasts and snacks aren’t too bad.  My morning oatmeal (around 7:45 AM) is something that I’m not willing to give up.  I make it nice and thick with 1 1/3 cups of oatmeal and 1 1/2 tablespoons of peanut butter.  The apples and cottage cheese is new — I had been doing a meal replacement shake until last week.  Either way is slightly over 200 calories, but the apples and cottage cheese keeps me satisfied longer.  Snacks are only when I need them.

Next on my nutrition docket is improving my pre- and post-workout nutrition.  I should have something both before and after I workout (as I laid out in my last post), especially on those days I’m working out for several hours.  It is a journey.

Fitness

I really didn’t mean to go nearly two weeks between posts.  I actually thought I posted a few days ago, but it turns out I merely left it as a draft.

Here’s my current workout plan that I started last Tuesday:

Sunday: P90x upper body/abs
Monday: Advanced TKD; Kali
Tuesday: P90x upper body/abs; Teaching beginner TKD
Wednesday: Hapkido; Teaching intermediate TKD; Advanced TKD
Thursday: Rest!
Friday: P90x upper body/abs; Hapkido
Saturday: TKD (90 minutes)

There are several P90x upper body routines: Chest & Back; Shoulders & Arms; Chest, Shoulders & Triceps; and Back & Biceps.  I’ve only tried the first two so far, and they are definitely good, challenging workouts.  The Chest & Back workout involves lots of chin ups, so for me that involves cheating (only lifting some of my body weight).  My shoulders just aren’t that strong yet.  My left arm is far weaker than my right — my left arm will fail on the final move while my right could have done more weight/reps.  Hopefully that left arm will catch up.  I haven’t had issues with my surgically repaired shoulder doing the lifting programs.  When I first started doing push ups (a couple of months back), the scar tissue would crackle and pop, but that is no longer happening.  So full speed ahead with strengthening.

Another quirk to my workout schedule is that I like to play tennis.  I almost invariably play with the same guy, and we keep it very light and active when we play.  We don’t bother serving or playing games, we’ll just rally back and forth workout ground strokes, approaches, and point construction.  So it is a good cardio workout.  We often play on Sunday (when my partner isn’t injured), so that will make for a tough double workout on those days.  We’ll see how that goes.

Fitness, Training

Yesterday I talked about my weight and my fitness goals.  My position at the time was that I’m doing a whole lot of exercise, so maybe I should just let the nutrition thing slide and continue to do the things that are maintaining my weight, but not allowing it to drop.

But the more I think about it, the less defensible that position is.  As I stated, I’m training or teaching martial arts around nine hours per week.  And I think I’m going to make an honest attempt to continue with the P90x program.  Today was the Plyometrics workout, which is a 58-minute DVD of jumping around in different ways.  (Side note: one of the four doing the workout on the DVD has a prosthetic lower right leg, which astounds me.)  I’m sore from yesterday’s chest/back/ab workout, but I’m not dead from it.  Tonight I did the hour-long plyometrics, then went to the dojang for a black belt TKD class (thankfully mostly hand techniques), then I stayed for the Kali class (which, unfortunately for my tired legs, had plenty of footwork drills).

Back at the ranch (as one of my college professors loved to say), the fact is that if I’m going to add an daily hour-long workout to my martial arts routine and I’m also going to play tennis hopefully once or twice per week, I’m starting to push 20 hours per week of exercise.  And I can’t be bothered to spend maybe an hour or two per week researching nutrition and meal planning?  That doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Part of my mental hangup with changing my diet is not feeling sure that I know what direction to go.  There has been so much misinformation over the years regarding nutrition, that it is tough to feel confident in anything I read.  Among the martial arts blogs I read, there have been two nutrition programs that have stood out with positive reviews: Precision Nutrition and Fat Loss Troubleshoot/Metabolic Repair Manual.  Sometimes all those testimonials seem over the top, but I think I’d have a much higher level of confidence following one of those programs than trying to do my own thing (which is working soooo well for me).  Both of those programs are much more expensive than a simple diet book, but they both come with plenty of extras that should make it worth my while.

So I’ll mull over it a bit longer, and almost certainly come to the conclusion that if I’m willing to spend hundreds of dollars on exercise videos, that $77 or $97 isn’t too much to pay for something that has the potential to fundamentally alter my diet for the better.

