Sometimes you just have to be ready to hear the truth, and then it sinks in, and you say, “Okay. Gotcha. No more excuses.”
At least with me, that’s how it works.
If I got an old fashioned report card for my physical attributes, I’d do okay in everything but my flexibility. In which I’d get a great big ol’ “F Minus”, in red, with an exclamation point. With a notation that I’m working below my potential.
And I know that perfectly well.
So there I am reading Rob Redmond’s great blog (and the inspriation for this blog), which is mysteriously named 24 Fighting Chickens, even though the subject matter is Shotokan Karate.
And Rob Redmond says, and I paraphrase, stretching isn’t rocket science. Stretch for five minutes in the morning and for five minutes in the evening every day. And you’ll see remarkable improvement over a short time.
So I had an “aha!” moment. And now I’ve decided to take that excellent advice, rather than continue my current protocol, which is to whine five minutes every morning and then whine five minutes every evening about how inflexible I am.
With a 30 day self-evaluation to see how I’m doing.
So every morning, I’ll do five minutes of stretching, and every evening, ditto. And I’m going to throw in the secret three-hundred kick practice that’s a part of the Shodan exam (I’m not sure it’s really a part of the formal exam, but it’s sort of a friendly hazing thing. Nobody gets told about it formally, we don’t much train for it, so the examiners are looking for how well you handle the calm instruction to do one-hundred fifty kicks on each leg at the end of the exam you’ve worked hard to perfect. Front kicks, side and back. And it seems to me that they don’t really care how well you do it; they seem to care how hard you try).
Note: three hundred kicks on each leg, without putting your foot down between kicks, is no particularly big deal; it’s just a matter of doing it a few times a day until it’s ordinary practice. I’ll be steadying myself on a chair until my muscles and wind and balance improve. And it’s best if you work up to it. Mind you, some people (many, I’m sure) who’ve studied for a while can just do it without thinking. But I’m not as young as I was, so I’m going to do progressive increases in the number of kicks, and sets, and repetitions, until it’s easy to do.
That’s the theory, anyway. The flexibility I know I can get, if I just quit whining and do it. The kicks, maybe.
So my show-off moment, if I can manage it at age 60, is to see if I can do a snappy job of my three hundred kicks. Without falling over. And without breathing like a steam engine.
Will it make me a better karate student?
Well, no.
But remember, people will literally die for the recognition of their peers.
And I are a people.
Note: Andre Bertel is another blogging karate guy. Note that both Andre and Rob Redmond have great blogs, and are MUCH MUCH MUCH more advanced students of karate than I am. Interestingly, Andre seems to feel much the same way about the traditional Shotokan stretching routine in classes that Rod Redmond does. That is, that they aren’t perfect. Both gentlemen seem to believe that warming up first, before stretching, is a better idea than stretching and then working out. Mind you, you should read their opinions rather than my thoughts about their opinions.
Now, do you think I’m going to go to Sensei Koyama and say, “Sensei, let’s change the stretching routines in class!”
That would be a “no”.
I’m a STUDENT. Not a teacher.
But give me another thirty years or so, and I may actually have an opinion of my own!
p.s. okay, did not do a good job of following through with stretching.
p.p.s. life has interfered with my stretching project. Fortunately, I’m still on the right side of the grass, so I’ll be able to remedy that.
