Nearly two weeks back Black Belt Mama wrote a post on the wonderful wonderfulment (yes, you read that correctly :P) that she terms Gym-Legs. While I can’t profess to the plural, I can confidently say I have the case of the wobblies with my right leg. I spent the Saturday and Sunday afternoons just gone squatting, sitting or standing behind my latest toy:

Yes, that’s a Sega Astro City. It barely fit through the door, the chassis (the boards the power the tube monitor) blew 4 days after first receiving it, and even after installing a refurbished chassis on the weekend and accidentally blowing that up (note to my fellow nerds – don’t forget to connect that earth cable on your video chassis!!!), I still love it. I think Wifey will come to love it too once I’ve stopped nerding around on it and we can play some old school scrolling fighting games or Moon Patrol together, but we’ll see how that goes.

Anywho, Saturday and Sunday arvo were spent wiring up, testing, and disassembling the chassis, throwing in some extra wiring on the JAMMA adapter for MVS stuff, and swearing profusely at it. This involved all manner of sitting/standing/squatting/storming-off-in-a-huff, and my right leg is well and truly telling me off now.

So this one’s to BBM – I’m totally feeling your pain right now!

What’s making it doubly interesting is that I’m hammering through my second cold in a row, which means my asthma’s flaring up and doing a good leg workout to iron out the kinks is out of the question. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution!

Once again, karate comes in to save the day – I spent about 20 minutes this evening going through all my leg stretches I normally do in class, and then did a couple of dynamic leg lifts afterwards. The end result certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than before!

So there you are – if you’ve done yourself a nerd injury from tinkering with stuff, karate training can help you get back on your feet. Or in my case, foot 🙂 I’ll hopefully be ready to roll into a good weight training session tomorrow after work, complete with my usual stretches and exercises in prep for next week’s class.

Bloginated Monday, 1st June 2009 / Injuries
Tag-isms: stupid injuries

It’s a bit belated, but oh well – better late than never!

Last week’s training went well – put in as much effort as I could on the night and really felt good afterwards. I love it when you have a training session, your gi ends up getting soaked through all the persperation, you feel knackered, but you come out of class on this crazy natural high. Gotta love it 🙂

Anywho, the theme of last week’s session was two-person drills – one blocks, one attacks, swap arms, then swap sides. I was a bit unco at first (I get the feeling this is a personal feature rather than something I’ll eventually get over :P), but eventually I got into the rhythm of things and it went well. The cool thing is that the session ended up being a good way to start working on conditioning the arms, in particular the forearms. I remember in the school I used to train at before my current one that Jyastin-kun and I used to go full-on with blocking and striking drills, and it used to be a regular thing going to work the next day sporting bruises all over my arms. I must have gotten out of practice though, as I was struggling towards the end of it to put in the max effort on each block knowing what was coming 🙂 It’s taken my nearly a week, but I’ve finally come out in a weak bruise on my right forearm, so there wasn’t even much to show for the pain 😛 Ah well, gotta toughen up and start working on this – my forearms used to be able to take much more punishment than this, so hopefully Sensei will start doing this regularly.

Aside from the frills, we also did kata – I’ve asked Sensei to start being very particular with my form so I can work on the small details to really round it out – I let my age-uke slip a little higher than usual (a bit of a goju habit I think), so I’ll be paying attention to that, and my stances as there’s bound to be a grading coming up, and I’m keen to push myself hard to try and make it, and do a really good job at it. I’d feel disappointed if I went to a grading but only kinda slipped through with an average record, I want to push to really achieve a strong grading. Otherwise I don’t really think there’s much point at all.

Bloginated Monday, 1st June 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: Conditioning | kata | training