5 minute workouts

Sometimes life gets busy.  Really busy.  Really really busy.  So busy in fact, that I sometimes have to be a little neurotic to make time to train.  And dang, it’s hard to be neurotic when I’m really beat after a long day of work.  But I usually find a way.

As an example, when I travel overseas, I usually spend all day at customers, and then I have to return to my hotel, write status reports, read and respond to emails, and work on all the other projects I have going on at home, making sure I don’t drop the ball.  That’s a challenge.

In Korea and Japan, it goes up a notch, because as part of the business culture I’m often expected to entertain customers after work.  So I spend all day at customers, eat and entertain with customers, and I may not get back to my hotel until 9 or 10pm.  Then I still have to get to my communications, email, and everything else – and go to bed early enough to get back up again and do it all again the next day.

So here are some suggestions for a 5 minute workout, in a hotel room or other restricted space.  One of the main differences between these and the ways I train while on a plane are that many of these take more space, and many of these give me enough of a workout to get my heart pumping very quickly.  I have to give credit for almost all of these to Grandmaster Tae Yun Kim, who continually helps me find ways to train and maintain as I face life’s many other priorities.

• Stretch before going to bed.
  • I originally started doing this when I had no time to workout, but it has since become a ritual for me, which I do daily.
  • It helps me relax and rest better, and helps mitigate the stubborn resistance to flexibility embedded in certain parts of my body (like my hips).
  • I go through some of the stretches we do during regular Jung SuWon class, spending about 1 minute on my legs, 1 minute on my arms, shoulders, and wrists, 1 minute on my neck, 1  minute on my back, and 1 minute on my hips.
  • In a hotel, I often stretch on the bed, on the theory that it’s probably cleaner than the carpet.
• Stand in deep horse riding stance for 5 minutes.
  • If you find this easy, try turning your toes in more, arching your lower back, and going deeper.
• Stand in deep forward stance, switching direction every minute.
  • Don’t put your hands on your legs or on the ground.
  • Instead, hold your elbows at your side or tuck your hands in your belt
• Do full forward stretch, switching direction every minute.
  • Don’t put your hands on your legs or on the ground.
  • Instead, put the hand on the same side as your forward leg over your head in a high block position, and put the hand on the same side as your back leg at 90 degrees to your legs, straight out in middle punch position.
• Do your basic forms in place.
  • In place means never moving more than 1 step away from where you started – meaning sometimes you may move backward instead, and sometimes you may do the arm motion without taking a step forward.
• Hold a side kick as high as you can for 2 minutes on each leg.
  • Don’t prop your leg up – use your muscles.
• Do 500 crunches (give or take)
• Do 30 slow pushups.
  • Take 5 seconds to go down and 5 seconds to go back up for each push-up.
  • Note that I’ve also done push-ups this way when I hurt my elbow – it’s a little easier on the joints than going at high speed.
  • When you’re comfortable with this, change to doing the push-ups slower, or change to doing the push-ups while open in full splits.
• Run stairs
  • I pick 1 flight of stairs (at least 9 stairs), and go up and down, taking 2-3 stairs each step on the way up (as long a step as I can, building strength), and 1 stair each step on the way down (as fast as I can, building speed).
• Do 50 Full frog jumps, 5 seconds between jumps
  • Start with your knees bent, hands touching the ground
  • Jump as high as you can, bringing your knees up as high as they can go (try to touch them to your chest)
  • Land back with hands touching the ground
  • Try to land as quietly as you can – this is kind to those in the room below you, protects your knees, and strengthens your calves and ankles

If you can take 10 or 15 minutes, try doing one of the more physically active exercises, and finish up with 5 minutes of stretching.

None of these can substitute for a full-length workout in class.  But keeping them up – even if only 5 minutes a day – helps me stay toned and flexible, ready for a full class as soon as I get back home.

Physical Challenges

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

- M. Kathleen Casey

In the category of “my favorite excuses”, let’s talk about physical challenges: “I’m injured,” or “I’m not feeling well”.

Either one of these well-worn excuses is worth a whole blog entry all by itself, so I’ll just stick with “I’m injured” for now.

Being injured is a very legitimate, very real reason not to do something stupid and hurt yourself worse.  I have made the mistake of pushing myself too far and injuring myself worse (and not being able to train for a long time), and I do not encourage this in any way.  So then how can we train when we’re injured?

Let me tell you about one of my good friends and fellow instructors, Rocco Pochy  (we call him Dr. Pochy).  Dr. Pochy is a Master instructor, and an extremely intelligent individual, with voluminous knowledge of physics, computer science, and technology in general, a sharp, dry wit, and a ready smile.  He’s a formidable opponent in sparring, whether verbal or physical.

