What I found best worked for me though, was working out the same year around. I never got "ready" for a tournament, so much as I was always ready for a tournament.
I'm the same way. To me, a tournament is a snap shot of who I am today, at the point of become, so I do't do a lot of special preperation for one.
However two things are differnt this time around:
1) The GM at the school has amped up the training a bit in preperation for the tournament, both in terms of forms and in terms of sparring. One of the adult BBs in the class is going to be coaching and he's been helping me a lot with adive in forms but also in sparring in talking about drills and such to work on in my own time.
2) I took two weeks off of doing pretty much anything physical to first let a nagging foot bruise heal and then to recover from surgery. Normally after some break like that I would come back strong and intense in the physical strength and conditioning, but I'm ot sure if that's the best plan this time.
My training is probably not the most fine-tuned for an athlete but is pretty good for a guy my age, I guess. In the morning before work, I do 40 knuckle pushups, 40 crunches, 30 more knuckle pushups (different hand position) and then 4 minutes of jumprope (with some one legged jump-roping at various points in the time). This is my bread and butter daily routine and I'm back to doing this and will probably do it up until a day or two before the event. A few nights a week I pull out a resistance tube and do sets of bicep-curls, squats with resistance, and a bunch of other arm, chest, and leg exercises I don't know the names for. Somedays I will double up the tube and do more resistance at slower pace for less reps. Other days I will do more reps and do them faster, with just a single tubes worth of resistance. This is my poor-man's, all-in-the-apartment, workout routine. As of Monday I restarted the morning routine, but I've not restarted my evening routine with the resistance tube. Instead I've ben hitting class every night and before class after work I've been working a lot on kicking drills, punching drills, and forms practice.
So that was kinda the root of my question. Normally take a long term but also day-to-day approach. What I mean is that day-to-day, I am who I am at this point in my training as far as skill and conditioning and what not, but also this is a long term part of my life where I'm slowly climbing a mountain, not just up and down the hills of tournament preperation and performance.
However, since I came off a two week break where normally my emotional inclination would be to hit the conditioning/strentgh work hard, but with a tournament coming up where my instructor and coach are focusing hard on drills and preperation, I'm inclined to let them set my focus to be a bit more of tournament preperation and so my question was mostly, given an extra hour in the evening, am I better suited at doing strength work or drill work for the next few weeks.
Thanks for all the responses
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