Away From The Mats

I’m Paul Willson I am a brown belt in Ju Jutsu, a centuries old Japanese martial art.

Thanks to Coronavirus, like most people, my martial arts training had to stop. As lockdown eased we could return to partial training which was no contact training which is quite hard to do with Ju Jutsu so we practiced striking and worked on our fitness.

I have to say I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. As I mentioned in my last post, I was unemployed so doing some pad work really helped to release a lot of frustration in a positive way. This is one of the things I love about martial arts is the positivity. If you are willing to work hard at it you will get more out than you put in. Now I will brag here that I lost 4kg in a month practicing striking and working on my fitness and the better news is that I have yet to put it back on!

Most of the fitness involved running to a pads and putting some kicks in then running to do some punches before returning to the start to do five press ups. We did four or five repetitions of this then doing something similar afterwards.

Ju Jutsu is the jack of all trades, master of none martial arts which is why I like it because of the variety but it was good to practice my striking which, if I am being honest, is not very good. I am a big guy (this true, not opinion) so I should be able to get a lot of power in my striking but my technique is not up to scratch so it was a good opportunity to make improvements.

I did have one downside and that is that my training partner is very good at striking, at least punching. He is 6ft 5″ and 18 stone which means he has a perfect storm of strength, power and bad eye sight. He is able to very hard with speed but if he isn’t wearing his glasses or contact lenses he has a tendency to miss the pads. Once I got an elbow in the chest which hurt quite a lot. His punching is quite frightening. I’ve been holding a kick bag whilst he was punching it and I was struggling to keep it under control at time whilst he threw the punches in at speed.

All this goes to show that even if you can’t train normally you can still do something, practice strikes, katas or just work on your fitness. What made it work for us was the enthusiasm of everyone in club who were just happy to be back training.