And oh, did I forget to mention that he’s in a wheelchair?  Or that, despite what kinds of challenges he faces – even when he has a hurt shoulder (1 good limb to my 4), or we’re training on the beach where his wheels can barely move in the sand – he never complains.

A few times in Jung SuWon class, Grandmaster Kim gave us a chance to try and experience what it’s like to not be able to use our legs.  She asked us to start at one end of the training floor and crawl – using only our arms, not moving our legs at all, not even our toes – about 40 or 50 feet to the other side.  If you do it right, and really don’t use your legs, it’s extremely difficult and utterly exhausting.  And it’s amazing that I see Dr. Pochy do this all the time.  Without complaining.

Dr. Kim does this to help us appreciate what we have.  It’s pretty easy to say “my knee really hurts,” or “I have a blister on my foot,” or “I have a huge bruise on my shin.”  But when I face Dr. Pochy, it helps me realize I don’t really have anything to complain about.  Just because it hurts doesn’t mean I have to complain about it.

So why am I saying all this – what’s the point.  What I’m getting at is there’s a huge difference between being injured and complaining about it or using it as an excuse.

I was blessed to be born with 2 bad knees.  I had a birth defect in both knees that made it painful for me to do any kicks.  It got progressively worse until about 13 years ago, I had surgery in both my knees to correct the problem.  If any of you have ever actually damaged your knees, you probably know that once you damage them (and any surgery does some kind of damage), they’re never 100% again; I’m now, 13 years later, about 95% with my left knee and about 65% with my right knee.

Sometimes, when I’m in class, my knees just hurt – that’s just life for me.  And if I keep going full speed when that happens, they get worse, and I can really injure myself (keeping me out of class for weeks).  But when I face injuries, I have a choice in how I protect myself – I can stop training completely, or I can adjust what I’m doing to take care of my injury and let myself heal.

The truth is, except for a very few naturally talented individuals (of which I am most definitely not one), all of us need to make adjustments sometimes; we really don’t have a choice.  As a simple example, as white belts, most of us didn’t come in and do our techniques perfectly; truth is, our muscles just didn’t stretch that far yet and weren’t strong enough yet to work that way.  And some of us have physical limitations that prevent us from ever fully getting over that; as a personal example, when it’s time to do a high side kick, my cement hips don’t open up that far, so I have no choice but to adjust and kick a different target.  For me, side kick high is as high as I can kick while still executing the technique properly, and I adjust by picking a target at an appropriate height (but I still do pick a target).

The same applies when we have a temporary injury – we can use it as an excuse to complain and to stop training completely, or we can find a way to adjust that allows us to continue training while still giving us a chance to heal.  For me, when my knees start to hurt (or even when I feel them starting to get tired, before they start to hurt), I adjust by either doing very low kicks or just using my hands.  When I’ve hurt my back (many times), I’ve adjusted by rotating my whole body instead of twisting my waist.

The point is, I find a way that works.  And amazingly enough – and this is really important – I often learn more by adjusting this way than I learn when I go through all the motions normally.  In fact, I’m thankful for my knee surgery in some respects, because for 9 months after my surgery, I used only my hands, and I got very good with my hands!

Injuries shouldn’t be a reason to stop training.  Injuries, and learning how to work with them, are actually an essential part of training.  Physically we learn new ways to do our techniques, and we learn how to handle it if we ever get injured defending our lives.  Mentally we learn to be creative finding new ways to do the techniques and we learn to be flexible, not always relying on the same techniques and combinations.  Emotionally we learn how to deal with the fear of injuring ourselves more and the challenge of not being in our top form, even when facing a partner who still has everything working.

And in all of this, attitude is key.  I think about Master Rocco Pochy, and realize I have nothing to complain about.  I make sure not to push myself too far and injure myself further out of frustration.  And I find a way to make it work, even if that means sitting in a chair, watching class, and going through my forms in my head while everyone else is working out (remember how many things we can do while sitting in a chair?).

So the next time you hurt yourself, choose to continue training, and accept and enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to work around it.  Don’t add insult to injury by making it an excuse as well (ouch )

In-Flight Services

Ok.  I’m on a plane right now, typing furiously into my phone (properly placed into standby mode in accordance with FAA regulations), because I can’t run my laptop yet. I’m on a 1 day trip: red-eye to the East Coast, meetings starting 2 hours after I land and ending less than an hour before I have to head back to the airport to return home.  I’ll be gone about 30 hours total, with about 12 of those hours sitting on a plane, and barely even enough time to shower before my first meeting – how can I possibly find time to train?  Well…where there’s a will, there’s a way.

