Category: Fitness

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During the pandemic I followed something of a training plan—a mostly bodyweight exercise plan with minimal equipment beyond a pair of gymnastic rings, based largely on Anthony Arvanitakis’s Bodyweight Muscle books and YouTube channel.

Post-pandemic (once my local fitness room reopened, and exercise equipment became available again), more activities became possible. As they did, I added some in. With extra stuff to fit in, I let the program go. Instead I began exercising more intuitively—simply trying to fit in my strength training and my running as best I could. Each day I’d decide what to do influenced by how I felt, and what I’d done (or hadn’t done) the previous day or two, trying to cover all the bases, while allowing adequate time for recovery.

It has worked pretty well, but not as well as I was doing with an actual program. However, I don’t want to go back to the bodyweight rings program, because I feel like I’m getting real benefits out of the kettlebell and heavy club activities. So, I’m working on roughing up a training program that includes all the stuff I want to do.

Goals

It probably doesn’t make any sense to talk about the activities I do without thinking about the goals I’m trying to achieve.

Of course, I want to feel fit and healthy.

In the spirit of Peter Attia’s Centenarian Decathlon, I want to not only be capable of all the activities of daily living, but have enough reserve capacity now that I’ll still be able to do those things when I’m eighty, ninety, or (as I like to joke, except I’m totally serious) eleventy-one.

Among those things are the obvious—be able to hike a few miles on a rugged trail, climb a steep hill or several flights of stairs, carry a heavy bag groceries home, put a suitcase in the overhead compartment, get down on the floor and back up again, etc. Besides those, I also want to be able to do well at longsword, which requires the ability to stand and walk in a low lunge, hold the sword with my arms at full extension (both forward and over my head), etc.

Fitness Activities

I figure the first step is just to document the activities that I think will support these goals, so that I know what I want to fit into the week. Here’s my first pass at a list. (Note that I already do an extensive warm-up every day, because it makes me move and feel better all day, whether I do a workout or not. I also walk my dog, and she rather insists on at least 6 miles a day.)

HEMA practice

My group has 2-hour meetings three times a week. They’re mostly skills training, so not too intense, although now that I’m approved for sparring the intensity has gone up.

Running

I want to go for two runs per week. One is a “long” run, in the 6–10 mile range (although I may want to work up to half-marathon length). The other is a “fast” run, which might include sprints, hill sprints, or just a hard run in the 3–4 mile range.

Kettlebell swings

This is primarily to work the muscles of my posterior chain, which needs a regular workout to keep me functioning well. In particular, I learned the hard way what happens if I don’t work my glutes. Currently I’m doing a heavy/light cycle, where I alternate between swinging an 18 kg (40 lb) kettlebell and a 24 kg (53 lb) kettlebell.

For the light kettlebell I’ve worked up to 10×19 swings emom. For the heavy kettlebell I’ve worked up to 10×12 swings emom. I try to add one swing per set every week.

Somewhere around sets of 25, I’d no longer get any break at the end of a minute. I don’t yet know if that’ll mean I’ll be able to do 250 straight swings.

Heavy club swinging

This is one of my newer additions, and I have already seen it do great things for rotational strength, plus grip, arm, shoulder, and core strength. As the weight has gone up, it has started hitting the legs as well.

I do three exercises (outside circle, shield cast, inside circle) in sets of 5 left and 5 right, and I work up from 5 sets on each side, adding one set every workout or two, until I get to 10 or 12 sets on each side, and then go up in weight. I’m up 8 sets with a 13.75 pound club. Soon I’ll go up to 15 lbs.

Kettlebell clean and press

This one seems especially useful for longsword, where you often need to hold the sword over your head, with your arms near full extension.

I do these as a reverse ladder, starting with 4 reps on the left and 4 reps on the right, then 3, then 2, then 1 rep on each side. Then I take a short break and repeat for some number of sets. Each workout (or every other workout) I add one set.

