Testing Spirit

Modern physical exercise can sometimes be a detriment to karate. Mostly because you repetitively use your muscles in the most inefficient means possible. It's what provides the stress, which helps grow them. In karate we want to use our muscles and structure as efficiently as possible, which is designed to not stress your muscles so you can fight longer. This doesn't mean however that muscle building exercises are bad for karate. They just need to be kept in the correct context. One very good aspect of these exercises is testing the spirit.

In many muscle building exercises, the goal is to reach total muscle failure. This means you could not do another repetition in perfect form if your life depended on it. Your muscles are completely tapped and will need a rest. There was a Gunnery Sergeant in the Marine Corps who could work you so hard you couldn't even lift your arms to type for a few hours. This takes a large amount of discipline and courage to train yourself to do. Your muscles burn, they ache, they are screaming at you to stop, and you're trying to force them through immense mental will to do just a little bit more. You're just asking a little bit more. It is a fight. Our bodies and our brains are designed to move us away from pain, to stay still and conserve energy. This is what is easy. Pushing to your complete physical limits is a fight with yourself. It is a complete test of will to do absolutely what is necessary to get the exercise done, no matter how much your arms burn or shake and your brain is telling you to stop.

This makes it an excellent test of spirit. Fighting hurts, you will get hurt, you will get hit and you have to keep pushing through, because if you don't do something it's not going to stop. We should strive never to fight, because it is deadly, dangerous and costly, so we need safe, low risk alternatives to test our fortitude. Exercise is just one small way to test ourselves.

Make Training a Part of Your Everyday Life

Ever since my daughter was born its been harder and harder to set aside a few hours of the day to practice. I now have minutes of practice scattered randomly throughout the day. It's one of the best things about single kata practice that I can take a minute and run through my form. One or two reps here and there, or practicing a section while cooking. This has led me to do all sorts of things to try and keep my physical fitness and karate level up.

Keep weights around the house.

I'll keep a pair of weights or kettle bells at different stations in the house and every time I walk by I make myself do a set. You could do the same thing with calisthenics.

Elastic bands

If you get bored of the weights I sometimes keep a bicycle inner tube slung across me and use it periodically as a resistance band. They take up very little space in a pocket as well.

Make everything harder!

If you do chores around your house or some other banal activity, make it more difficult. Practice stances while you clean. Practice the footwork of kata while moving around the house. Lately I've been sliding a five pound plate onto my brooms, mops and scrub brushes to make cleaning the floor a resistance exercises.

The basic idea is to Mr. Miyagi-hack your day to day. Turn everything into an exercise. It also makes doing the boring housework that comes with life a little more interesting.

Busting Logs

I've been spending a few hours each day splitting rounds of maple. They're from a tree we brought down in my front yard, and it's been a mission of mine to get it from fallen trunk to cords of wood for the last few months. All the rounds are finally sequestered in my driveway, so they're not an eye sore for the neighbors. I'm sure they're liking that. This activity has been my chief source of strength training for the last week, making it a point to spend a few hours on it each day. It was a thirty foot maple, so it's taking some time.

I'm using a sledgehammer, wedges and an axe to split the wood, though I have a chainsaw in my basement. I could get it done much more quickly with the gas-powered tool, but that's not the point. It's a challenge and a monster. Blisters, splinters, some blood and muscles so sore that sometimes it's hard to practice have been my rewards so far, plus dropping ten pounds. What I'll get in the end is more knowledge, more resilience, more strength and a ton of free fire wood. It's worth it to me for just the challenge and the accomplishment.

It seems simple enough on the face of it. Hammer wedge into stump, hit wedge with hammer and split wood. The logs don't know this though. Usually it's hammer, hammer, hammer, ping, and the wedge pops out like it was pushing against a spring. Probably user error along with lack of knowledge, but this is the kind of thing you have to figure out on your own. These are skill based tools. You don't just follow the instructions. These things build mental fortitude as well as physical. You need to work past the frustration, the pain and work toward progress. Swinging the hammer is the easy part. I know that sooner or later it will be routine. Once I've learned the weaknesses of the wood. It will take mindfulness and concentration.

I'm looking forward to what I'll learn.

Why Hojo Undo Equipment is Cool and Stupid

Doing supplementary training exercises in the old fashioned way is pretty cool as a cultural study. I've used these old tools and it's pretty neat to discover exactly which muscles these old karate tools are used to develop. These are usually the deltoids, trapizious, the lats and the forearms. The exercises are performed for endurance because power endurance exercises are the kind of movements you want for physical conflict, but besides cultural study these tools are not necessary.

"If you don't use kigu, you're not practicing karate."

Read this recently and it made me roll my eyes. Almost all of these tools were some form of heavy household object. They ground rice were locks for doors or were just heavy stones. They were whatever you could find that was heavy. A modern equivalent would be lifting milk jugs or bags of kitty litter. In a hundred years it would look pretty silly to come across someone lifting their ancient traditional milk jugs because that's the true way that poor old great grandpa used to do. Besides the fact that the kigu came from Hawaii in the 1920s. The author of the above quote knows this, but I think some people are confusing form for function.

These grand old karateka were looking for results. Remember that there were no organizations, no belts, no ranks (as we know them) and no syllabus. You practiced however you felt made you stronger and you learned from others. You used what came to hand. Skill was what was important and not the kind you showed off to your friends, but the type that got you home at night. I'm fairly positive that if you could drop an Olympic weight set off at Matsumora's house and showed him how to use it, he'd be all over it. It's a lot more versatile than a rock.

