Post workout recovery?

I've been in a low cycle lately for a variety of reasons. Depressed with grad school, not making any noticeable progress in the MA, etc. I've been training pretty much every day. I do the beginner and advanced classes Monday and Wednesday with Chris. I run the open workouts for him on Fridays. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and either Saturday or Sunday I'm doing the Chen taiji thing. Then I've got my random Jiulong bagua, online Gao bagua, xingyi, baji, etc. practicing that I work on other times. Sometimes I just want to go home at a normal time, have dinner, and enjoy a free evening instead of having dinner at 11 PM after several hours of exercise. Anyway, training every day leaves me constantly sore and feeling old and decrepit.

So what should I be doing to fix that? Should I be stretching after every workout? Would that help? Hot showers seem to help a little but only temporarily. I feel like an old geezer at the beginning of every class. Having my wife punch me a lot seems to be the best help (breaking up the lactic acid I guess). I'm not sure what else to do.

Well, obviously there's not much I can recommend pertaining to grad school except to just keep focused on your goals. I'm sure you have a heavy load so it's only natural to get down sometimes. As far as wushu goes, definitely stretch after, but I would recommend taking longer and more frequent breaks from training. There is so much more to life than wushu! I know you train diligently enough that allowing yourself some chill breathing time will not cost you any progress in the long run. I have actually found that some of my greatest progress has come from just relaxing and taking some time away from training (not for very long of course). Your body definitely needs more recovery time. I kept up a training schedule like you describe for many years and it definitely left me sore all the time. The thing I found was that with qigong, my recovery time got much quicker as I got better at it. Still, it does the body and mind well to reward yourself with some other distractions. These days I will take a couple days where I only do qigong or some chill taiji after a couple hard training weeks. I also take some days where I do nothing, but really I'm still doing qigong much of my daily life. Deepening qigong practice will provide better recovery as well as leaps in your martial practice. It has greatly improved my mental state as well. You should definitely have dinner at a regular time. Carve out some space and really analyze your priorities. Reduce and refine my friend. The best thing to be gained through martial arts, IMO, are introspection and life perspective. The arts themselves are insignificant. Qigong, or more importantly, inward exploration, is where it's at. Enjoy your life and the adventure that it is. Find a balance and learn to be easy with yourself too. We will get old and decrepit and injured, but we can maximize our time here.

wuxia_warrior wrote:I've been in a low cycle lately for a variety of reasons. Depressed with grad school, not making any noticeable progress in the MA, etc. I've been training pretty much every day. I do the beginner and advanced classes Monday and Wednesday with Chris. I run the open workouts for him on Fridays. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and either Saturday or Sunday I'm doing the Chen taiji thing. Then I've got my random Jiulong bagua, online Gao bagua, xingyi, baji, etc. practicing that I work on other times. Sometimes I just want to go home at a normal time, have dinner, and enjoy a free evening instead of having dinner at 11 PM after several hours of exercise. Anyway, training every day leaves me constantly sore and feeling old and decrepit.

So what should I be doing to fix that? Should I be stretching after every workout? Would that help? Hot showers seem to help a little but only temporarily. I feel like an old geezer at the beginning of every class. Having my wife punch me a lot seems to be the best help (breaking up the lactic acid I guess). I'm not sure what else to do.