Peak of my fitness to date and what I plan to exceed

Now that the new year of karate training, or whatever martial arts style you are into, many of your will be struggling with getting back in shape after the Christmas/New Year binge. This most definitely includes myself, and it sucks big time. You may have worked extremely hard, also like myself, getting in tip top condition for your end of year grading. Or in my case, the biggest grading I had after two years being my Nidan Grading.

So now that we have established that we are all hurting, you can’t get out as many pushups as before, you can feel your new gut getting in your way during your sit ups and you are generally more tired and lethargic, sleeping more, drinking more and eating more. We need to find a way to put the brakes on and get this karate journey back on track.

Hopefully, my list below will help you with this. Now I am no dietitian, personal trainer, doctor or astronaut. What I am is someone that has previously seen results through the following list of tips:

1. Know Your Daily Recommended Calorie Intake

Naturally, there are more calorie/kilojoule calculators on the internet than there are fast weight lose schemes. With a little bit of research (I wouldn’t go past your countries health department/government website such as The Department of Health and Ageing for Australia) you should be able to come up with a Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is how much energy your body needs to survive if you become a couch potato and a Daily Recommended Intake (DRI) that suits your age, height and current weight. The DRI adjusts based on your activity level and will give you a calorie intake to maintain your current weight.

2. Set SMART Goals

Once we know this we can set a daily/weekly calorie deficiency target that is SMART. S.M.A.R.T stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely (or words to that effect).

A good SMART objective for weight loss for a myself as a young, fit martial artist would be something like this

“Lose 5 kilograms in 3 months by reducing my calorie intake by ~400 calories per day on average”

Obviously it is specific as we have figures in there, it is achievable as it is within the range of a healthy calorie deficit for someone my age and fitness level. It is achievable as I can lose the weight and still have a healthy BMI. Realistic as I have done it before and timely because we are doing it in 3 months.

3. Make it Your Decision

It is all good to have a plan, set smart objectives and tick all the right boxes. What we ultimately need is the personal drive and discipline to go through with it. This won’t work if you are not doing it for the right reasons. You may need to reevaluate why you are doing this before you start. If it is to achieve your goal of passing your next grading then that will be a good motivator and one that your instructor will support. If it is because someone else is telling you to do it you may end up applying a negative association to  the journey you are about to embark on. This in my opinion happens a lot with personal trainers. You pay someone to push you but when they are not around you have no desire to push yourself. You cannot outsource will to a personal training. As martial arts instructors we aim to change your discipline and behaviour by giving you the will to do things outside the dojo and not just in the training arena.

Find strength in yourself and you increase your changes of success.

4. Find Support With Your Friends and Family

Next step is to get someone else on board that you can be accountable to. Your friends and families, or even work colleagues, people that you see on a daily basis or in regular intervals will help you with this. I would recommend someone that does not have too close of a relationship as they may be soft on you and allow you to take shortcuts. Also it is good to talk about goals we have set ourselves with other people as it goes from being an idea to a choice.

5. Change Your Diet

Now we come to the bits that will actually help you to get the weight off, and hopefully to keep it off.

Most karate students or martial artists are already getting a good amount of exercise in their weekly routine of training. What is lacking is the discipline within our diet.

First thing first, research the foods that you currently eat and find out their serving size, calories per serve and compare that to your target daily calorie goal. You will be surprised how many calories are a serve of honey, or in two slices of white bread or a latte. This gives you a very good point of reference especially once you get a grasp on how many calories you burn running or riding a bike or training in karate for 90 minutes. It starts to become very apparent that it is easier to not consume the energy than it is to burn it off.

My personal strategy is to increase my protein intake (tins of tune, chicken breast, kangaroo, protein powder supplements, egg whites, soy milk) along with fibre (psyllium husk, whole grains), minimise my carbohydrate intake by cutting out simple carbohydrates and foods high in sugar. Do some research on the glycemix index (GI) of food as this measures the rate at which the your body absorbs energy and impacts blood sugar levels, insulin and has a huge impact on apetite, hunger pains and the underlying desire to eat.

Find some super foods such as freeze dried acai for antioxidants, white tea to boost your metabolism and and get stuck into your vegetables such as broccoli, carrots, spinach and drink the recommended daily amount of water. A lot of emphasis on water and magnesium to help the body to absorb the water and use it for greater functionality.

6. Lift the Weights

To substitute the new diet we are going to take on, we will opt to lift some weight so that we grow those muscles (which will feed off the high protein and carbohydrates) and ultimately increase our overall basal metabolic rate as our body requires more energy to be a couch potato with those new muscle fibres to feed.

For someone that is new to weights, the easiest way to begin is by working the large muscle groups by doing bench press, squats, dead lifts and chin ups. Anything that will get those large muscles pumping. Also some of the smaller muscle groups such as the abdominals, calves, triceps will be worked during your martial arts class and you may not have the appropriate recovery time for those muscles to repair themselves between weight training days.

If you are unable to gain the equipment to work these muscle groups I recommend a martial artist to research kettlebells as they require minimum space, can be done in short training sessions and give a complete workout for the body.

7. Implement a Cardio Routine

Skip, run, cycle or swim either before class, after class, in the morning, when you get home from work. Anytime you get a spare 30 minutes to an hour, you can do this at a low pace just to get your heart pumping into the fat burning zone. This may add up to an additional 300 calories burned per session and will be another stake in the coffin of the Christmas gut.

Try not to overdo cardio for weight lose and follow the general rule of 80% of weight lose coming from diet and 20% from exercise. The greater the energy put into cardio exercise the more you start to use energy derived from within the muscles and this needs to be replenished usually by eating carbohydrates after exercise. So you can run a marathon a day but you need to up your carb intake to align with your activity level which negates the calorie deficit objective. Stick to long walks on the beach.

8. Measure Your Progress

If you don’t have a set of scales you will need to go out and buy some, find some, borrow some, beg for them. As part of our SMART objectives we had measurable and the scales will be the key factor in success or failure. If you do not measure you do not know whether what you are doing is working.

Measure your body weight whenever you want but keep it to a routine that has little variables that can effect it. Also only measure yourself once per day as there are too many factors that can change. This is why most people measure themselves after they wake up and after relieving themselves. Keep it consistent, do it daily where possible and track it on a graph or write it down, get an app on your smart phone or tell someone who can.

9. Give it Your Top Effort

Once you have the fitness you need to work harder to take advantage. Don’t leave anything in the tank.

If you find that the results don’t come straight off the bat, give it some time. This is not a fad weight lose diet, this is about changing behaviour so that when you have reached your goal you do not go back to the old ways and be back at square one.

Part of the journey of karate is learning about perseverance, determination and will. Think of it as part of your overall karate journey.

10. Results Equal Reward

After achieving the goal, you need to be rewarded. The weight lose itself will be reward enough, but you need something special that isn’t a binge fest. Sometimes you just need to give yourself a break, enjoy the moment and show off the results to your friends and those that have supported you along the way. Be vocal and bask in the sunshine of success. This will also make you remember down the track if you ever find yourself off course what it feels like to give it your best shot and give you the motivation to get back on the fitness band wagon.

If you are still here reading this than thank you for your time. As always, you get inspired to write these based on events during the day. In this case it was speaking to one of our students who is attempting their 2nd kyu later in the year and looking themselves for inspiration to lose 10-15 kilos. I will go back through and re-link to more sources as I go to help you out.

But if you do have any further advice to add or want to talk about it feel free to comment below. I am more than happy to help and share some of the things that I have learnt after crawling the internet for information, applying it and getting great results.