10-Minute Conditioning Challenge

With New Year’s resolution time upon us, you may be pleased to learn that Luke Ryan, RVTKD Instructor and Partner, has created a deliciously agonizing conditioning routine to share with all RVTKD students and instructors. The challenge: perform ten varied exercises, totaling 400 repetitions, in ten minutes. That’s an average of just one rep every 1.5 seconds—how hard could it be?

What’s more, Luke has generously volunteered to meet all comers at the dojang outside of class time. Once you schedule your individual session, he’ll show you the techniques, then time you as you perform them, tracking each rep on a scorecard and coaching you on what exercises need attention to complete the challenge. This means you don’t have even have to log your numbers—it’s like you have your very own trainer, and all you have to worry about is doing the exercises. When you think about it that way, it feels like it’s almost too easy!

You can scroll down to read more details from Luke about the program, or if you’re the “I’m ready for anything” type, you can boldly click the link below and sign up.

Happy sweating,

bt

CAN YOU FIND 10 MINUTES A MONTH TO IMPROVE YOUR PHYSICAL FITNESS?

As you all know, Taekwondo training is physically rigorous. Jidokwan’s deep stances and explosive motions require strength, speed, stamina, balance, and agility. Consequently, as we become stronger and faster and build endurance and body awareness, our practice benefits.
Before the pandemic, we had a once-a-month Saturday morning class focused on fitness. As much as we’d all like to resume this kind of group training, we’ve decided it would be more prudent to offer the following opportunity for individual workouts.
During the first two weeks of each month, every student can come to the dojang at a time of their choosing and, with the guidance of an instructor, spend up to 10 minutes performing as many of these exercises as possible:

• 50 push-ups
• 50 sit-ups/crunches
• 25 burpees
• 25 Russian twists (each side)
• 100 lateral bosu ball steps
• 50 air squats
• 20 split squats (w/weights)
• 50 dips
• 10 pull-ups/chin-ups
• 20 get-ups (each side)

It will be up to each student to decide upon the order in which they do each exercise, as well as the number of repetitions they do in each set. Given the targets in each exercise, most of us (if not all) will have to tackle each challenge in chunks. For students who aim to do all 400 repetitions within the 10-minute time limit, it may make sense to prioritize weaker exercises at the outset before their energy gets depleted.
For example, a student who struggles with burpees might choose to start by doing 5 of them, followed by 20 sit-ups/crunches, then 5 more burpees, followed by 30 air squats, etc. Conversely, a student who wants to work their way up to 400 repetitions might ignore certain exercises they find particularly challenging or save them until they’ve harvested all the lower hanging fruit.
Because these exercises can be done at home without the need of expensive equipment, we should be able to make month-to-month improvements by working out on our own. That, however, is not the only path to better performance. As we become more attuned to our physical strengths and weakness, we should be able to deploy wiser strategies that account for our finite supply of energy. In addition to producing better results in this fitness challenge, the experience should develop body awareness that helps us to grow as martial artists.
In the interest of maximizing participation in this challenge, we are offering it free of charge whenever it works for your schedule. You can use this link to sign up for a date/time of your choosing.