Trick to help your skills based sport/event

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My friend Karen is a very good swimmer and she train 5-6 days a week.  In an event like swimming, you need both very good conditioning (so you don’t run out of puff and sink) and very good technique (so you don’t waste energy as you go through the water).

We were looking at Karens current training timetable and she cycles through “hard” and “easy” days each week.  What this meant was, she would crank it up to 11 and go all out on her “hard” days, but simply ease back and go through the motions on her “easy” days.

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Assessments: Body Composition part 2 – Body Fat

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In part 1, we covered ways to measure your weight (bathroom scales and BMI) and a measure of fat distribution (waist/hip ratio). Here in part 2, I’m going to cover ways to measure your body fat.  And this is the important thing.  A common goal of many people is to lose weight, when they should be trying to lose fat.  The following methods are ways to measure how much body fat you are carrying.  I would say that it is much more important to maintain a healthy fat level, than an arbitrary weight.

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Assessments: Body Composition part 1 – Body Weight

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I’ve split the Body Composition post into 2 parts.  In this part I’ll brief you on 3 simple ways to assess your body composition (Bathroom Scales, BMI and Waist/Hip Ratio). In part 2, I’ll go over some less common and more specialised ways to assess just how much body fat you have. First of all…What is body composition?

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Fit for different things.

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As I have mentioned previously in my article “An Introduction to Getting Fitter“, there are different types of fitness.  These include, but are not restricted to, being fit for:

  • Running a marathon
  • Sprinting 100m
  • Throwing a javelin
  • Stepping into a ring for a fight

Now you might think “what the hell does this have to do with me…i’m not doing any of them, I just want to get a bit fitter for health/life/performance“.  Well here’s a real world situation…

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Warming up – Karate specific

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Last week I told you about warming up in general.

As promised, this week I’m going to give you an account of one way I warm up a Karate session.  For me, the priorities of Karate training are:

  • Acceleration
  • Reaction/reflexes
  • Body Coordination/balance/agility
  • Limb/eye coordination

My warm ups usually start with basic, generic moves and progress onto more Karate-specific drills of increasing speed and complexity.

Remember, this is just an example of one way I warm up a session…here goes!

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Form follows function.

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Most people asking me for training programmes do so for aesthetic purposes.  They want to lose weight, “tone up”, get big guns…in other words, they want to look better and don’t care about anything else.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with training to look better…but in my experience, people need to work hard and changes are fairly slow.  And this can be demoralising for anyone.  So many people “fall off the wagon”.

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