A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

I'll have to skip swimming today. Yesterdays strength training left me sore and tired. Getting up at 6 to begin the day by teaching two classes didn't exactly help that fact. Now if there was nothing more to do for me today, I'd force myself to swim. Still having three classes and a nightly meeting with my good friend and mentor Ronny ahead of me, however, I'll have to conserve my energy. Obviously I still need time to get fit for the volume of training my program has me go through every week. Still, I'll try to catch up on that workout before the week is over. In between the classes I've yet to teach today I'll be doing some tennis ball work to help me be fit again tomorrow. By the way, there was an article in a local newspaper about my dojo today. I'll post the scanned image in the evening. So long, take care

Just returned from the pool. I feel great. In fact, I feel much better than I did tuesday afternoon. When I'd have to decide for or against swimming after working out in the gym, I'd rather choose to do it. Of course there's downsides to it, but for me the positive aspects far outweight the negative ones. You see, when I walked out of the gym I wasn't motivated to do just about anything else today. I was completely devastated. Obviously, this affected my performance at the pool. But then, on the other hand, it took me exactly 25 minutes net training time to complete the swimming workout (8 minutes warmup, 10 minutes intervals, 7 minutes cooldown), so I guess my speed hasn't suffered all that much. Also, most people will agree that endurance is as much a mental thing as a physical. Doing my cardio in an exhausted state might actually help my fortitude. It's not the total result that counts with endurance (as opposed to strength and/or speed training, where only m...

I just started my day with swimming. It's been both a pain and a pleasure. The routine: I tend to keep my cardio workouts short and intense. Although what I do can't exactly be called an "HIIT" workout, I do employ a form of interval training. As a matter of fact, it's all pretty simple (I said simple, not easy). I got up at 6 and started my workput at 9AM, so that's three hours for my joints to lubricate properly. Some tennis-ball work for my feet and calves loosened up the legs, which are pretty sore from yesterdays workout. To go to the bath it takes me about 12 minutes, which I've used for joint mobilization in the shoulders, elbows and neck. Once at the pool, I warmed up with 10 lanes (25meters/lane) of breaststroke at a low to moderate intensity. After that, I did seven intervals of two lanes each. The first lane I'd go all-out, crawling, while the second lane was done by backstroke, at an easy pace. With seven intervals, that's another 14 la...