I’ve been sticking with the P90x workouts I detailed five weeks ago. I have been happy with my results so far. The weights and reps have been slowly increasing. I haven’t measured my biceps or other parts of my musculature recently, but I think there’s been improvement there.
By far the most encouraging thing about my workouts, though, is the stability of my shoulder. I’m no longer feeling any slippage or crunching of scar tissue in my AC joint when I do pushups. Wide grip pushups are relatively easy, while military-style pushups are more troublesome from a strength standpoint than from a stability standpoint.
My left side is still lagging behind my right in a lot of the exercises. It is especially noticeable during bicep exercises, which is a little surprising (I’d have expected a bigger difference in shoulder exercises). The right side of my back is a bit weaker than my left due to the muscle paralysis that I’d gotten nearly two years ago from Lyme disease. Last week those same weakened muscles were spasming a bit on me, so my shoulder blade wasn’t quite working the way it should. The spasming has relaxed, and things are good.
This past Wednesday during TKD class, the instructor pulled out the stopwatch for 2-minute max pushups (and situps). I was able to do 70 full-range pushups, though a couple of them were a bit sketchy. This was at the end of class, and it was also at the day after doing a couple hundred pushups as part of my Sunday P90x workout. Not up to the 90+ I could do a couple of years ago before these shoulder issues took me down, but it is definitely a sign that I’m making good progress.
Training
Finally, a post. Things are going well in my life and my training, but I just haven’t gotten around to posting in a while. So here’s a bit of a recap.
When I teach, I generally am teaching the subjects that resonate the most with me at the time. This week, it was rolling and falling. The beginner class was pretty small at seven students, so we pulled out some of the mats and worked on rolling and falling. Two of the students were white belts who had never done it before, and several others had only done it once. I’m not sure if my instructions on soft rolling are improving, or if the new students were just naturals. On the surface, they didn’t appear to be naturals, so maybe I can feel good about my teaching. After rolling for a while, we worked on side falls, which also went well. Finally, we worked on takedowns from a padded baton attack. The students attacked the black belts and got practice falling safely. Then we reversed rolls and had the students take the black belts down so they could begin to feel how to off-balance an opponent.
The intermediate class this week was primarily run by the secondary instructor for that class. The Wednesday Hapkido class overlaps with the intermediate class by 15 minutes, so I let him do the warmup so I could stay for the full Hapkido class. He was having so much fun running class that I let him stay with it for most of the rest of the class. He was running a lot of moving kick/punch drills. I took over the last fifteen minutes for 1 minute max pushups and situps, then for some kneeling wrestling takedown fun, and finally a few minutes on doing a scissors sweep from guard. I might be adding some more ground work in the coming weeks.
The previous week, I focused on forms and one-steps. The week prior to that was a high-rep upbeat class with a lot of kicks. Spinning back hook kick is a common trouble spot for most of the green belts, so I think there’s a good chance I’ll focus on that with them soon.
TKD, Teaching