Personalise Your Training - Ask the right Questions - Part 1

Article by Idai Makaya

This article was written for the June 2007 edition of Martial Arts Illustrated Magazine.

Safety and sustainability must always be the primary considerations when designing a training program – whether for yourself or for other people. The main focus should be on physiological safety and effectiveness. The term ‘physiological’ refers to biological structure, function and development of the body and general anatomy. Ignorance about physiological safety is actually dangerous when deciding how you are going to train yourself and it’s unacceptable when you are training others who have invested their trust (or even their money) in receiving your advice.

Ideally, training should be tailored to suit the individual concerned. The aim of this article is to help you develop ways of successfully processing and applying any knowledge you have gained – whether from your instructors, your colleagues, books, the internet, or any of a multitude of other sources. I will also make suggestions which will assist you in becoming more discerning about how and where you look for training information. This should enable you to determine what is actually of genuine value to your particular circumstances. In my next article we will then analyse an actual example of applying these principles to a training and conditioning challenge.

Whether or not you are a beginner, your initial concern should always be to ensure that your training routine is actually safe, sustainable and effective. Sometimes this can be unexpectedly difficult to determine because of a lack of information or experience. Many of us are not sure where to look for the information we need on training or physiological safety, apart from consulting our club instructor or training mates. Unfortunately, many martial artists, even the very experienced, are not physiologically trained and although they have a wealth of unique advice and insight to offer, they may not be in a position to answer queries relating to more medical/physiological challenges.

Such information is not easily found and is usually hidden in really obscure places. The martial arts world is a very insular one and training information is often passed to others through relatively isolated personal interactions. For this reason, it is sometimes very difficult to find external, researched information pertaining directly to one’s own specific martial arts training and conditioning needs. The latest discoveries and advances in sports science tend to filter more slowly into the martial arts. This is probably because of the fact that the martial arts are one of the last sports to be commercialised.

.Commercialisation forces advancement in training techniques for competitive reasons and the commercial sports and fitness industry has greatly benefited from this. Luckily, with the advent of professional kick boxing and the mass marketing of kick boxing fitness routines, the martial arts are finally beginning to see rewarding training advances as well.

These new advances in martial arts conditioning may not be in areas pertinent to your specific needs. Nor may they even be in the public domain as yet. One possible solution to this problem is to look towards mainstream sports and carry across some of the established research knowledge that has been accumulated in those disciplines pertaining to general or specific conditioning. Human bodies are all relatively similar in the way they respond to physical exercise. The limbs and muscles are only capable of a limited number of movement options and your body doesn’t really know whether it’s doing judo, wrestling or swimming. It simply carries out physical functions as directed by the brain. This logic gives martial artists a starting point when looking for additional conditioning knowledge if they are having difficulty finding advice specific to their particular training challenges.

Most people do not stretch correctly which is why they fail to reach their true potential.

However, even when the correct training information may have been identified it still needs to be interpreted or applied appropriately. You may wonder where best to begin. A key tip to help us evaluate our current training, or any new training drills, is to retrospectively look back over our training history and ask ourselves the following questions:

• Are my current training drills helping me to improve measurably over time? Am I progressing towards my training goals at the correct pace? For instance, are my kicks getting better, higher, more accurate, etc? If it all seems to be going well then keep on doing what you have been doing. If you are not satisfied, perhaps you need to reconsider your training and what may be improved on or replaced.

• Do the moves I practice feel natural? Are my joints comfortable during and after training? How do I feel the morning after certain types of training? Are my energy levels acceptable immediately after, or in the days following a training session? These questions are especially important when you start doing something new or different to what you’ve been used to.
  
  
• Do I look forward to training - month after month, year after year? A dread of training is usually a good indication that something is not going right. Try to identify the exact problem. Often it is a case of simple overtraining (doing too much, too soon, too often). Sometimes it may be an indication that you are pushing yourself – or being pushed – harder or faster than you are comfortable with (even if you can physically tolerate the training). Whatever the problem is, it needs to be resolved quickly or you will find that you will eventually come up with a good enough reason to drop out of training and spend your time doing something you find more rewarding or more relaxing.
  
