Can you say cardio?

One of the toughest parts of our color belt tests for me is the endurance/cardio.

My goal for this year is to increase my cardio ability while training for my blue belt techniques (Mr. Van set a pretty high standard). Tonight, I felt like I showed promise. It's hard to work in cardio when you homeschool 4 kids, help your husband with his business, and help with the administration of a martial arts school. I also do web work for my son's drum teacher. So you can imagine my days are pretty full and it's easy to let cardio go by because it's the hardest thing for me right now. Nevertheless, it's the key to losing the rest of the weight I want to loose. I've lost 20 pounds so far and would like to see 25 more go away this year. It's been slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

This brings me back to tonight. I've been training, although I must admit not to the consistency that I should, with Sensi TJ using Crossfit. For the most part it is body weight exercises that you do as fast as you can or other days it's a specific number. I was skeptical that I could even do them at first but I kept plugging away and I can tell I am making progress.

Tonight, Soke asked me to teach the open class. I was a little nervous because I've only taught one other open class for adults and tonight I had 2 black belts from other systems in my class as well. But, I had planned out what I wanted to do and I wanted to work on cardio! Osu!

Here is what we did:

Warm up: up two flights of steps and down 3 times, light stretches and front leg dynamic stretch. Because this was everyone's 2nd class of the evening we were already pretty warm.

Cardio: 8 sets of (35 kicks, 10 pushups, 10 situps, 10 squats)

(the kicks we did moving up and down the dojo are: front high kick, inside
crescent, outside crescent, side kick)

Cool down: lots of leg stretches using our belts to help pull the stretch

Ending: I showed some cool tips on the spear finger strike that Sensi Kendall had showed me earlier.

Time: 40 minutes

That's a total of 280 kicks (I think we actually did 285 because I forgot to stop a couple of times), 80 pushups, 80 situps, and 80 squats. How cool is that! I didn't know I could do 80 pushups! It's amazing what you can do when you push yourself.

Everyone did awesome! Truthfully, I was wiped out after this and boy are my legs letting me know I need to continue working on my cardio consistently! However, I was so excited that everyone actually enjoyed the class.

It's a good feeling when you lead a class and feel like you are helping others progress. I got a glimpse of why black belts get so much enjoyment from teaching and watching their students progress. That was pretty cool.

Happy training,
Lisa