This year I am going to be mixing in more HMA-adjacent content. Don’t fret dear reader, you will always be able to draw a fairly direct link between my articles and swinging swords about the place. I just want to widen the scope of the subjects I address. In that direction here’s my look at fitness, healthy lifestyles and gainz.
I think that fitness is vital. To life, to HMA and to happiness in general. I don’t consider myself a fitness fanatic of any kind. I wouldn’t be running ironman triathlons every weekend or doing 2000+ sit-ups in pursuit of a six pack. I do like to look after myself though. My reasoning is that if I am fit and healthy I will be a able to do the things I like, for longer and with less discomfort. If the activity I chose is inherently damaging – drinking and the like – my fitness will make it easier to get over a bout of self-destruction. Needless to say you should absolutely not be looking here for lifestyle advice and if you want to take me as an example to live by then I suggest you seek professional advice, quickly.
The problem I face when trying to do things to get fitter is that I find exercising inherently boring. I try to focus on the end results and I am led to believe that this will make all the effort worth it. It does not make it any easier to repeat the same partial body movement a couple of dozen times a week. I have tried many versions of workouts over many years and honestly they have all eventually bored me to tears.
I enjoy researching the technical ins and outs of particular methods, I like creating workout schedules and plans and I even enjoy doing the workouts… for a limited period! I find that I can stick at a given plan of exercise for somewhere between 4 and 6 weeks before I allow the other aspects of my life ‘get in the way’ and my regime slopes off into the darkness. I have a few weeks break and then I’ll have a go at something else but the same pattern holds true for that as well. In particular I find that I take breaks when I get a cold or if I have a particularly gruelling social life…
Knowing what you are doing, even a little bit can make all the difference and is vital to avoid injuring yourself. I used to go to a gym when I was much younger, I did a sort of ‘aerobics class with free weights’, Reebok-Body-something I think. It was amazingly effective in developing muscle and more importantly it taught me how to handle free-weights in a supervised environment; which in turn gave me the confidence to go and use the weights in the open gym next to guys with thighs the same size as my chest! Attendance at the gym was fairly regular and ongoing for a couple of years but faded as the weigh of my university studies got in the way.
Next, I got into an American football team and we did high intensity cardio type training at our weekly practices. This was excellent I have to say. We were in a large group (about a dozen or so on the defence) and there was a real buzz about the workouts. There was a lot of mutual encouragement, high fives and all that sort of chaddy-jock nonsense. We had a purpose and the drills/exercises were all designed to give us a level of fitness, speed and stamina that matched the positions we played in. It had immediate utility in the activity I was doing. The drills were essentially interval training and footwork drills: how to get the heart rate up and change direction without thinking about it, whilst keeping your eyes on the ball/opposing player. American football is very stop-start, a fair amount of downtime interspersed with short intense periods of fully committed activity. The overall activity was a world away from HMA but the fitness training style is directly applicable in my opinion.
Years passed after I left the team and I was basically an erratic gym attendee. I never got it together to join a decent health centre and was always on the lookout for places I could pay a small amount for the few times I got down there. Needless to say I didn’t go very often as this doesn’t match the preferred model of most gyms. They want your money upfront, in large quantities and they don’t really care if they never see you again as long as the direct debit isn’t cancelled!
The next time I took any really stock of my physical state I realised that the take-aways and the idleness had really taken their toll! I was pasty, heavier than I wanted to be and often out of breath (thanks to the roll ups). I was in the process of dropping out of the crass-consumerist life I had been living and getting my body back in shape was going to be a big part of that. I started doing a lot of cycling, it was easy as I lived in Germany where the infrastructure is excellent and I’d been banned for drink driving so I had very little choice in the matter. Following my return to Ireland my choice of lifestyle was much more physical than it had been. I was working in gardens and on small building projects. My diet improved tremendously as I was working for organic growers, my meat consumption dropped to very little (even now I only eat red meat once every couple of weeks at most) and my health and fitness started to get better and better.
I kept trying to add a determined focussed ‘fitness regime’ with sets of this and that but they never seemed to stick. The best I could do was stick to a basic morning routine of so many press-ups and sit ups. I’m pretty good with this even now having developed some discipline, I suppose. Now I am back, driving to work and sitting in an office the best part of the week. I have realised that I need to make conscious effort to build and maintain my fitness. Regular HMA sessions is a great workout but I want to be fitter in order to do better in my fencing, not use the fencing as my sole physical activity. I have been messing about with Macebells (well, a sledgehammer in my case as it’s far more Metal!), functional path workouts and resistance band workouts. They have all been fun and I am learning to mix things up regularly as a way to overcome the natural dullness of working out.
