At-home training, Hébert style

I usually train in the gym in the evenings, or outside on the weekends, but lately I've been forced to cut back on my training time. I only manage to hit up the gym once or twice a week and I'm really feeling the change. I feel slow and stiff and I haven't been sleeping as well. Some of you out there may be experiencing similar issues, now that the summer training season is over, and you're going back to school, or back to work, or having your training time cut short by darkness.

Luckily, several members of the APK community, including Pilou of DCmPK and Gregg of HIPK and others have been working on translating some of Georges Hébert's Méthode Naturelle training, and many of Hébert's stretching and moving exercises are great for working out at home. I particularly like the QM variations as a way of stretching and conditioning my hips and back after a day spent sitting at the computer, and I can do the shoulder and arm exercises while sitting at my desk. These exercises can't replace a good workout, but they do help strengthen my joints, keep my muscles toned, and make my body happy on days when I can't train. They're also a great way of recovering after a hard training session. APK put an article with a link to Pilou's PDF here and you can also read Gregg's translation here. The pictures are invaluable for understanding the movements (and some of them are pretty amusing, too), so check out the original Google doc of Hébert's book here.

Familiar Peaks

I hate it when you find truth in a cliché.

“You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” “Youth is wasted on the young.” “Don’t grow up too fast.”

My life seems to have gone about 180 degrees in the last year. From October 2007 to October 2008 I was living. I was teaching martial arts, training in the martial arts, training parkour, and doing performances and traveling because of parkour. I got to go to some amazing places I had never been to before; Chicago, Las Vegas, Hawaii. I was in the best shape of my life. I got to meet and be trained by some amazing people; Bill ‘Superfoot’ Wallace, and the Parkour Generations instructors Kazuma, Forest, Dan, and the Vigroux brothers. I got married to a wonderful woman who supported all of this, even letting me train on our honeymoon in Europe.
Unfortunately, life has its ups and downs and leads us all down different paths. I ended up getting an 8-5 job for various reasons, moving and buying a house, and finally “growing up” as some of my relatives so nicely stated. Needless to say, the time I have for training has been drastically cut short.

Where at one point I felt as though I was progressing, charging forward, ever expanding and improving, now I feel as though I am merely working to maintain. Strangely enough, that is just as exciting to me at this point. Having to work so hard to constantly achieve the same thing, while frustrating at first, afterwards provides the same liberating feeling each time I climb those familiar peaks. I now treasure each true training session, as long and difficult training seems to now be a more rare occurrence; most of my regular ‘training’ has become merely maintaining physical conditioning which rarely involves overcoming the fear and skill barriers that I have yet to rise above. Each instance where I find time to revisit, I walk away thinking “You’re not too old yet. You’re not past the point of no return.” It is a shame however that I did not work harder when I had the time, because if I had, these familiar peaks that I am constantly re-visiting would be a little higher.

Making Time

In February I started working a full time job (8am to 5pm) after having worked "part time" in a couple of different jobs (driving a delivery van in DC, teaching Martial arts, office work) for two years. I immediately noticed that with the time at work itself plus the communte time (about 30 minutes one way), I was starting to find less and less time to train with others. I would get off work and have to run some errands, or I would head home and make dinner and spend time with my wife, or I would volunteer to teach an hour or so of martial arts, and before I knew it I had to hit the hey or I'd hate myself in the morning.

With the sudden cut in training, I decided that I had to 'make time' for myself to work on my parkour and martial arts training. So far I have been using my unpaid lunch hour to go out and train, as I am lucky enough to work in a building that has showering facilities. This however only leaves me maybe 35 or 40 minutes to train, as changing and showering and such take up the other 20 or so minutes. This really effects the way I train, as I used to take my time warming up, and then drill something for a while with no particular rush. Now I have to get right to work and try to squeeze as much into my weekly sessions as possible. Quite often I found myself finishing a warmup and workout and not getting any time in to train specific skills.

So the question becomes, what can I cut out next? Starting next week, I'll likely be getting up significantly earlier and going to train before work. Propapby going to try to get teh workout/conditioning done in teh morning, and then just train skills at lunch. We'll see how well and how long this lasts.

What sort of things do you do to 'make time' for yourself and your training?