Quote:
Originally Posted by hannukah harry
stretch. but only stretch warmed up muscles (never stretch cold muscles!) and don't bounce! flexibility is important to the martial arts, so definatly work on that.
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That's true but a distinction should be made between stretching and loosening up. You DO want to loosen up before a work out, even before warming up, which would be very similar to stretches, only more gently and for not as long and with a few loosening moves thrown in (that I don't know how to explain.)
Cross training wise...anything that works out core (torso) muscles would help a lot. Swimming is good, if you do any endurance work outs (biking, swimming, jogging, etc) just make sure not to over do it (probably wouldn't have to worry about till you get past the 4-5 mile mark for jogging, and whatever the equivelent is for swimming) by throwing in sprinting type periods in between. ie jog for 5 minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, walk for 60 seconds, jog for 5 minutes, etc. I think its called interval training. Reason being is because if you go over endurance heavy workouts I've heard you can slow down a bit which is really bad in MA.