Greetings from a Karate practitioner and tea connoisseur from Victoria, BC. I'm happy to hear that you found a good gym. Please let us know how your first day of training goes. I'm in the same basic situation as you. I'm 36 and started seriously training later in life. I want to compete as much as I can in Karate / Kickboxing while I am able. Like you, I don't have any professional ambitions. I simply want the experience before I get too old. People tell me to pace myself, but I look at as making up for lost time. It's been three years of hard training, but I'm not burnt out yet!
Greetings from a Karate practitioner and tea connoisseur from Victoria, BC. I'm happy to hear that you found a good gym. Please let us know how your first day of training goes. I'm in the same basic situation as you. I'm 36 and started seriously training later in life. I want to compete as much as I can in Karate / Kickboxing while I am able. Like you, I don't have any professional ambitions. I simply want the experience before I get too old. People tell me to pace myself, but I look at as making up for lost time. It's been three years of hard training, but I'm not burnt out yet!
Just sharing my experience, not trying to discourage you from going for that. I tried training 5 times a week (2x BJJ, 2x Muay Thai, 1x weight training), and it was just far too much. (At least at my current fitness level.) If I did manage to go that often, I would be completely exhausted. Most of the time though I would skip a few, and then feel guilty. Don't feel like you have to jump right in to 4-5 classes a week. I find trying to make 2-3 classes a week (just Muay Thai now), plus weight training 1/week, more manageable. I'm going to stick with that for a while, though I will probably at some point try to add BJJ back in.
I agree with morik. If you are overweight and out of shape then you, your joints and your CNS will be taking a pounding at 4-5 sessions a week. My advice would to be build it up gradually.
Another one who agrees with Morik. When I started (fat and dead after ten seconds of running ), I slowly added sessions. At first I only went one/ week, even though that was more a coincidence, because it was during the holidays. After six or seven weeks I added a second session. A while after that I trained four times a week, and after that it was five times plus rather regular seminars in addition. I'm glad I did like that, because aside from the exhaustion that might have come, I could also be sure, that I would actually like training that often and also keep doing it for longer then a few months and suddenly realizing: "Too much, too fast, now I quit everything" so to speak.
I would train 4-5 times a week if I could, but I don't have the time. I used to cross-train in Jiu-Jitsu, but had to quite due to family reasons. 3 training sessions a week is the best I could negotiate.
It's more important to be consistent then to attend a billion times a week, start slow, build up progressively, and have regular rest weeks, simple.
I thought you can only fit realistically with recovory time 3-4 days a week for actual fitness building and the rest days are for building technique up rather than actual fitness. Or at least thats what i thought professionals would do and working on the notion everyone needs a day of recovery after a workout. (obviously if its not your job and no competition upcoming there would be no drive to use the rest days for technique refinement)
Because it's been a while since I trained for a Martial Arts competition, I'm just going to answer that from a fitness perspective. Personally, I try to fit in 10-14 gym sessions a week, with Sunday tending to be gym free (martial arts day!). Now, not all of these sessions will be absolute killers, but I'd say 8-10 out of them will leave me shaking, and extremely achey. However I also split bodyparts, so if I worked chest Wednesday, I wouldn't work it hard again until Friday. I will do a couple of sets, on the Thursday, just to keep it moving. So you don't NEED a full day of recovery, although recovery speed will depend on your fitness and diet.
If you want improvements you need a full day to recovery, and most major body parts need at least 48hours between sessions to recovery, it depends on what you are trying to do but if you are constantly tearing muscles down in the gym you won't get stronger or bigger, if those aren't your goals that's fair enough
I've upped the intensity as I approach a physique competition, burning more calories, losing more bodyfat. I have managed to hit new 6 rep max pbs, and put on a small amount of weight. If my goal was just strength I would be more likely to follow a plan like 5x5, or smolov, and that is what I am planning to do in the off season. My strength and size obviously aren't increasing as much as they would be if I was training specifically for them, but they're both increasing.
Totally agree, however you can give yourself time to rest and workout by alternating days for different body parts.
There's a kid in my gym, he lost loads of weight training 4-6x a week. But I think he was doing 2 classes a day then doing a long break in between or spreading the days evenly
Just got a stretch machine to help with my flexibility. Going to use it to do isometric split progressions.