Training on holidays
Yep, BJJ practitioners usually make poor holiday partners if your family is just into the ‘relax’ style of holiday. However, my wife knows now that if there is not a gym/sports-activity/beach with waves then the holiday will be a nightmare. So gratefully this holiday is all about sport, there is a gym and there is a mountain with snow. So firstly you need to think what you need to achieve with your training on holidays. For me, especially in a sporting holiday, then it’s all about warming up early in the day, focusing on vulnerable body areas and some short explosive strength combos.
My first stretch is stepping high and ducking under. This pretends there is a piece of wire strung about hip height on your right hand. You step up over the wire to the right and duck back under it to the left. I do about 20 of these and then repeat on the other side. I finish this off with 30-50 push-ups. Fortunately there is a rowing machine here. Again I just am focused on warming and stretching so I do five sets of 1 minute, 10 seconds hard and 50 seconds easy. This 5 minutes is ideal. Its enough to really stretch out all the main muscle groups and get them warm and ignited! Again I focus on the deep stretch forward and the long pull back in the slow period, and speed in the 10seconds. If there is no rower, I tend to use air squats and push-ups with 50 seconds air squats and 10 seconds pushups. In the gym here they have plenty of fixed machines of which I tend not to ever use. They are too focused on individual muscle groups, and for me are not very ‘bang for buck’ as far as training. I never use these in normal training anyway because of this!! Fortunately there are dumbells here to about 30kg. I use these like a kettle bell and just do single arm snatches, single armed cleans and thrusters. I do a few sets to prepare for the exercise and then hit out about three sets of each, with about 5-6 reps. I keep all this to a minimum as far as volume. The last thig you need is injury!! Finally I stretch my back. Here I have a roman chair, so I can do back extensions. If there is no roman chair I use planks and supermans on the floor. I can punch out this session in about 15-20 minutes and be back ready for breakfast as the team are still getting ready. As always my session is not the ‘be all or end all’ fabulous session, but I think no matter what you do:
1. Be safe and reduce volume and weight to prevent injury
2. Focus on the exercises that warm and stretch the bodyparts you are stressing
3. Keep it short