Week 4: Day 4

cardio:

• Turbo Kickboxing (@ 8:30am) = 1 hour

I recently read somewhere online that Tae Bo and Turbo Kickboxing shouldn't be used as a supplement or replacement for traditional martial arts. While Tae Bo and Turbo Kickboxing are great for working on cardio, you don't learn proper technique. In fact, you can learn bad habits from these two. You really can't just attended the classes or follow the videos, and then expect to defend yourself if you get attacked in the streets.

There are a lot of moves in Turbo Kickoxing that I can't do because they feel uncomfortable or unnatural for me. After 15 years of traditional martial arts, old habits die hard. I still do traditional martial arts, so old habits die even harder.

So, I was thinking about this during the Turbo Kickboxing class this morning and I lost my concentration. I was trying to follow along, but I couldn't understand what I was doing during most of the class time. I was trying to make sure that I wasn't picking up any bad habits and going with what the more traditional martial arts moves which felt more natural/comfortable to me.

Traditional martial arts is a guys sport. If you go to any classes of any traditional martial arts, you'll see mostly guys. Guy black belts outnumber girl black belts. Depending on the style, there are between eight to ten degrees within the black belt rankings. The higher the ranking, the less women there are. There are ten degrees for black belts only for Kajukenbo and I have a second degree. Just in my class only, there are two girl black belts with a second degree and a total of three active (still participating) girl black belts...the third one is a first degree. Out of all the Kajukenbo schools around the world combined, I don't know how many total active/participating girl black belts there are, but I know that there is a good handful.

I'm comfortable participating in a guys sport and being surrounded by a bunch of guys. Because I'm a tomboy and I'm macho like that. I have been doing traditional martial arts for over 15 years. I started participating in Turbo Kickboxing about six months ago. I have been going to the gym for a year and it took me a long time to be okay with Turbo Kickboxing because I felt too macho for the class. I finally got my ego checked. Most people don't know this about me because I hide it well, but I have an ego problem.

The only reason why I even started going to TKB was because another black belt student - who is a fifth (5th) degree black belt - recommended that I worked on cardio/conditioning outside of karate training. I can run for two hours and feel fine, but I need another kind of cardio to work on my conditioning for karate training and self-defense. If you get attacked on the streets, most of the time it will not end with one strike to your attacker's head. A lot of time, you will have to fight back and it can last for a few minutes which seems like a long time when you're trying to defend yourself and you want to get away. I've done both regular sparring (with punches and kicks) and grappling/wrestling. It does get very tiring after one minute or three minutes. If we don't do the tournament style grappling/sparring and have a time limit, we can be wrestling/grappling for as long as five minutes or longer or until one of us does a submission. Running can only do so much to help, but doing a variety of cardio will help. I can run for two hours and be fine...I'm tired and want to leave after 30 minutes of Turbo Kickboxing (but at the same time, I don't want to).