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Welcome to my Blog.

This is my first attempt at keeping one, my reasons for keeping this Blog are as follows

1. To clearly see my progress in my training as I will be keeping up to date records.

2. To help others with their own training by recording my exercises and goals and giving tips and ideas.

3. To help me reach my own goals, because if I put my goals for all to see then I have to achieve them.

4. I enjoy adding stuff to this site.

Goals:

I am writing this two days after my last competition.  As a team, we came home with a silver medal, which was great but my performance in the individual rounds could have been better. Having a little more mat time than my last competition I came away learning a great deal, learning about myself and other fighters.

So this experience has lead me to a long term goal, the thing with achieving goals is to break them down into smaller goals and reach these one at a time.

My long term goal is to win an individual gold medal in any karate event.

To achieve this I have set myself smaller targets to reach.

1. Lose at least half a stone, at present I weigh 16 stone and want to reach 15 1/2 stone.

2. Improve my fitness

3. Enter competitions on a regular basis

I will try to update this Blog on a daily or weekly basis until my goals have been reached.

Friday 25th May 2007

Woke up this morning and it was lovely so started to plan what training to do, should I go to the park and have a good sprint session followed by different exercises on the playground equipment?  Or maybe take a slow jog down to the track and run through my kata and some shadow boxing?  I just couldn't make my mind up.  Anyway in the end I didn't train in the morning and by the time the afternoon arrived it was raining!  Typical English weather!! 

In the end, and because of the rain, I just went for a run, I increased my distance as I didn't feel like anything else afterwards (couldn't really decide on what to do), I must have ran around about 5 1/2 miles in a time of 44.38 minutes which is really slow.

To see my running diary click - Here

My excuse is that I was still coughing whilst running making my breathing hard, or is it just because I'm a bad runner?  I will leave that for you to decide, but be warned, I like the first excuse and I also take some of your lessons, so agree with me or suffer (evil laugh).

I normally try and train 6 days a week resting on Sunday, but this week is bank holiday weekend and I have a few things to do so not sure if I will be back to training Monday or Tuesday.  The extra rest will not do me any harm.

One of the things I have learnt over my 18 years of training is that rest is a very important factor of your training, without the proper rest you body cannot repair and you will end up with a injury.

Have a nice Bank Holiday weekend and I will see you in class.

Thursday 24th May 2007

Thursdays are squad session days, These are held in the evening with me getting there around 8.30. However the hall is use tonight and we can't use it.

I normally do my running first thing in the morning on a squad day so I'm rested before the evening session, but as the squads are not on I done my run at 4 in the afternoon running my 3.5 mile route.

I took it at a easy pace today as still have a cough and a little stiff in the legs from yesterdays workout, the run was hard and I finished at least 1min slower than my personal best.

To see my running diary click - Here

As soon I got back it was in to the back garden for a few exercises.

100 Press ups - 100 Sit ups - 30 Burpees. I had to break them down into sets, so 4 sets of 25 Press ups - the Sit ups I done as 1 set and the Burpees 3 sets of 10. 

Wednesday 23rd May 2007

Track training today at the local running track. On nice days (and not so nice days) I often go down there as there is a nice big flat area ideal for kata practice and what can be better than training outdoors with the sun beating down, beats a sweaty dojo any day!

Started with a light jog round the 400 metre track, 4 laps (1 mile approx) is an ideal warm up. Once warm I ran 10 one hundred metre sprints building speed with each run.  I use the walk back to the start line as rest and run back down straight away.  Then I moved on to my  body weight circuit (to see click Here) Just worked once through doing 10 reps of each exercise, took my time as my legs were tired from the sprints.

I then trained Kata performing each one with care concentrating on my stances, started with Pinan Nidan and finished with Kankusho.

Finished with shadow boxing in front of the large window, not just to see if I looked good (which of course I did) but to use as a training aid as you can spot yourself making mistakes (which I never make of course!).

Had a small warm down stretch and went home in all about 1 1/2 hours of training (and got a nice sun-burned forehead).

Tuesday 22nd May 2007

Have got a bit of a cough and as Tuesdays are my running days I decided to go for my smaller distance run of around 2.5 miles.  Finished the run by doing my set body weight exercises.

To see my body weight exercises click - Here ( pictures will be added at a later date)

Tuesday evening I am teaching my class and sometimes join in, or at least have a good stretch but as I have a cough I just stuck with the stretching.

Monday 21st May 2007

Went to the gym in the morning - weight 16 stone exactly.

Started with chest workout and preformed bench presses.

I slowly add weight on each set reaching about 80kg for my last set of ten reps.

Moved on to squats working my legs, using a barbell again placing more weight with each set reaching around 80kg for my final set of 10.

Using the same barbell I moved to upright rows working my back muscles again placing more weight with each rep reaching around 60kg for my final set of 10 reps.

For my final exercise I did 'clean and jerks' using the same barbell, this being the first time I have performed this exercise I kept the weight low. This exercise is a power lifting move.

Finished my workout some what sweaty but happy I trained hard.  My workout is quite short compared to a body builders or power lifter but it covers most of the muscles I need for fighting.

I will add details and some pictures of this routine very soon.

Evening session was karate with Shane teaching.  These sessions can be very intense but I think Shane realised that myself and the other students needed a slightly easier session tonight. Good work was covered on basics and some fun stuff on kata.