old poll, new poll

well, it’s been a month or so since i posted the warm-up poll in the right side­bar of this site. unfor­tu­nately, there were not so many responses, but i’m guess­ing that this is because some peo­ple were not aware of the poll to begin with. at any rate, i’m going to try again with a brand spank­ing new poll and see i can make it a lit­tle more popular.

first, let’s look at what (lit­tle) the first poll may be able to tell us.

the first poll

the ques­tion was “how do you warm up?” — out of 12 responses,

• 5 warm up by light cal­is­then­ics and sta­tic stretching
• 4 warm up by dynamic stretch­ing and joint mobil­ity exercises
• 1 warms up by relax­ation and breath­ing exercises
• 2 don’t warm up

obvi­ously, most of the respon­dents (small sam­ple as we are) are warm­ing up by doing some jog­ging, arm cir­cles, and et cetera, then sit­ting down on the floor and try­ing to touch their toes. i’m going to go out on a limb and guess that these peo­ple are amer­i­can taido stu­dents. i say this because this is the tra­di­tional japan­ese warm-up that uchida sen­sei has used for­ever. other amer­i­can instruc­tors use this method because it’s “the way we’ve always done it”. we also do this warm-up in japan, but i doubt many japan­ese stu­dents are read­ing this site and respond­ing to my poll.

no mat­ter where the respon­dents reside, i don’t believe that this is a pro­duc­tive warm-up for taido prac­tice. i’ll get in to details in an arti­cle some­time before long, but let me warn you now that sta­tic stretch­ing prior to dynamic move­ments is known to increase the risk of mus­cle strains other move­ment injuries. for starters, i’ll refer you to the stretch­ing faq writ­ten by brad apple­ton. i’ve also included this doc­u­ment on my links page along with other use­ful resources.

the joint-mobility-exercise-and-dynamic-stretch camp is where i (and a few oth­ers) cur­rently fall. this warm-up par­a­digm was devel­oped out of cold war sports per­for­mance research in in rus­sia and other social­ist nations. i’m guess­ing that i am the only amer­i­can in taido who warms up this way (and i can tell you that nobody does in japan either). cur­rently, most phys­i­cal per­for­mance coaches seem to be advo­cat­ing this kind of rou­tine for the sorts of move­ments and abil­i­ties demanded by taido practice.

appar­ently, only one per­son warms up with the relax-and-breathe method. this doesn’t sur­prise me, and prob­a­bly a few of you thought it was included as a joke-option. i have used pro­gres­sive relax­ation and an abbre­vi­ated tai chi rou­tine as my pri­mary warm-up in the past with quite good results. it’s not the best when you are actively attempt­ing to improve your phys­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties, but it is an excel­lent way to teach your body to trig­ger per­for­mance pre­pared­ness in a short time. pro­vided, that is, that you already have the req­ui­site strength and flex­i­bil­ity for your desired activ­i­ties. specif­i­cally, this method is per­fect for performance/competition events where you either don’t have the lux­ury of a full warm-up or must be in a state of phys­i­cal readi­ness for an extended period of time.

and who­ever isn’t warm­ing up at all — you’re very bad boys or girls.

i’ll be get­ting on writ­ing an arti­cle about warm-ups, asap, but in the mean­time, feel free to com­ment on your own warm-up choices below.

the new poll

tell me what taido tech­nique you enjoy doing the most. i don’t care what you’re best at, what you think is coolest, what’s the most dif­fi­cult, or which one makes all the young girls cry. what i’m inter­ested in find­ing out is which type of move­ment you find the most fun. what feels good to you phys­i­cally (we’ll be using the taido def­i­n­i­tion of “hen­tai” for this one)?

pick one and let me know. i’ll give this poll a cou­ple of weeks or so to run.