How long does it usually take to get back into the physical shape needed to go all out in class?
Hey Bushido---I started TKD a bit over three years ago, when I was 56. It took me about three months to be able to go all out, but I was doing a lot of cardio/weight training at the time. The kind of physcial demands in MA---both in the aerobic and anaerobic limits---are somewhat different from what ordinary cardio/iron workouts prepare you for, though.
(1) The kind of cardio most people do will give them pretty good endurance and improved cardiovascular capacity over a steady haul, and is an all-around good thing. But it doesn't prepare you particularly well for the intermittant high-intensity/lower intensity pace of most MA workouts---where you have to do ten minutes of serious kicking up and down the haul, with maybe some jumping or popup kicks thrown in, and then another five or six minutes of stances, block practice and other breath-catchers. There's only one way to prepare for
that kind of workout---interval training. Not forty minutes of jogging, but twenty minutes (maybe in two ten-minute segments) of steady jog for 50 seconds and all-out spring---really,
all out---for the remaining 10. That's not something to start with, though. When you can do half an hour at medium jog comfortably, throw in a five second all out sprint every two minutes or so. When you can do that OK (it never gets comfortable!) ramp it up to ten seconds. When you can handle that, do it every minute and cut your total running time down to twenty minutes. Start off by doing one of these sessions every third cardio work out, then two out of three, then every one. Don't do more than three of them a week, though. A couple of things will happen:
(i) You will lose bodyfat faster than you can imagine, once you get going. Intervals ramp up your metabolism to really high speed and keeps it there for a couple of days. Physiologically, the program I described will keep your body working almost as hard as it would on the basis of twenty minutes of all out sprinting, because you stay at a very elevated heart rate almost all the time you're jogging between the sprinting intervals.
(ii) Your ability to handle the intermittant extreme cardio demands of MA training will increase dramatically. In effect, you're training your body to accept the need for a rapidly accelerated adaptation to very high demands on aerobic capacity. That's exactly what you need for most MA workouts.
The downside: intervals are very unpleasant. You have to view them like trips to the dentist: something you don't want to do but it's worse if you don't. If you decide this program is something that would do you good, give yourself plenty of time to get up to speed in it. You just can't do it over a couple of weeks.
(2) Even serious strength training won't generally work the muscle groups you need for MA applications, particularly things like side and turning kicks. A good basic
high-intensity program---major weights to failure in a power rack---is a good platform. But at home, try very slow renditions of the kicks you're working on and try to hold them in the maximal extended positions for as long as you can---that will help with the specific demands those kicks impose in full-speed performances.
Take a look at Loren Christensen's
Solo Training---it's probably the best single work on physical conditioning for MAs---and Thomas Kurz's stuff on stretching, particularly the importance of controlled dynamic stretching, as vs. the kinds of static stretching that most MA workouts begin with.
Good luck with your training!
Without it, we'd be in a lot of trouble everytime something came up that derailed us for six months or a year...