  
• Am I often – or constantly – nursing injuries? The implications of such a question are not as straight forward as one might initially anticipate. Sometimes a degree of injury is regarded as a ‘necessary evil’ under certain circumstances. Professional athletes, competing at a very high level, need to push themselves to the limit of their physical durability. In such situations the art is to reach the verge of breakdown and ease off at the correct times – usually when injuries are noticeably worsening and such injuries are likely to limit or stop all further training activities, if left unchecked. Hence, top-level athletes in many sporting disciplines will routinely operate on the verge of injury or within ‘acceptable’ levels of injury. They classify themselves as ‘injured’ only if the injury actually means that they are unable to continue with normal training.

Idai makaya believes you need to know what you are trying to achieve and how you will do it.

Is this definition of injury management really appropriate for you, though?There is another set of questions we need to truthfully ask ourselves to satisfactorily find this out. Ask yourself the following questions honestly:

1. What are my martial arts goals?
2. Are those goals realistic?
3. What are the likely returns of achieving these sporting goals?
4. Do these returns match the possible consequences of any potential training injuries?
5. Do I really know what the future consequences of my training could be – if, indeed, there are any?

Often, a professional or high-level athlete can justify the consequences of their training injuries because the rewards of success are relatively high.

However, the average martial artist (even a very competitive martial artist) should realistically expect to live and train virtually injury-free. Training must be contained within physiologically tolerable limits.

You shouldn’t think that nursing injuries all the time necessarily ‘comes with the territory.’ It is completely acceptable for a martial artist to expect to feel good and to feel strong and healthy all the time. If you haven’t been feeling good physically, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate your training and the position it occupies in your life.

 Also, consider your training routine and methodology. Are you absolutely certain that all your training methods are as safe and effective as they could possibly be?

Many of us are not really able to quantify the answer to this last question. How do we know if we are doing the best we can or whether there are actually much better ways to train that will get us the results we seek with less physical sacrifice? If you find yourself in that position it may be a good time to carry out a thorough self-assessment based on the following considerations:

• What are the long term consequences of the way I train now?

If this is something you haven’t thought about before, please do consider it. Evaluate your full training program. Look into each of the exercises and drills you do. If there are trained or experienced people readily available to you - ask them for their opinions about the exercises or drills you regularly use. Always try to get opinions from a number of unrelated sources for the sake of objectivity. Don’t ever rely on just one source of knowledge. If you don’t personally know anyone who would be able to help you, just use the internet or martial arts books and training magazines.

• Am I actually asking the right questions?

This final question is, perhaps, the most important question of all. Not many people objectively evaluate this aspect of their training – their questioning. Consider the following illustration:

Suppose you want to know a person’s name. You would probably just ask that person what their name is - not what someone else’s name is, or what day it is. If you ask them anything other than what their name is, the likelihood of getting the right information decreases sharply. The goal is unlikely to be achieved.

I’m sure you get the point. But it’s not so clear when we look at more complex, more long-term issues, such as martial arts training. Like the above example, when looking at our training – much like anything else we do in our lives – we need to start by defining our goals. We should have a vision in mind of:

1. What we want to be
2. Why we should do it
3. Where we need to be
4. Who may help us get there
5. When we expect to have reached the goal.
6. How we will actually do it.

Good functional physical development is never by accident, especially in relation to technical progression.

When deciding how to go about achieving our goals we need to look into the small details of everything we do (or decide we are going to do) and have a multi-dimensional vision in mind. Training is a journey. But, unlike some types of journey, martial arts and fitness training is intended to be a lifelong journey. This necessitates planning all the different phases of the journey and updating those plans whenever necessary.

So set short-term, medium-term and long-term goals for your training. Ask yourself where you’d want to go once, for instance, you have achieved Black Belt status - if that is your current goal. Would that be the end of your training journey? Hopefully not. If you were to stop training at that stage, you would immediately begin to unravel your achievement, which took years of sacrifice to accomplish. But if, instead, you were to aspire towards becoming a master or a grand master, then there would be scope to keep moving forward towards new goals - whilst also building on already achieved goals (hence, the analogy of a journey).

Part of martial arts philosophy is continuous improvement of the individual and the society as a whole. You cannot keep returning to the starting point of your journey each time you have reached a landmark goal. Instead, build your goals in such a way that your journey keeps progressing, even if the direction changes at various points. Regularly regressing back to the starting point means you are less likely to be able to measure the true value of your endeavours and you are less likely to be motivated by the realisation that you have moved far ahead of where you started years before.

