Tag: fencing

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I’ve long struggled to program my training, a task that is difficult because I want to get better at everything. I want to be stronger and faster. I want to have more endurance for running and more endurance for walking (which turn out not to carry over perfectly from one to the other). I want to maintain and deepen my taiji practice and my parkour practice. I want to learn rock climbing and fencing.

This isn’t a new problem for me. As just one example, back in 2013 I was considering programming training not organized by the week but perhaps in 9-day training cycles.

There are at least two problems that I’m trying to address. One is just fitting in training for each capability I want to get better at. The other is how to not break down under that training load (which involves at least fitting in enough recovery time, but other stuff as well).

During the pandemic I’ve done okay, by focusing on exercise. Although I tweak things pretty often, very roughly I’ve organized each week to include:

  • 3 strength training workouts
  • 2 runs (a “long” run and a “fast” run)
  • 1 HIIT workout
  • 2 rest days

That looks pretty good until you do the math and see that it only works for 8-day weeks.

Besides that, note that this excludes my taiji practice (which amounted to more than 5 hours a week back in pre-pandemic days, because besides teaching I was engaging in my own practice). It also excludes my long, slow warmups (which I’ve started calling my “morning exercises,” since I do them pretty much every morning before proceeding with my “workout” for the day).

The way I’ve been making it sort-of work is by doubling up how I think about some of the workouts. A “fast” run with sprint intervals is a HIIT workout, and a HIIT workout with kettlebell swings is a strength-training session.

Still, there’s no hope to make something like this work if I want to add in parkour, rock climbing, and fencing. Likewise, I know from experience that I need a full day to recover from a very long (14-mile or longer) walk, so doing one of those requires devoting two days out of the week to just one training session.

So, I’m left in a quandary. How can I get better at all the things I already do and add in some additional activities as well? (Just before the pandemic I’d started taking an aikido class; I’m sure I’d enjoy finding a local group that plays Ultimate Frisbee….)

Happily for me, Adam Sinicki (aka The Bioneer) has written a book that addresses exactly this issue. The book is Functional Training and Beyond: Building the Ultimate Superfunctional Body and Mind. It starts out talking about “functional training,” and about the history of “getting in shape” i.e. “physical culture.” Then it runs though all the most common training modalities (bodybuilding, powerlifting, kettlebells, crossfit, etc.), before proceeding to talk specifically about how to take the best from each one, and then how to program it all into a workout plan.

His thinking on programming is pretty straightforward: You don’t just add everything together. Rather, you look through all the exercises you might do and pick the ones with the most cross-over benefit relevant to your goals, and then build an exercise program out of those (and you sequence them correctly to maximize your gains in terms of strength, mobility, flexibility, skills acquisition, speed, power, hypertrophy, etc.).

I’m going to spend some time (and some blog posts here) thinking over just how I want to do that.

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I don’t know how long I’ve wanted to learn to fence. At least as far back as 7th grade when I read Glory Road, and probably before then. Back in the 1960s and 1970s in Kalamazoo, I was unable to come up with a way to learn, but nowadays in Champaign it’s possible—because there’s The Point Fencing Club.

The minimalist option would be to take the $100 three-day adult fencing workshop in mid-June. The dates are slightly awkward, as that’s very likely exactly when my dad might come to visit, but otherwise it would be just the thing.

Alternatively, I could go ahead and join for the summer for $150 (plus another $100 or so to buy my own foil, plastron, jacket, glove, and mask). Upside of that: I’d have my own foil! Downside: it’s a lot of money. Plus, if I enjoyed it, I’d end up wanting to keep doing it, which would cost something like $750 a year.

I’ve considered doing this each summer for years now and have never done it due to the cost and scheduling issues. This year it seems like a real possibility.

Another thing I’ve been meaning to do each summer for a while now is study taiji with The Center for Taiji Studies.

Founded by my teacher’s teacher, they’re a strong local group that takes a somewhat more martial perspective on taiji than my teacher, which very much appeals to me.

Like with fencing, the main obstacles have long been scheduling and cost. Taking weekly classes for the summer looks to come to $234, so almost exactly the same as it would cost to spend the summer fencing.

There’s slightly less downside. Since I already have a taiji practice in place for fall, winter, and spring, there will be less of an inclination to spend another several hundred dollars a year to continue practicing with them year-round.

A third thing that I meant to do last summer and will almost certainly do this summer is join the local campus parkour club for their practice sessions over the summer.

That has the enormous upside of being free. The downside is that they are just group practice sessions, and not formal classes.

I went one time last summer, and actually got a lot of instruction. I expect that if I showed up, practiced with the other folks there, and asked people to show me the stuff I didn’t know, I could continue to get instruction. Of course, that’s not the same as having a skilled instructor put together a curriculum designed to teach the basic skills in a sensible order.

As I say, these are all things I’ve been wanting to do for as long as I knew they were things. I’m still working out the details, but this summer I’ll start working on the backlog.