Fitness, Training

Well, hrm.

I’ve not been doing well with motivation to eat healthily.  I had done two six-day diets (here and here), and had good short-term results.  But, of course, once I resumed my normal eating routine, the weight came back.  The last week and a half have involved birthday cake, ice cream, pizza, Indian buffet, plus my normal unhealthy lunches.

Today I weighed in at 199 with 17.5% body fat, which is around what it was prior to the second round of that six-day diet.  That’s as high as I’ve seen the fat percentage in the last few weeks, so hopefully that’s a bit of an outlying data point.  Still, this isn’t what I’m looking for.

This morning, I tried out the P90x chest and back workout for the first time.  I muddled my way through it, using some of their suggested “cheats” for some of the pull-ups.  It was definitely a good routine.  My arms are fatigued, and as a bonus my shoulder is still feeling okay.  I also did the 16-minute ab routine, or at least as much of it as I could.  That one is pretty brutal.

I haven’t decided how much my slightly-squishy body is bothering me relative to my inherent laziness.  My current primary fitness goal is definitely improving my upper body strength.  After 20 months of shoulder problems, I really want to strengthen that area.  So this means that weight management falls behind strength training.  Perhaps I should save my mental energy for doing a near-daily P90x routine so that I make sure I am working towards my primary goal.  I know that I need to make substantive permanent changes to my diet in order to see much progress, and I don’t think I’m quite ready to commit to that in addition to the nine hours per week of martial arts classes (plus the time spent getting there, getting home, showering, etc) and the maybe 2 hours per week I’ve been spending on fitness outside of the dojang.

It’d be nice if fighting my weight wasn’t a lifelong struggle.

Fitness

Periodically our dojang will change the training schedule up a bit.  Usually this is due to changing demographics within the school.  For instance, a couple of years ago there were a number of juniors and seniors in high school — but now those students are off to college.  When I first got my black belt, there was a black belt-only class on Friday night.  A black belt couple from out of town would come to the dojang for that class and stay nearby for the following morning’s class as well.  All told, there were usually a dozen or so in class.  It was the high point of my training week — I was a new black belt training alongside a dozen other black belts and working on advanced techniques.  Maybe nine months after I got my black belt, attendance had dropped to the point where the class was no longer sustainable.  The out-of-town couple had stopped coming, some others had other regular responsibilities, and the remainder no longer made it as high a priority.

Similarly, there was a poom (junior black belt) class that regularly drew 10-12 advanced children, though maybe a year later it was down to three or four.  Ditto Friday night Hapkido, which had been down to maybe 3 regulars for a number of months.

Most recently, the Monday night Hapkido class fell by the wayside.  Monday was the “advanced” Hapkido class, though the Hapkido program was small enough that it was the same people as in the other, all-level, Hapkido classes.  The schedule change in the fall added a black belt TKD class immediately prior to the Monday Hapkido class, which made for a pretty tough double workout, and most opted to just participate in the TKD class.  In addition, the regular Monday night Hapkido instructor had been having shoulder and medical insurance issues, and he could no longer come to class.  We have several well-qualified Hapkido instructors to fill that void, so it was most likely due more to the schedule change than anything else.

But as one falls, another rises to take its place.  Recently, we’ve seen a strong growth in the Wednesday and Friday Hapkido classes.  Both of those classes are taught by an instructor who lived and trained out in Portland, Oregon (where a number of us periodically go for seminars) until he met one of the black belts from our school, fell in love, married her, and moved out here.  Anyhow, he is a fantastic instructor, a 7th dan with over 30 years of experience.  He runs a very traditional class, and gives us a bit of a different take on Hapkdio than we’ve been used to.  Those Wednesday and Friday classes are up from maybe 4-5 students to 10-12.

It is interesting how different classes wax and wane.  This week, I switched teaching duties with another instructor for the beginner classes (I taught Thursday instead of Tuesday).  The Thursday beginner class was very small (six people) — I’m not sure if the Thursday class is normally that small, or if I caught it on a light day (the Tuesday class is normally at least 10).  The following class, a green belt and up class, was very well attended.

Overall, adult participation has been very light over the last month, though it did pick up noticeably this week.  Here’s hoping for a great summer of training.

