While I’ve been concentrating on work and Tae Kwon Do (TKD), oh and the garden and house, did I mention the kids? and the car too?… it seems swimming has fallen by the wayside. I was still exercising but was martial arts enough?
The martial arts class starts with around 20 minutes warming up and stretching which is good, then it’s on to target practice, maybe some sparring, working on forms, which are patterns you learn to be tested on later and finish with some more exercise.
The best bit is that you have achievable targets in the form of belts. Every 3 months there’s a grading and if you’ve practised enough you can be tested and if successful, rewarded with the next colour belt up.
This is the thing that swimming is kind of lacking.
Swimming for me, has one simple target, the number of lengths I can do while I’m out of the office for an hour.
Having had what seems like an unbelievable year or so away from swimming I’m starting with 40 lengths front crawl once a week. At the end of 40 lengths my upper body feels like I’ve been to the gym, very different feeling to exercising at TKD. The swimming has also helped shift upper spinal pains I was putting up with for about 3 weeks prior which didn’t go away with either the NSAID’s or paracetamol.
So there are some positive points already about going back to swimming, the only negative was severe hip pain a day or two after swimming. Could it be that kicking my legs while swimming was putting enough pressure on my hip joints to cause inflammation? I knew I might be rusty, but I felt like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz.
If I keep it up perhaps I can work out what’s going on there.
And to make sure I do keep it up I’m thinking of setting a target. A sponsored swim in the Summer to raise money for NASS in the UK. The question is how far can I manage?