I’ll give some examples of some of the ways I train while flying (feel free to skip to the list below), but first, maybe I should start by clarifying what I mean by training.

If I’m injured so I can’t participate in class, but I still go to watch class, does that count as training?  Well, it’s not the same as being in class, but it sure as heck beats being a couch potato at home losing brain cells watching the tube.  And actually, I often learn things by watching class that I don’t recognize when I’m actually in class.  So yes, that counts.

What about if I just visualize training, without actually going through the physical motions – does that count as training?  Actually, in Jung SuWon, Grandmaster Kim teaches us to practice our forms and techniques by visualizing and mentally going through motions while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store, walking down the street, or doing any of a number of other things that we often do without much thought or purpose.  Visualization can be a very powerful way to learn new things and help retain what we’ve already learned.  And when I actually think about all the details, including the position of my feet, my back, my hips, my target, where I place my eyes – things which I rarely consciously think about all at the same time when I’m actually performing the technique – I often find myself questioning how I’m actually doing things when I’m in class (do I have my foot in the right position when I do that?).  I often actually learn something new just by visualizing, so yes, visualizing counts, too.

In fact, when I really think about it, anything I do that helps me learn something new, or reinforce something I already learned ultimately helps me improve.  So it counts.

Ultimately, for me, it comes down to the purpose.  Anything I can do that helps me directly improve my physical training, learn something new, become a better instructor, improve someone elses view of the art, retain something I already learned, or even motivate me to take the time to train after I get where I’m going is ultimately going to help me in my training.  So it counts.  At the very least, it’s got alot more to do with training than the alternatives (like reading a business magazine, doing sudoku, or zoning out watching the in-flight entertainment).  And it’s better than the times my body is physically in class, and I’m physically going through the motions, but my mind is so far away on other things that I don’t retain anything; just being in the room doesn’t count as training – training happens when I’m focused on improving.

So now, what can I do to improve and motivate myself while I’m parked in a cramped airplane seat for a 5 or 6 hour stretch?

Here’s some of the things I do, roughly grouped into similar types of activities, but otherwise in no particular order.  Your mileage may vary:
Promoting the Art:

• Smile at the flight attendants, even if they don’t smile back (imagine how rarely this happens to them).
• Strike up a conversation w/the passenger next to you (but if they were trying 2 sleep, don’t tell them I told you to).
• Think of ways to promote your school in your local neighborhood.
• Think of ways to help motivate other students to come to class more often.

Physical Training:

• Drink lots of water, and try not to drink soda, coffee, or alcohol
  • The altitude and dry circulated air on an airplane dehydrate you, which can make you tired and less motivated to train after you land (and can give you a nasty headache).
  • So drink alot to keep up your energy.  Plain old water is best – and tomato juice if you don’t have problems with high blood pressure.
  • Caffeine and alcohol both dehydrate you even more, so avoid soda, coffee, and alcohol.
• Rub your hands together fast.  This works the muscles in your arms and hands, and gets your blood moving.
• Lock your fingers together and squeeze tight to strengthen your fingers.
• Twist your waist in your seat to stretch and strengthen your waist and lower back.
• Perform your hand basics.
  • Be careful not to hit the person in the seat next to you, or the flight attendant walking by – I can assure you from personal experience that neither of them will appreciate it
• Roll your shoulders
• Tighten your stomach and breathe out quickly like you’re about to get hit.  Repeat many times to strengthen your stomach.
• Press your knees together tightly to strengthen your hip and legs.
• Roll and stretch your wrists and palms.
• Press your palms together hard with your palms at chest level (almost like you’re praying), to stretch your wrists and strengthen your arms.
• Work your bruises
  • Grandmaster Kim teaches us to press our fingers into our bruises and rub them HARD (if it doesn’t hurt alot, you’re not pressing hard enough).
  • This breaks up the dead blood vessels and gets the blood flowing under the skin, helping the bruises heal faster.
  • Note: This is also an excellent way to wake yourself up if you’re feeling sleepy but don’t want to fall asleep
• Pound your muscles (hard and fast).  Kind of like a massage, but alot harder.  This works your arms, brings up your energy, and conditions your body to being hit, all at the same time.
• Tighten your foot & calf.
• Do calf raises, pressing down with the ball of your foot against the floor.
• Practice your foot position, striking or pressing your contact point (ball of foot, blade of foot, instep, etc.) into the floor.  Press your foot into the foot rest if you have one.
  • I don’t recommend striking the foot rest – this shakes the seat in front of you, and could bring you future bad karma in the form of a little kid kicking the back of your seat for an entire international flight.
• Push with your toes against the top or bottom of your shoes or against the floor, to strengthen and stretch your toes and the arch of your foot.
• Rotate your ankles, and press your heel into the floor with your feet bent to stretch your ankles and calves.
• Breathe deeply
  • If you’ve learned how to breathe from your abdomen (in Korean this is called tan jun breathing), do this.
  • Otherwise, breathe in slowly, as deeply as you can, hold your breath for a few moments, and then breathe out slowly again through your nose.
• Arch your lower back strongly to stretch your lower back and practice your posture.
• Arch your lower back while twisting your hips slightly to stretch your hips and back.
• Raise your arms up, lock your hands together, and stretch your arms and shoulders
• Stretch your neck
  • Gently, slowly, but firmly touch your chin to your chest, and roll your head around in a circle, then roll it back the other way.
  • Turn your head to the side slowly and gently, pushing to stretch it when you reach as far as you can go; then slowly turn back the other way.
• Practice tight fist, knife hand, ridge hand, and other hand positions.
• Practice which part of your hand to strike with for each of your hand positions, striking the palm of your other hand.
• Practice where to block on your opponents arm by striking the wrist on your opposite arm with each of your hand techniques.