Hapkido, TKD, Training

I mentioned several weeks ago that I worked with one of the red belt candidates during the promotion exam.  He was very tense and rigid.  This is common when he is training — all of his muscles are continuously engaged.  His kiyap tends to be an explosive release of pent-up air, rather than a quick contracting of the abdominal muscles.  I’ve worked with him on several occasions on relaxing during techniques, and while he works at improving these things, they do not come naturally to him.

Things came somewhat to a head during his promotion exam.  He has high standards for himself, and takes his training seriously.  But the dark side of that occurs when he doesn’t live up to his own expectations.  And when that happens, he has a lot of negative self-talk.  He was even verbalizing some of that under his breath when I was his uke for wrist grabs.  I told him to relax, breathe, and slow down.  All of those suggestions were probably as welcome as a tornado in a trailer park.

He was promoted at the conclusion of the exam, obviously frustrated and disappointed by his performance.  At the end of the exam, the black belt panel gets a chance to offer some critques and suggestions of things to work on in the future.  The comments by the other instructors involved the same concepts I have mentioned.

Two days after the exam, I got an email from him saying that he was going to suspend his martial arts training due to some personal (family and work-related) issues that he needed to work through.  He felt that his martial arts training wasn’t helping him in those areas.  He was also frustrated at his inability to get his basics straightened out.  After sitting on the email for a day or two, I wrote him back.  The gist of my email was that if he needed the time for personal issues, that obviously came first.  But as far as training, I didn’t want him to stop due to frustration.  All of his technique issues (short-arming punches and punches, slow turning kicks, poor balance at times, clenched kiyap) are due to the same lack of relaxation.  I also suggested that if TKD wasn’t meeting his needs, that perhaps he might try Hapkido at the dojang, or possibly yoga elsewhere.  I received a “Thanks” email in reply, but no other communication from him.  I knew that at least one other instructor had spoken with him about his discontinuing his training, so there were other voices in his ear.

But, much to my surprise (and pleasure), he came to this past Saturday’s TKD class.  He was in a much better frame of mind.  He has decided to start taking Hapkido, which should definitely help him move more fluidly.  He is going to scale back the TKD to just Saturday morning, which is usually a high-energy class.  Hopefully he’ll be able to begin to apply some of the principles he’ll be learning in Hapkido during the Saturday class.

Yesterday was his first Hapkido class.  I didn’t get a chance to speak with him afterwards (since I was busy teaching a class), so hopefully it went well for him.  It was a tough class for a new student to jump into, as it turned out, since we were working a lot on a counter to kotegaeshi (wrist turnout), which is tough when you don’t know how to do a kotegaeshi in the first place.  We’ll see how he does with his new martial arts focus.

Hapkido, TKD, Teaching

Today was my latest appointment with the doctor.  Two X-Ray’s and an exam, and I’m in perfectly good shape!  Apparently the soreness and stiffness is still to be expected.  The collarbone is still in the place it is supposed to be, and he was pleased with that.

I’m cleared for lifting weights, so I’ll try to phase that back in a bit.  I still have my chinup bar hanging from a doorframe, which I had stopped when I was getting a little bit sore.  I’ll phase some pushups back in as well.  I might go back to Physical Therapy once or twice more, but I think at this point I don’t really think that it will be helpful enough that I’ll continue to devote time to going there.

I’m still not allowed to get back into grappling, nor do I wish to stress it in that sort of way.  I’m going to have to be comfortable rolling over that shoulder in order to start grappling back up again.  And I’m still kind of babying it when I fall in Hapkido.

Here’s hoping it continues to improve.

Health

I haven’t written a shoulder update in a while (in fact, I haven’t written much in a while).

Over the last week, my shoulder has begun hurting a more.  I backed off of Physical Therapy and some of the other strengthening exercises I was doing.  The AC joint itself is sore to the touch, in addition to the upper trapezius and other back muscles being locked up tight.  The doctor had said that the surgery is designed to be overly tight at first, and is expected to loosen up.  I’m starting to wonder if it has loosened up more than it was supposed to.

Of course, I haven’t really backed off of other things, such as tennis and sparring, and I’ve been doing some light falling in Hapkido.  I haven’t specifically reinjured it in any way since Day 5, when I thought I may have tweaked it.  But it still has some instability in some directions, which troubles me slightly.  Fortunately, I don’t have to wonder much longer.  I have my next appointment with my doctor tomorrow.  Hopefully everything is fine, and I’m worrying about nothing of import.

Health