Cards of Doom

We do not stop exercising because we grow old - we grow old because we stop exercising.     

- Kenneth Cooper

Even when we are pushing ourselves, I think that we subconsciously 'protect ourselves'. I love to push myself yet I know that in the back of my mind I'm weighing just how rough a drill/exercise is going to be.

Some of the best workouts my Kung Fu school has done in a long time have been what we lovingly call Cards of Doom. What is that you ask?

We take a deck of cards and, going around the school, take turns drawing two cards. The first gives a guide to the amount / duration that we will be doing. The second determines the type of exercise. Spades are legs, clubs are arms, diamonds are abs, and hearts are cardio.

If a joker is drawn in the first draw - the student can choose any amount / duration and exercise they want. If a joker is drawn in the second, they can choose any kind of exercise they wish.

This has repeated resulted in us choosing counts / durations and exercise combinations we would have NEVER sanely chosen! It has been amazingly brutal. Just what our conditioning workouts should be! 

Sweat Now

What you don't sweat out when you're young will turn into tears when you're old.

- Japanese Proverb

We are all huddled and trapped right now. And even though some of us are still training via video conferencing it is difficult to keep our physical activity up, at the level it usually is. Now is an excellent opportunity to build skills that will not only keep us fit but will benefit our Kung Fu training as well!

I believe that the biggest benefit of formal martial arts training is actually the accountability. Every A day of the week you have class at B time. It's fixed, there's no flexibility. That's when it is and it doesn't matter if you are feeling tired etc, that's class time. On our own it's easy to let our training time migrate around, it's easy to get lazy. And - at least for me - once I end up skipping one or two home workouts/practices I end up not doing it at all. My home workouts just stop.

What I've been doing is picking one area focus per day. For example one day would be abs, the next arms, and so forth. Throughout the day, any time I have a moment, I work exercises in that area. This way, even if I end up too busy to set aside a decent amount of time, I at least got SOME exercise in.

If you are interested in learning Kung Fu call us - we are currently training via Zoom, while we are forced to isolate:

(253) 268-2874

Freedom Martial Arts Academy, 2908 Meridian East, Suite 107, Edgewood, WA 98371