If something is not about what you do, but how you do it than that's called aesthetics. Function has it's own kind of beauty, but form by itself is empty. It's an illusion. What counts are results.

There are plenty of free exercises that can work these same muscles. They're called calisthenics. You can look them up online and they only need a body. Your body. But then you'd just need to work hard, instead of playing with cool toys. Granted many of these tools can be made very inexpensively, but five dollars in my pocket is better than some more crap filling up my house.

The practice of one kata is the same. If I can learn karate from one kata than why should I pay someone for 20 if one will serve? Should I buy 20 different cars just in case, or twenty different corkscrews, 20 different kinds of axes? People love collecting this junk, but skill and creativity counts for more than possessions.

Everything and Nothing

The martial arts are weird and especially karate, because we talk about them as if the martial art or the technique does all the work when really it's you who does the work. Technique is just the movement of our bodies. The martial arts are like an idea, real and not real at the same time. They are everything and nothing.

The same thing goes for kata. I like to call kata the shape of the weapon, because it's easier for me to think about it with this filter. Kata is very abstract and this gives it a handle of sorts. It helps me picture what I'm thinking about. By shape I don't mean the embusen, I mean the actual movements and all the parts of the movement. If I could take a photograph of a movement with a low shutter speed, the blur of movement that the camera captured is the shape. It's not the beginning or the end that is important. It's only a guide. It's me who does it, not the kata or karate. There are plenty of ways to interpret kata movements. There are definitely different legitimate ways to look at the same movement. There is no right or wrong. There is only movement. Because of this, kata essentially becomes everything and nothing. Because it's nothing it has the capacity to be anything, because it can be anything it's essentially nothing.

This ties rather well into the idea of mushin no shin, or mind without mind. Thought without conscious thought, or no mind. There is me, my opponent and that is it. My resolve against theirs. Everything else is irrelevant.

Makes me think of the union of mind, body and spirit in a more tangible way. Interesting.

Makiage Kigu

The makiage kigu is a wrist roller. I know my high school weight room had one of these, so it's not exactly an original Okinawan invention, but it's super easy to make.

You basically need a stick, an old broom handle or a dowel. I used part of an old wooden closet rod. You cut it so it's the same length as your shoulder width for the most part. Drill a hole in the center and tie a rope through the hole and tie the other end to a weight. I used an old five pound plate weight that I had.

I won't explain how the exercise is done, because you can just YouTube it. You basically just hold it out in front of you and wind the cord up by rotating the handle like you were rolling up a newspaper.

I have to tell you that I thought 5 pounds was going to be too light. I was wrong. It's not too heavy, but my forearms are screaming by the time I've brought the weight up and all the way back down again. It's definitely going to be great for grip strength.

Grip strength definitely makes things a lot easier. Karate wise a good grip is essential for hikite, grappling, gouging and possibly finger strikes like the nukite. It makes a lot of none karate stuff easier too. I spent a significant amount of time moving furniture for relatives over the weekend, and it was pleasant having the hand strength to grip at all those weird points you end up grabbing when you move shelves, couches, nightstands and tables.

I recommend anyone add this to their training regimen mostly because it's cheap and easy to make, takes up little space and improves strength and health.

Mental Training

I've read that doing things you hate is good mental training. This also includes doing things that scare you, but aren't dangerous. Public speaking for instance. I don't like doing certain things, but it was very hard to come up with something that I truly hate doing. I was coming back from the grocery store the other day and saw two young women running together on the sidewalk and chatting and I thought to myself, "I really hate running." I then realized what I had to do, and honestly wished I didn't have to do it.

I used to run all the time when I was in the service. Five-mile runs were common almost every morning whether it was raining, freezing, snowing or all three. I wasn't bad at running either. I just hated every single second of it. The slow plodding, the burning lungs, the cramps, aches and all the saliva that builds up in your mouth from trying to suck in as much oxygen as you can until you can barely breath, and knowing the whole time that you're completely fine and could probably even go faster. It's hell. If I'm going to work my cardiovascular system, I'd rather ride my bike. I can go for a few hours and relish the burn in my thighs. It feels like flying to me.

Today I went for a run. It was terrible, but I've already decided that I'll go for another one on Wednesday. I don't have to run, but if the point was for it to be easy and enjoyable than I'd just sit on the couch and play video games.

Karate Resolutions

First post of 2016, so I should obviously write about New Year resolutions. Resolutions for me obviously.

First on my list is making some hojo undo equipment and dedicating some time in my fitness routine to them. Mostly the chishi, body conditioning (because fighting hurts), the nigiri game and makiage kigu (wrist roller). I already have the ishi sashi. I like building stuff, and I'm a big advocate of DIY.

I'm also planning on making a makiwara and striking post for testing structure. I've had makiwara in the past, but they keep breaking. The last one lasted about a second before it snapped. It was old wood.

Me and J are also planning at some point to make videos, and we're planning on participating in some local martial arts tournaments.

The tournaments might be surprising to some, but it's just another way to test our karate. It should be fun, give us a little bit of stress and give us a little bit of a challenge. After all the essence of self defense is not being touched and playing a game of tag is a pretty good way of testing that. It's also a chance to meet people.

Other than that the plan is to keep training and keep learning.