I just did 7 sets. I’ll work up to 10 or 12, then either increase the weight or else start the reverse ladder at 5 reps left and right, and go back to workouts of 4 or 5 sets.

Gymnastic rings circuit

Versions of this were my main workout all through the pandemic, when fitness rooms were closed and kettlebells impossible to come by. These were push/pull/legs workouts preceded by a starter and then ended with a core exercise. I had at least a couple variations of each exercise, so the starter was often jumping rope, but sometimes some sort of quadruped movement, push generally alternated between dips and some version of a push up, pull alternated between pull ups and inverted rows, legs was often air squats, but sometimes hindu squats or lunges or wall sits, and core was often hollowbody hold, but sometimes planks or reverse planks or V-ups.

I’d set the number of reps of each exercise at what I thought I could carry through for 3 rounds, and the 3rd round I’d aim to push to technical failure.

Toward a schedule

Putting all these things into a weekly schedule has proven to be difficult.

Me standing in zornhut

One issue is that my HEMA practice sessions occur at specific times, so there’s a certain lack of flexibility in the schedule there.

Besides that, there’s simply more stuff I want to do than fits easily into a week.

One solution to that would be to abandon the idea that “weekly” is the right structure. I could fit things into, let’s say, a 9-day cycle—but there are enough inconveniences with that, that every time I’ve considered it before, I’ve ended up sticking with weekly.

I’m pretty close to having a first cut at a weekly schedule ready to post. Look for it here in a day or two.

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I was not particularly sporty as a child. My dad played catch with me an ordinary amount of time for a father who had no particular aspirations that his son would be a sports star. I played whiffle ball with the neighborhood boy across the street, and threw that ball a good bit. I took tennis lessons, and played quite a bit of tennis, and eventually got sorta okay at tennis, and there’s a certain amount of throwing in tennis, to get the ball to the person whose serve it is. (Plus, a serve and a forehand are both throwing-pattern type movements.)

My point is simply that although I did throw balls around some as a boy, it was never important, and I pretty much quit as soon as I was out of high school.

(And even in high school phys ed there was way less ball-throwing than there probably should have been—the fake, altered versions of sports that they made us play in class provided neither training nor practice for the kids who were not “good at sports.” We were sent out to stand in the field and do nothing except be available to be blamed once every 10 or 15 hours when a ball unexpectedly came our way.)

This was brought home to me a couple of times in the past decade or so. Once, perhaps 10 years ago, while out walking near some ball fields in our old neighborhood, I had a softball roll up at my feet. A player across the street asked me to throw it to him. I attempted to do so, and ended up throwing it perhaps halfway to him.

That was embarrassing.

When I thought about why I did so poorly, my analysis was that there were several issues. One was perhaps just a lack of strength. Just as much was simply having forgotten how hard to throw a ball to get it to go a particular distance—an important skill in many sports, and one that requires quite a bit of training. Mainly, though, I think the issue had to do with having lost the fine motor-control patterning. Throwing a ball involves a bunch of muscles that all have to fire in sequence, each one at just the right moment.

I was reminded of this more recently, because Ashley likes to chance a ball, so I’ve been throwing one for her from time to time.

Hand holding an old tennis ball in front of a dog

When I started doing this, around the end of November last year, once I had Ashley signed up for the dog park, I was crap at throwing a ball.

I’m still crap at throwing a ball by any objective standard, but maybe 1000 throws, spread out over the course of six or seven months, have gotten me up to being able to throw the ball perhaps three times as far as I could in November, and with quite a bit more accuracy.

I suspect that the main thing is simply the muscle pattern stuff: my nervous system has relearned which muscles to fire at which moment in order to execute a competent throw. Secondarily, I think my heavy club swinging has helped some. Inside Circles are essentially a throwing pattern, and using a 15 lb club lets me build considerable strength in those muscles.