Mental Training:

• Visualize going through your forms
• Plan new 1- 2- and 3-step sparring combinations; if you’re artistically gifted, try drawing them
• Mentally review terminology (in whatever language you use to refer to your techniques and forms during training)
• Review your performance during your last belt test, tournament, or another training event, and think of things you can do and ways you can train to improve
• If you’re an instructor, take time to mentally review each of your students, one by one, and think of new ways to motivate them or help them improve their techniques

• Read a martial arts book or magazine
• Watch a martial arts podcast from youtube (obviously, this requires a little pre-planning)
• Watch a movie with martial arts action or theme.  But don’t just zone out – watch the action carefully, and visualize doing some of the moves yourself and try to figure out how they do really complex or unusual moves.
• Write a letter to the editor of a martial arts magazine, or write a comment to martial arts blog.
• Write a thank you letter to your instructor or your students
• Write a martial arts blog

Emotional and Motivational Training

• Remember why you started training in the first place – what attracted you to training?  What did you want to achieve?
• Review your training history.  Where did you start, and how far have you come?  What have you learned and what have you accomplished?  How many people started training when you did, and how many of them are still training now?
• Remember some great moments and great stories you’ve had during your training – really challenging sparring sessions, days you’ve felt like you were on top of the world, and days you started out feeling like you could barely stand up, but made it all the way through class anyway.  Funny moments, achievements and recognition you’ve received.
• Review your current training goals.  If you don’t have any, take some time to think about and set some.  Why are you training now?  What do you want to achieve?  What are your challenges?  Once you have some goals in mind – even little ones – take some time to plan out how you’re going to achieve them.  What actions are you going to take to make it happen?

When I go through only a few of these, and I start feeling motivated and thinking about when and where I’m going to train after I land.  And doing some of these physical excercises helps me relax and, when needed, get some decent rest on the plane.

You may also notice that many of these could also work while sitting at a desk, driving a car, or sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for an appointment.  It’s true – they pretty much all work anywhere we’re sitting down or standing around waiting, even in a very cramped space, and they’re a great way to make good use of time that might otherwise be wasted; but if you visualize during driving, please do avoid closing your eyes .

Have any other ideas how to train while flying or otherwise trapped in a seat for a long time?  Share them by writing a comment.

Choices, choices

Things to Do, Places to Go, People to See

My most common excuse for not taking time to train is “I have no choice – I just don’t have time.”

Let’s face it, most of us have alot going on in our lives.  Most of us have work or school (or both work and school), personal relationships, family responsibilities, social circles, favorite TV programs, financial obligations, medical difficulties of our own or our loved ones, and a whole host of infrequent and often unplanned events and interruptions from speeding tickets to elections.

So it’s not always easy to find time to train.  Sometimes, it seems darn near impossible.

Helpful(?) Advice

You may have heard alot of advice on this subject.  Things like: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”  “Don’t find time, make time.”  “Make it a priority.”  “Make a commitment.”  “Just do it!”  But what does all this really mean, and how can it actually help me change the end result and get my butt moving?  All this talk about attitude and decisions and priorities sound great, but the things in my life that are taking my time now aren’t just going to go away to make room for training – how do I deal with the physical reality of that?

Physical Changes Come from Mental and Emotional Commitment

There are physical limits to how much we can get done in a day – there’s no way around it.  So to make time to train, we’re probably either going to have to give up something else we’re doing, or maybe (just maybe), “make” time by rearranging our schedules and taking a little less time on a few other things to make room.

