The Wannabe Polymath

Modern living is too soft.  For the martial artist, you need to often go back, go old school, in order to not only live healthy, but also for the body to be in optimal condition to perform the techniques that martial artists need to perform.  Eating organic, non-gmo foods (while a must) is not going to keep your joints and muscles in alignment and shape by itself.  Food is a fuel.  Your lifestyle is the other half of optimal living.  It doesn’t matter that you eat non-gmo if you sit all day and don’t exercise.  To take it further, eating non-gmo and exercising an hour a day is awesome, but their might be other parts of your lifestyle that is that negatively effecting your body and health.

Case in point: I have recently taken to sleeping on a Chinese wooden bed.  There is no real mattress, to be speak of.  The entire bed is wooden, with no springs or rails.  It is almost like a table.  On top of the wood we have placed something like a thin tatami mat.  The Chinese call it a grass mat. It is simply a another layer between you and the wooden board, it provides no sense of softness or comfort.  It is there just for sanitary and aesthetic reasons. Essentially, we are sleeping on a board.

I can only describe the benefits as being great.  From sleeping on a mattress my hips have sunken.  The support is too soft for my hyper extending joints.  As a result my hips sink back when I am sleeping.  When you sleep on a mattress, the heaviest part of your body is going to sink lower than the rest.  For a normal, healthy person (or some out of shape people) this would be the buttocks.  In my case, my old mattress had depressions on both sides from where I sleep that only exacerbated the problem.  As  a result I would have to continually rotate my legs out throughout the day to get support back. Even when sleeping on a new mattress, my hips would still sink into the mattress. It is just a soft surface that is unable to keep things on the same level.

This hurt my kicking alot.  After throwing a kick I would sometimes have to readjust myself to get my hips back into place.  To be clear, what was happening was that some tendon/muscle in my hip socket was not in place and would not stay there. This is an example of the high level of maintenance that my hyper extending body requires. Massage therapy and physical therapy worked a bit, but was not solving the cause.

What was needed was for a hard surface to lie on. After a single days rest on the wooden bed I was already better. My hip joints now stay in alignment and the rest of my body does as well. My kicks are now back and I do not have to perform any readjustments anymore. If you are having joint troubles, perhaps consider a hard wooden bed. You can easily test this out by spending a night on the floor and seeing how your body adjusts to it. Chances are, you will be better off for it.
Soft living hurts the body. Harden up your daily living and you will be stronger for it.