Early Onset Rigor Mortis

Exercise, by it's very nature, is going to make the practitioner sore and stiff especially as the amount of effort is increased.  That being said, I'd hate to admit that I usually put in the amount of effort needed at the time and usually not much more. 

For me it has always been an issue of gain, fighting with the avoidance of pain and discomfort.  However with this confirmation year I'm actually motivated to do better and take the accompanying discomfort in stride.  That is; until it got embarrassing. 

As a personal milestone I'm incredibly pleased to have finished one half of the long application.  That doesn't mean I'm good at it, but I've made it to the end of one side.  The Application is a manufactured expression of all the bunkai from a single kata.  In this case it's for Kyoku Roku Dan, a kata with around 50 moves.  Instead of breaking the pieces into a one or two-step example the whole kata becomes a flowing process between two folks.  A complicated dance for sure.

This is further made difficult in that it contains several break-falls, roll-outs and about ten arm-bars.  Once I'm warmed, up this is fairly exciting because it represents a vast amount of technical work with a tremendous amount of physicality. 

After Monday night (and I took Ibuprofen) I wasn't quite sure how sore I'd be, but as Mark and I compared notes we both cataloged the level of discomfort we were both in.  Not that it was debilitating, but we both knew we less mobile that we cared to be if we were supposed to be operating at our best.  My muscles appeared to be forming a cast around my lower abdomen and back down to my mid thighs.  On top of this my knees were complaining just walking up single steps. 

And let me reiterate that I was barely able to get out of bed that morning and the first thing we do for a warm up is jumping jack then push up.  This goes from 1 to 5 and back down again.  I  honestly needed it to just get the blood pumping, but I was the last person to finish.  I just couldn't get my legs under me to stand up. 

In time the joints were lubed up and the muscles had some blood flow, but I was assigned to help Charlotte to work on her Kata.  She's 6 or 7 and when she's bored she just simply walks off.  Brutal.  We got through a kata five times and then the Oyo five times, but it was an act of god to get through all that.  I was never so thankful to do something different after we got that far.

After class turned out to be me and Sensei's Dan and Reed.  So it was the private lesson of dreams, but I had to hustle the whole hour to smooth out my half of the application.  Needless to say I slept like a log last night.