Happy new year to everyone; 2017 starts with its first lesson today, 3 January, keeping our regular schedule of 4 lessons per week for the next 51 weeks.

We are already planning our usual Town vs. Gown fight in February where members of all clubs we are training (CARISMA, CUKBS and ARUKBC) will fight members of the other clubs.  This is a great opportunity for all beginners to have a go at sport fighting in a friendly and controlled environment, before trying other tournaments.  Later in the year several members of the club will take part in various regional fights, both light and full contact.  CUKBS will be fighting Varsity in Oxford this year and their training regime has been under tight control since the beginning of Michaelmas term in October.

As usual we will be having 4 grading sessions in March, June, September and December.  On the second Saturday of June we’ll have the annual CARISMA BBQ and on the first Sunday in December, after grading, we’ll have the Christmas dinner.  These events are already on the club’s calendar for your perusal.

As our aim is keeping a critical mass of at least 60 paying members at any given time we will be recruiting beginners any time we need more members but pausing when membership is in line with our expectations.  Our first beginners’ course for the year will start on 19 January and, as usual listed on our calendar.

2016 was another good year for CARISMA, with a large number of new interesting people who joined us, and classes consistently larger than previous years.  We found ourselves with a reduced percentage of undergrads students, from both University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin; good news is that we replaced them with high school and post grad students as well as young professionals both male and female.  This change has increased the retention of our members and the consistency of their attendance as undergrads students are around for about 6 months per year and their attendance tends to be not as regular as we would like.

An individual achievement which is definitively worth mentioning is Meitar Blumenfeld as our first winner for a full contact fight; it has to be said that our whole full contact team to date had a total of 4 people, over a long period of time.

For a number of personal reasons we lost, within a short time, 3 of our instructors; fortunately we were working, in the meantime, to train some of our most promising senior students to be their replacement so it all happened smoothly and according to plans.

Whether you are a regular member or a casual reader interested in joining us we hope to see you soon and looking forward to train with you during 2017.

With 15+ years of history CARISMA has trained thousands of people which joined us, trained with us for some time and then, for various reasons, left us. It happens once in a while that somebody who left months or years before decides to come back which is always appreciated from our side.

I decided to write this post about prescribing a slow start for people who rejoin a martial arts club in general, CARISMA specifically. It was inspired by four former members of our club that during the last year have decided to re-join us and, not following my suggestions, gave up within a few weeks. The idea of slow start after long breaks is something that everybody should apply, whether you have been on a long holiday, took a sabbatical or moved temporarily away from training.

Let’s start from the beginning of someone’s training history, which might be similar to yours; you were feeling unfit or looking for a new challenge and decided to join our club. At CARISMA we welcome beginners from all walks of life, within a very broad range of ages and backgrounds. The majority of people joining us are not as fit as they would like; most of them are not as fit as they should be in order to perform at our average level of expected speed, power and accuracy. Upon joining most people experience a more or less steady progress toward fitness and proficiency which may be eventually reaching a peak or a plateau within a few years.

At that point you feel nicely fit, able to perform most exercises without struggling too much; if you are never struggling you are not pushing hard enough. Some training might be more challenging on power, others on endurance; others might push your skills to their limit. I hope it sounds familiar because that’s the way our training regime is designed to deliver. A continuous challenge that explorers all aspects of training martial arts, with the aim of creating a well round martial artist.

Imagine now that for some reason you stop training martial arts; if you are reasonably active person you might keep running, swimming, cycling or going to the gym. Your physical and cardiovascular fitness perhaps doesn’t drop that much and you still feel you can go back and pick up your martial arts training where you left it; here is where disappointment starts, for three main reasons:

• Your mind still remembers pretty well most moves as they should be performed. Your muscles might have lost some reactivity or that level of flexibility which allowed you to block a fast attack, punch somebody and surprise them or kick to someone’s head.
• Some of the people you still know at the club have progressed a great deal; some of them were just beginners when you left a year or so ago and now they are fit, fast and wining fights. You were used to nearly play with them, now they do the same with you and that’s very frustrating.
• The two above reasons cause you to get hit more than you were used to and when you get hit it hurts more than you remember. That escalates de-motivation and often causes people to leave within weeks.

The simple solution to the problems described above is to manage your expectations and adopt the “slow start after long breaks” approach that is far from super scientific but it helps to avoid the above described situations.

Never mind you were an intermediate or a black belt: accept it will take some time to get back into shape by following these rules:

• Give yourself 4-8 weeks; during that period you will accept your performance will be suboptimal
• Approach each exercise at 50%-70% expected performance; don’t even try to achieve full 100% so you won’t be disappointed by the fact that you cannot
• If you are training with partners try to find people which are either less experienced than you, lighter than you or both; training with them will not push you beyond a threshold that will show your reduced performance

Depending on your specific genetics you might catch up in a shorter time or perhaps a bit longer but managing your expectations and be realistic with your achievements will help you to get back in shape and keep enjoying your training.