I have also come to enjoy the use of various apps to design workouts and record my diligence in doing them. My wife laughs that I am more interested in designing the workouts than doing them, but making my performance visible through the trackers has helped me be more consistent. The most effective motivator me has always been direct applicability. I want to see that what I do in my exercise sessions is directly linked to what I will be using my increased levels of fitness for.
My current thinking is that the same HIIT style exercising I did for American football may be best suited to HMA. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, 30 seconds of intense repetition of an exercise, 10 second of rest and repeat 8 times (8 work periods that is). I am sure there’s other versions but this mix works for me. It’s more effective than steady state cardio and far less dull. Along with the benefits to cardio health and I can use sword specific sets to make up the work portions. So I am getting some drilling done at the same time as cardio, ideal.
I also mix in some resistance band and weight work for muscle strength. I don’t have room in my cabin for a full compliment of weights so the bands are perfect. When they arrived I thought “I’m fairly fit, I’ll start with the biggest band”, man was I wrong! For most exercises I’m using the thinnest or second thinned band. By adjusting where you grip the band you change the difficulty within a range determined by the bands thickness. Plenty of scope for progress and they all fit in a small bag. To the bands I have recently added a 10Kg kettlebell and a pair of dumbbells – thanks Lidl! Space and storage are still an issue so I’ll never have a multi-gym torture device or even a folding bench and barbell; so these small weights is what I will be working with for now.
You can’t help being bombarded with physical ideals in the mass media and social media. I admit to being a bit vain and impressionable. I would honestly like to have a more impressive physique, add a little size and definition as well as functional utility. I’ve looked into it though and it definitely seems to require a higher level of dietary commitment and outlay on equipment than I am willing to give. So, I end up with what I have chosen, as we all do. I won’t feel bad for not having a six-pack if I consciously decide to eat thickly buttered toast with honey on it as a snack late in the evening. Anyway, I have abs, I can feel them, they’re just under the layer of protective pudge…
What I have learnt about personal fitness (both for general well-being and sporty activities) can be summed up like this:
- Diet makes the biggest impact, both in how I feel and in how I perform. The improvement in my physique and stamina that came from a better diet has been more dramatic than any ‘gainz’ from moving heavy objects around.
- Variety is essential, not only for any functional benefits, just that working out is dull and without variety I don’t stay engaged.
- I find it hard to do workouts for their own sake, tying the exercise to a specific activity that will make use of the additional stamina and/or strength I am developing makes the drudgery worth it.
- If I miss or forget to do a work out on a given day it isn’t the end of the world. I’m not going to suddenly lose all benefits from the sessions I have done just cause I missed one or two this week. So you shouldn’t use one missed session to justify giving up on a regime (I’m guilty of this is the past and I have regretted it).
My next move is to check out a local sports club, they run weekly “Group PT” sessions (which is basically CrossFit by another name as far as I can tell) and have a small gym with free-weights and machines. Added benefits are that it is kind of on the way home, well not too far out of the way and they are asking very reasonable money for a years membership. I haven’t made it down there yet, I’ve had a cold – as just about everyone has at the moment it seems. That is my excuse and I am sticking to it! More than likely it will be later in the spring, with longer nights and less depressing weather before I get serious about going. This time around I think I will have a session with a personal trainer, not for motivation, but to get some advice on what I should be doing to achieve my goals. it would be handy to have some professional input into my DIY style workout planning. For now my goals are:
- Increased stamina in shoulders, back and arms – being able to hold that buckler in the right place for longer without every fibre in my shoulders burning.
- Improved cardio fitness – be better able to perform after long pools and/or when I inevitably get through to the eliminations and finals over every tournament…ahem.. moving on.
- More explosive movement in my footwork – I want to be leaping around and shit! I’m getting a bit older and I don’t want to become a dawdling auld fella.
- The aesthetic results of the above – I find that athletic form is inherently nice to look at; male or female. If someone is physically active they tend to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye and I would like to be too.
My take on fitness for HMA is this; if you have a decent basic level of fitness you will enjoy your training more, and you will be a better fencer. You will not be dying at the end of each session and you might remember more of what you are trying to study. You will be able to repeat a drill more times and build muscle memory better if your arms aren’t falling off after the first 10 runs through. Your losses in tournaments will be due to your level of ability and not from being out of breath; you have to take responsibility for both. You may even be able to secure more victories by outlasting your less fit opponents.
I am sure I remember reading in some treatise, somewhere (now, that is a quality academic reference, if I ever saw one) that you should ‘lift heavy weights, run around a bit and not eat all the roast boar in sight’ if you want to be a good fencer. If we are willing to believe what the sources say about waving a sword around we might as well listen to their advice on fitness too.
Thanks for taking the time to read my article. As ever you can reach me in the comments section below as well as through the Wrathful Peasants page. Let me know what you think of this article and any of the points raised in it.
The Wrathful Peasant 