It’s not the exact same motion as throwing any particular ball, so I still need to practice whatever throw I want to be good at, but the muscles are being strengthened in the right patterns, which I’m sure has already helped.

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If I’d realized that this run would be 0.01 miles less than my longest run ever, I’d have run another 0.02 miles. I did run it three minutes faster, though, despite the heat. 🏃🏻‍♂️

It may not be obvious from the picture below, but those sprinklers are not only blocking the sidewalk; they cover the entire right-of-way from the detention pond to the drainage creek. To get around it I had to walk through a parking lot, down the street, and back through two more parking lots.

A footpath with multiple sprinklers making the entire right-of-way, from pond to creek, wet

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In my workout yesterday, in the “lower body” slot where I’d usually do either some type of squat or some type of lunge, I decided to practice stepping for longsword fencing. As soon as I started, I realized there was all sorts of nuance to how to do it, with a lot of details I wasn’t sure of.

I posted a question to the group discord, asking when to pivot the foot. (That is, the front foot is pointed straight ahead and the back foot is turned out 45 to 90 degrees. After you step forward with your back foot it’s easy enough to just put it down pointed straight ahead. But your new back foot needs to turn out at some point.) I also wanted to know whether people did a toe-pivot or a heel-pivot.

A couple of people responded to say that they did toe-pivots, and that they did them at the end, after establishing the new front foot. Good to know.

When I got to today’s class, Christopher Lee French (one of the intermediate HEMA students, but also an instructor in sport fencing at The Point Fencing Club & School of Champaign) gave me a whole master-class in stepping. He made a series of excellent points.

Source: https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/File:Meyer_1570_Sword_F.png

(Let me pause just for a moment here to make it clear that all the following is my understanding informed by what he was telling me. It’s certainly not his fault if I’ve gotten some things wrong here.)

Here’s a short list:

  1. While you’re stepping, the foot you’re not stepping with has to support all your weight for the whole time your stepping foot is off the ground. (This is true with ordinary walking as well, but in ordinary walking gate you typically straighten and then momentarily lock the knee of your standing leg. Judging from the woodcuts that illustrate Meyer’s treatise, you stand with your front knee bent at nearly 90 degrees, making it a real strength challenge to hold yourself up.)
  2. You don’t want to push off with your back foot (because that would tend to make you bob up and down). Rather, you want to traction yourself forward with the planted foot.
  3. Your stepping foot needs to move twice as fast as your body. That is, your body is moving forward one step. But your foot has to go a lot farther in the same amount of time, because it’s also going from being the back foot to the front foot.
  4. As you step forward, you don’t want to swing your stepping foot out and around. Rather, you want to keep it straight in line with the spot where it’s going to end up. This is it better for a lot of reasons, but one is that it means you’re not telegraphing whether it’s a passing step or a gathering step.

He demonstrated many of these, and his example steps also helped me make sense of the (to me) odd use of a toe-pivot described by others in the discord. He tended to finish a quick step with his back foot not yet pointed out. Instead it was pointed forward, with the heel off the ground. When I asked about why he wasn’t turning it out, he said, “Fix that when you have time.” And the way you’d fix it would be to do a toe pivot, and then put your heel down.

None of this really has much to do with Meyer’s text. That is, I’m not trying to figure out how to step. Rather, I’m thinking about what to train to be able to execute what Meyer’s text documents.

Specificity would suggest that the way to train for fast, smooth, even steps would be a lot of stepping. But I know from experience that it’s always worth breaking these things down and checking to see if any of the pieces is posing a limitation.

To pick a not-so-random example, I’m limited by my leg strength for single-leg standing in a very low stance. Things to train for leg strength with bent knees: wall sits, single-leg wall sits, single-leg standing. Those first two I’ve done before, but I can emphasize them a bit for a while. I can add some bent-knee single-leg standing. And, because specificity is still a thing, I’ll also practice executing passing steps and gathering steps as smoothly and rapidly as possible.