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I relate my experience with martial arts and twitching/cramping calves below:

July 9, 2007

Day 6: Kenpo X

I felt pretty good when I awoke this morning. Not too sore.

As I was falling asleep last night I was a little uncomfortable with the way my calves were twitching. Throughout my life, but especially in high school, I have periodically been awakened by intense pain in one of my calves due to it cramping up. The first time it happened, it was downright scary. However, I soon got used to it and learned what to do: breath and stretch.

In high school, my physician and the school trainer both thought it was related to dehydration and, when they found out that I consumed very little salt, they prescribed salt tablets. At the time, these seemed to help. Now, I just make sure I’m taking in some form of electrolytes and I look for the early warning signs of an upcoming cramp and breath and stretch in advance… and that is just what I did last night.

Although I have experimented with martial arts some, similarly to my yoga experience, I’ve never dedicated myself to it. I’ve spent the most time with Tai Chi and Brazilian Ju-Jitsu.

There were certain aspects of Tai Chi that I liked: the philosophy behind it, and the idea of using your opponent’s energy and aggression against them especially. However, it required you to position your hips in a way that, having spent much of my athletic life in the western athletic position, I couldn’t seem to get the hang of (at least not as quickly as I would have liked). Additionally, it wasn’t delivering the workout that I wanted, and when I looked around at my instructors, while they had extremely strong cores, their legs and arms and uppers backs were totally undeveloped. I must admit, I didn’t really want to look like them.

I took more of a liking to Brazilian Ju-Jitsu. I got into it in part because the winners of the Ultimate Fighting type contests always seem to be Brazilian Ju-Jitsu guys and I got the opportunity to train with a former female grappler champion (C.J. McCue, 2004 Grapplers Quest Absolute Champion, among other accomplishments, I believe). However, I soon tired of it. At the time I really wanted to just get outside and go hiking, it felt graceless grappling on the ground all the time (the idea behind Ju-Jitsu is that most fights end up on the ground, so that’s where you need to know how to fight), and, honestly, my nuts were always sore afterwards (I was not born with “balls of steal”) and I was concerned about doing some serious damage if I kept it up.

Anyway, all of this is an introduction to say that I had never tried Kenpo… until today.

I really enjoyed it! Although, I’ve got some work to do with the side and back kicking in particular. Also, I think it may take some time to get the coordination down, especially on the fast combination punching and blocking moves.

I’m still working on the side and back kicks, but my form and height have certainly improved a great deal since Day 6! One thing I find interesting when I do a little self psychoanalysis is that I find myself throwing punches and kicks at random throughout the day. I think, subconsciously, Kenpo X may be my favorite P90X workout.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under Exercise, P90X, Ripped. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.