But that physical change in our schedule probably isn’t easy to do – if it was, we would have already done it.  So even if we do look strictly at the physical side of things, the mere physical possibility alone probably isn’t going to help.  We’re going to have to find the motivation to put our energy and time into making those changes.  For myself, that motivation is the key, so I’ve found it helps to look at my mental and emotional side first.

Choices

Ultimately, all of those helpful statements of advice we hear are talking about the choices we make.  And ultimately, each of us has to make a choice to train.  One of the most important things – maybe the single most important thing – I’ve learned from training with Grandmaster Tae Yun Kim is that I always have a choice.  I know, I hear you, sometimes we really don’t have a choice!  It’s true.  But I personally find that I also have a tendency to use that as an excuse to be lazy.  And I sometimes find that, in order to start making different choices, I need to recognize some of the choices I’m already making, without consciously recognizing them.

The truth is, any time we choose to do anything, it’s rarely because we have absolutely no other choice – we do it, at that time, because we make a choice to do so.  There may be highly undesirable consequences if we don’t do it, but we still do have a choice- those consequences help “motivate” us to choose one action over our other options.

So without going into any detail of what other things I plan to do, when I say “I don’t have a choice,” what I’m really saying is that I’ve already decided that all those other things are a higher priority than my training.  But is that really the decision I want to make?

What Do I Really Want?

I’ve faced all kinds of challenges to my training in the past 25 years including injuries, illness, personal relationship problems, rough travel schedule, car problems, money problems, moving my family to a new home, and deep questions about what I want to do with my life.  When I’m in the middle of one of these, or when, more likely, I’m in the middle of several of these at once, the pressures and my emotional involvement can make it pretty hard to breathe and sleep properly, let alone think straight and make good choices.  But every time I have a really hard time, and I ask Grandmaster Kim for advice about what I should do, instead of telling me what decisions to make, she always responds by asking me a question back: What do I want?  Not what are my obligations.  Not what am I capable of or what I think is possible.  Not what do I feel.  But what do I want?

And when I stop for a moment, and ignore all the competing priorities and commitments and emotions, and stop limiting my choices for just a minute, that question brings me back to basics.  Why do I want to train – what do I get out of it?  How do I feel about myself when I’m training?  What do I feel like I’m missing when I don’t train?  For me, personally, when I ask what I really want, training – and the benefits I get from training, like physical fitness and lack of stress – are always at or near the top of my list.

Now if you feel like you don’t know what you really want, it may be hard to find time to train.  But don’t feel like you’re alone – when I started training with Dr. Kim years ago, my life was in a total upheaval, and I had no idea what I really wanted.  But Grandmaster Kim helped me here, too.  One day during a special weekend training program, she recommended that if we don’t know what we do want, then we should at least identify what we really don’t want.  That one was really easy for me.  I don’t want stress.  I don’t want to be overweight and out of shape.  I don’t want to sleep 9 hours a night and still feel tired all the time.  I don’t want to be afraid to talk to new people.  I don’t want to struggle to make ends meet every month.

So if you don’t know what you really do want, then identify what you really don’t want.  And then ask yourself if training will help get rid of the things you don’t want?  If the answer is yes, then use what you don’t want to help motivate you to train.  And as you begin to eliminate the things you don’t want, you may just start to learn more about what you really do want.

Making Just a Little Time

I find that sometimes I get so caught up in all the business of my life, that I often forget to ask that question of what I want.  And when I do that, I end up setting my priorities and making my choices based on the circumstances around me or based on what other people want, not what I want.

But whenever I stop and remind myself of what I want, I inevitably find some things in my schedule that maybe aren’t as important to me as I thought they were.  And in those rare times when I still feel like everything I have planned is too important to let go of, or when I’m still not sure what I really want, I still find a way to make a little time – even if it’s only 15 or 20 minutes – to devote to training.

Recognize Your Choices

In a later post, I’ll share some of the things I do to train when I’m really, really short on time – things like taking 5-10 minutes to stretch before going to bed, or going through my forms in my head while I’m driving or in a taxi on the way to the airport, or choosing to take the stairs up to the office instead of the elevator.  But for now, if you find you don’t have time to train, or if you stopped training a while ago and can’t find the time and motivation to get started again, I encourage you to do just 2 things:

• Identify all the other things that are taking your time and energy, and acknowledge that you’re making a choice that these are more important than training.
• Ask yourself what you really want, or what you really don’t want.

If you really do want to train, then these 2 things will help motivate you to start making choices about the physical changes you need to make to get you back where you want to be!