Percussive therapy

In my continuing quest to be able to live my life and more easily do things like wrestle my eight foot ladder from the garage to my living room in order to silence the smoke alarm that decided to start beeping at 2:37 am due to a dying battery, I decided to enlist the help of one of the friendly staff members at my gym and get a new workout planned just for me. Last Friday morning, Sue put together a neat little strength training plan that has me doing all sorts of new things that make my arms and legs (mostly my arms) sore - in a good way - when I get out of bed most mornings. She also suggested that I add some cross-training to my routine, possibly incorporating an aerobics type class or two. She specifically mentioned "Cardio Kickboxing" with Robin on Thursdays. Her thought was that this class specifically would provide me with some good overall training including agility, endurance and lots of lateral movements (I think she said side-to-side. But I'm a stability and controls engineer and, to me, side-to-side can mean more than one thing. Lateral means only one thing.). Theoretically, this will help me when I play Ultimate Frisbee with the kids at church. It also has the added (and unadvertised) benefit of being a great stress reducer.

Tonight was my first try at the class. It was a lot of fun. I know my form wasn't very good and I have no delusions about ever actually being able to really kickbox (Robin said that was good and shows that I don't normally "wail on people"). But, it was still a blast. The 30 minute class flew by, even when I had trouble getting the more complicated combinations put together. As I was driving home I realized that I was the most relaxed I'd felt in the past week (granted, it's been a long, tough week). I think part of it was that for 30 minutes I had to concentrate so intensely on doing something completely new to me. But I think the bigger thing was that for 30 minutes, I got to kick and hit stuff. I confess to having a few delusions of Buffiness a few times. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Amazing television program. Now starting it's eighth season, in comic book form. But that's another post for another time.) But, mostly, it just felt good to hit things (and kick, but mostly hit). It's a similar feeling that I experienced in Belize last summer, when we spent a lot of time breaking up concrete sidewalks with sledge hammers. But this caused fewer blisters. And, did I mention it was a whole lot of fun?

Therapy's expensive. Bubble wrap is cheap. Kickboxing beats them both for my new favorite form of stress relief. I know I'm going to have trouble getting my shoulders to work properly and painfree tomorrow (and my abs are going to be sore, but that's more from the 15 minute abs class I did before kickboxing. Not as much fun, but still beneficial and I'll probably be back.). But, it's a small price to pay.