Team,

With all of us working from home, observing the social distancing suggestions and quarantining (we’re all doing that right?!?) it can be easy to slip off of a good fitness routine.

Martial Arts training is exceptionally rigorous and it’s easy to take for granted how many calories it takes to fuel a week full of wrestling, boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, etc. If you are trying to lose weight, or trying to NOT gain weight because of this quarantine, I suggest you evaluate your diet NOW. Not trying to scare you, but let’s be honest, do you think a pint of Hagen Dazs counts as health food….

It might be if it were part of your cheat meal after 3 weeks of a training camp, doing 2x days for the IBJJF DC Open. Unfortunately we aren’t doing that. The only marathon most of us will be running for some time will be on Netflix.

I’d suggest that you carefully review the amount and contents of your meals while you’re inside the house. If your physical output is less than it was when you were in DMA (I’m betting it is) you should consider a limit on how much sugar/carbs you’re taking in and, again, how big your servings are. Enjoy all of that as a treat.

Now, if you’re looking to keep your activity levels high during quarantine season I do have a challenge for you. I’ll be emailing the team (I’m locked in my living room, so you may hear from me a lot) with daily workout suggestions. These suggestions will all be exercises you can either do indoors with minimal or no equipment needed, or outdoors where you can get fresh air and still practice all the safely prescribed social distancing. I would love to hear from anyone who is keeping up with these workouts (an email back to me or text is cool if you feel up to it). If you guys like this maybe we can make it a routine practice (regardless of pandemics…). I’ll throw shoutouts to those who are following the workout routine!

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Suggestion: I am a huge fan of kettlebells – with kettlebells a little bit goes a long way. I encourage you to consider buying one for general fitness purposes but they’ll be particularly valuable now. I use a 36 lb kettlebell that is sculpted to look like a chimpanzee…talk about motivating…

For Today, March 19th:
This morning I ran a simple but blood pumping kettlebell workout from my living room. I’ll provide a substitute option for those without kettlebells (see below).

5 Sets of:
20 Pushups
10 Kettlebell Swings
10 Kettlebell/Goblet Squats
10 Pushpress (5 per arm)

OR

5 Sets of:
20 Push-ups
10 Burpees
20 Bodyweight Squats
20 V Sit Ups

5 sets isn’t a ton of sets but to push yourself you should try to minimize rest in between sets, OR you can set a timer from 12 minutes down and just burn out as many sets as you can. Anything more is super tough – I’m proud of you. Please train safely while you do not have a coach to supervise. Feel free to modify this if you aren’t comfortable with parts of this. Stay safe.

Let’s have some fun with this whole quarantine thing. Feel free to reach out to me with questions or suggestions about fitness or even martial arts in general.

All the best,
Scott
District Martial Arts