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Pain and Injury as Part of Training Life

It has been my observation that the practice of martial arts revolves around the question of balancing training with injury. For the most practical, combative training, one probably wants to spar a lot. One adds rules to the sparring, because otherwise people get badly hurt. Even with rules, people get hurt sooner or later, so instead of hitting one another, martial artists often hit targets. This is important because one can not progress if one’s training is constantly interrupted recovering from injury. Safer still would be hitting only air, but I can tell you even Taiji can hurt your joints pretty badly while you are learning to coordinate your movements. So it seems to me that every martial artist confronts this question every time they approach training: How am I going to do this today and still be able to do it tomorrow?

Class two students practicing body hardening

This is on my mind these days, because we have been training pretty hard and I am consequently in a bit of pain. We are expected to train if we are able, and none of my injuries are serious enough to demand that I miss training, but they are all painful and they create mental stress. This in itself is a form of training, of course; maintaining emotional calm when every movement hurts.

The conclusion people come to, I think, is that there are two kinds of pain, good pain and bad pain, and both are valuable sources of information about what is going on in your body.  Specific pains can be a wealth of information about the balance of strength in different tendons and muscles. Good pain tells you that you are going beyond your current limits and improving. Bad pain tells you that if you keep going, you will do such damage that your training will have to be interrupted by recovery. One wants to push the line that divides the two as far as one can, so that though training is difficult, it can remain continuous.

As for the injuries that do inevitably occur when training hard, I am not a doctor but my experience has shown me that rest is not the best cure. Rest is necessary, but attentive light exercise will stimulate circulation, help the metabolism deliver energy and nutrients to the damaged area, and reduce recovery time. At least that is what I hope will happen, because my ribs are really sore…:-)

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4th of July Safety

The Fourth of July is rolling around again. This is a great time to celebrate with friends, have a cookout, and be patriotic in general. But before the festivities begin, it is important to know how to make sure they are safe.  This post includes information on fireworks, barbecues, boating, pool parties, and the sun. It’s only fun until someone gets hurt, so lets try to make sure the fun lasts all through the day injury-free.

Fireworks

The first area of safety concern is the obvious: fireworks. Fireworks are beautiful, fun, and patriotic displays, so we should learn how to incorporate them into our celebrations safely. Here are some things you should not do : Continue reading “4th of July Safety”

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Stress: Using Avoidance to Cope

One level higher than distraction for coping with stress is AVOIDANCE.   As one 14 year old said, “when I don’t want to do something, I go online.”  That is probably true for a number of adults too.  We can get lost in the online world and even have an excuse saying we are doing research or something else.

When it comes to the higher level of avoidance, procrastination is very high on the list of common ways of putting off something that we do not want to face.  Using procrastination on projects, studying or deadlines may be a sign of not wanting to deal with real problems or emotions, and we may find ourselves living with high levels of high anxiety.

Some use sickness as an avoidance strategy.  In the USA over 160,000 students miss school, many times using sickness as the excuse to avoid bullies at school.  It is not that the illness, stomachache, headache, muscle pain or a whole slew of sympton’s are not real – but the root cause may be stress about something deeper that needs to be dealt with that we are avoiding.

Others use sleep as a way of avoiding stressful situations and challenges.  There is no doubt that when we are rested we can do a better job of facing our work, but if we are spending over 12 hours in bed or not leaving our bed on the weekend, it could be a sign of avoiding something.  One thing for sure is that sleep will not solve deeper challenges.

But here is the surprise avoidance tactic of all, being super involved and overachieving to overcome negative feelings.  Staying busy with many clubs, sporting activities and high end class course work may be a sign of trying to prove to yourself and others that you are good enough.  Trying to keep it all together to prove to our else and others that everything is good, can be so difficult and stressful on us that without even noticing things continue to get worse for us.

Avoidance many times leads to seclusion, with your own negative thoughts, that can lead to feeling hopeless and depressed.  Feelings like this may lead to the highest level of non-coping, escape.  We will talk about the dangers of that in our next article.

1. Using distraction as a way to avoid stress

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Using distraction as a way to cope with stress

In our last report on stress we talked about the 3 different ways that some of us cope with stress in our lives.  They were distraction, avoidance and escapism.  Each of them get progressively more harmful to the person practicing them.  However to some degree the use of distraction can offer short term relaxation and can prove to be helpful, as long as it does not get out of control.

Distraction might be a short break to take a walk, bike ride, physical exercise, reading or other short term activity that gets our mind off the pressure at hand.  The only problem with it is that the breaks can get longer or too many of them and that only leads to not getting the work done and more stress.  Unless we control the distraction as a coping tool it could lead to avoiding the problems all together.

We have to be careful that we are not just using distraction as a means of procrastination.  In the end we still have the same work to do, the same reports to write, and the same problems to deal with, except now we have a little less time.  The signs of avoidance in my next report.

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Dealing With Stress; How are You Coping?

Trying to stay on top of everything that we have going on in our lives can bring that stress that we have up to a level that feels more than just challenging.  We can start to lose our physical energy, our sharpness for thinking and very generally lose our edge.  Many of the illnesses and diseases that are prevalent today are said to be furthered and worsened by stress.  How do we deal with our stress?

There are many coping strategies that are used and usually we find one that fits our personality or one that we can be comfortable with and we use it to the max.  These are short term ways of dealing with the real issues and while they can help short term, may actually make things worse long term.

Distraction – Or, I’ll deal with it later
Distractions are about taking breaks and doing something else for a little while.  This can help you be more focused when you return, but the danger is the more you put it off with other activities, the more stressed you may become as your time to completion gets shorter.

Avoidance – Or, I might deal with it …sometime
Avoidance is like distractions on steroids.  There can be so much avoidance that each act of avoidance takes up more and more time and this leads to a vicious circle of behavior.  But there are all sorts of ways that we may be avoiding dealing with our feelings of stress, from illness and sleep to over-achievement or procrastination.  We will discuss in more detail later.

Escape – Or, I don’t want to deal with it…ever.
Escaping is the most dangerous of the ways we may try to cope and many times this will come after dealing with it with distraction and avoidance.  Some may try to escape with the use of drugs, dropping out, lying to others, even to the point of injuring themselves of attempting suicide.  Escapism only compounds the problems and we still have not looked at solving the underlying issues of our stress.

No matter our age, in elementary or high school, in college or on the job, what we really need is some stress management techniques.  I hope to share some with you in the coming weeks, as I study this subject both for myself and all of our students.