Another goal-setting example would be if you decided that you wanted to gain long-term fitness through your martial arts training (one of the most common goals martial artists have, research shows). Your training would then be driven by a meaningful, valuable and long-term goal. There are many ways of defining our goals and this is very much a personal thing. We all have different aspirations and inspirations, even within the same discipline – martial arts. But the advice we accept and the advice we reject will make a huge difference to the extent of our eventual success or failure.

At this stage you may be thinking this all sounds very logical but you could also be asking yourself how to practically go about doing the correct thing - asking the right people the right questions. Considering the vast number and array of information sources available to us in the modern world it is no surprise that such a challenge has arisen.

How do we know who to believe?

Asking the right questions is paramount to success. But the situation is compounded by the possibility that you may get a variety of different answers to the same question. So who should we believe?

Pro athletes like Lee Hasdell are extremely goal-orientated and have a thirst for knowledge.

Like many of life’s major questions, there may not be an exact answer to this, unfortunately. Thankfully though, there is a process we can use to focus our efforts on the options which are most likely to bring us the success we seek. It will involve the following considerations:

1.      First and foremost; continuously seek numerous, independent opinions. Multiplicity of opinions is important. Try your best to get a second opinion on any major challenge you face before making a final decision on what action to take. Logic has to prevail here. Some people’s explanations will not hold up to logical scrutiny, so simply discard them. A few will be sound, so investigate them further. Don’t be afraid to make changes in what you do, so long as you base your decision to change on reasoned evidence. Your training should always feel physiologically comfortable. Your joints should feel natural during training, immediately after training and in the days that follow training. The same should be true for any other body systems involved in martial arts. Avoid drills which seem likely to lead to visible disfigurement or which feel like they threaten the structural integrity of any part of your body. Any advice that doesn’t deliver the results it was supposed to, or any training that makes your joints or any other parts of your anatomy feel awkward, should be either reassessed or simply abandoned.

2.       Avoid ‘magic bullets’- baseless or empty promises of extraordinary results in unreasonably short periods of time, often without any provable evidence and claiming to require ridiculously little effort.

3.      Rely on good referrals. If you have heard about or have met someone who has experienced a similar challenge to one you are facing and that person has successfully overcome it, they may well be a useful source of information in your particular quest. Try to get advice from a number of such people. Evaluate it and then implement it.

4.       Find suitable role models. When forming your personal vision or goal, a good strategy is to find out what other people did to achieve similar goals. Never use just one role model. You can’t be exactly the same as another person. Be aware of the fact that some people may have a high natural predisposition to excel in certain aspects of training. Such people are not always the best to approach about their particular strengths because it is possible that even a relatively poor methodology would still have yielded good results for them.

Martial artists must use conditioning drills for their whole body. 

A good role model can often be someone who has had a poor natural aptitude for something but has persevered and been able to find ways to overcome their weaknesses and reach their goals.

Someone of similar experience and ability to yourself could make a highly effective role model for certain aspects of your development. Talk to other students in your club, as well as the instructors. Peers can be great teachers - if utilised intelligently. Sometimes a student at your own level picks up a manoeuvre you are both learning a little faster than you do. That student may be able to assist you to learn in a different way which may work better for you. Do whatever you need to do to improve.

Also be aware of the fact that more experienced practitioners can sometimes gain from novices or even from listening to their own students. Never discount any advice that instinctively sounds good. Give it a try and it may just work better than what you have been used to!

Lastly, if standard methods are not yielding the results you want – even if these methods are apparently working well for others you train with – the principle of personalisation suggests that you try something that is tailored more specifically to you. A good starting point for advice is your instructor. But there are many other independent forms of research you can resort to as well. Just remember to ask the correct questions.

Upon initial consideration, it may appear as if there is an overwhelming amount of ‘questioning’ you need to do and it may all seem quite daunting. Don’t worry. Much of what we’ve looked into in this article is based on good old common sense. You will naturally do a lot of it without really thinking about what you are doing. And once you take on the basics of such an approach you will realise that there are not many questions left unanswered anyway. Then the questioning techniques will only come into play when looking at making adjustments as a result of changes in personal circumstances, changes in training goals and priorities, or in reaction to sudden changes in the way you are responding to your normal training.

In my next article I will give a practical illustration of applying these investigative questioning techniques to solve some of the training and injury problems you may experience from time to time. Happy training till then!

For more about martial arts fitness and conditioning, please contact Idai here.