2008 Workout #41, Perfect Pushups #22: Pushing way, way past our limits…

Today the Breakfast Club consisted of , , , and myself. Today was the first day that I ran with and . I made a mile and a half with no problems. We then started in on basic techniques, with a plan to do strengthening in between katas later.

We made it through our basics, but in between sessions I asked some about timing and endurance so took us through some fantastic drills to work on that. One was shifting in kind’ve a “box step” at the angles, later adding in some techniques, and the other was working on switchback to the angles with front and roundhouse kick.

After that, we started in on some kata. We did two Sochin and two Kanku Sho, with strengthening interjected between the katas. We started with 15-10-5, then 8-6-4-2-10, then 15-10-5-10-15, then 8-6-4-2. That’s a grand total of 135 pushups!

In order to “blow it out” a little further, had us do some light slow sparring with different partners. I felt relatively ok, albeit a bit erratic as I went through my sparring. My recent rib injury had me a little tentative, and the pushup regiment honestly felt like I was getting stabbed pretty regularly as I was tensing the bruised muscles to perform the pushups.

I think at one point I took a few punches to the face and clocked me in the sore ribs, but at least we figured out that I have a hole in my guard that invites reverse punches right into that area. Filling that hole should be pretty easy, I’ve just gotta keep my mind on it when I spar. I was a lot of fun to have a variety of people to spar with, I was especially happy to see join us for the first time today. We gave him a fairly adequate amount of “new guy” crap for his first workout, but its always good to have others come and join us.

showed up with his video camera to tape some of our kata and sparring sections. I am not looking forward to seeing the kata parts, since we had just got done squeezing out a boatload of pushups so I’m sure we all looked rather lethargic and useless during the kata portion, but I will be interested to see some of the kumite matches that we did in order to relax ourselves. Some good exchanges were had and I always love doing a postmortem on my sparring performance.

In fact, when I was at college we would have our tournament sparring matches regularly taped and would usually spend a whole workout doing a “post game” review of what we did and how we could fix it. I’m not sure I want to get back to that extreme, but constant, honest self-evaluation is a pretty powerful tool.

Good stuff today, I’m really proud of everyone who pushed it past their mental and physical limits today!