These days, you can see many self defense and martial arts video tutorials in the internet and learn self defense at home. If you think that it is that easy to demonstrate, well you are making a big mistake right there. It is not like your typical action movies, where you can kick someone's ass after training in a short period of time.
Learning self defense is more deeper than what you think, it takes time and perseverance. Only through reptitive training can you develop your skills. So when the time comes, your body muscles reacts just as you have practiced.
But before learning fancy moves which you usually see in youtube, you must first build your body fitness. Physical strength, speed, flexibility, coordination and cardiovascular fitness will be your foundation for your good defense. This will be crucial in your defense because no matter how well you know the techniques or moves if your body is not physically fit you will just endanger yourself and everyone present.
The first thing we are gonna do is of course track or record our physical activities.
You can use any device or application that you want on tracking your activities. But if you do not have one yet, you may want to try #actifit you can download it on the app store and google play store. Visit actifit for more info.
Let's just start by doing mild exercises and gradually increase the training every 2 weeks.
Cardiovascular Exercise
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This will be good for your heart and it also help shape your muscle and make them stronger which means that you can use your body more efficiently.
There are many ways to improve your cardiovascular system. The best one I can recommend is jogging, but if you want something that dont need to go far away from home you can try jog-in-place, squats, jumping ropes and stair climbing. You may do 30 minutes cardiovascular exercise in the first week and gradually increase every two weeks.
Strength Exercise
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Having enough strength is crucial in self defense, I know that the many people prefer technique over strength. Just like Jet Li said "too much muscle slows your movement".
But you must also know that without enough strength you cannot execute the technique properly. Speed and force is also essential in self defense, that's why if you can you must end the fight from the get-go.
In this exercise, you may include push-ups, planks, squats and lifting dumbbells. Now, this kind of training is really intimidating especially for beginners. That's why we must first start small in every exercise, if you can, you may do 10 reps each exercise a day in the first week and then increase it by 5 reps every two weeks.
At the beginning, you may feel that there is no use in this exercise. But if you will keep repeating these exercises every single day will not only help you in your martial arts training, it also keeps your body healthy and fit.
You may see start to see some progress after a month or two depends on the intensity of your exercise.
"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop."
—Confucius