The Lenten season is finally over, and that means its Easter again! We’ll be spending the day visiting family, probably playing some Rock Band, and eating an amazing amount of food.

I hope everyone else has as nice of a day as that! 🙂

Today’s workout was a new height of glory for the Saturday Morning Breakfast Club. We did the Shodan and Nidan test basics and sparring combinations, once again alternating pushups at one end and situps at the other.

and I were keeping track, but I think everyone had totals approximating mine which were: 400 situps, 125 perfect pushups. I even did 10 Krav Maga style situps in there somewhere, which was a bad idea.

We ended up the day with freestyle one-time sparring like on the Shodan test, some light free sparring, and a “smear the black belt” drill where we showed our special brand of Breakfast Club love.

It seemed that my arms were rather dead and stationary during my drill with , pointed this out to me and I’m going to have to work on it in the coming months in preparation for my Sandan test.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention: I was given a target date for my Sandan test, which is April of next year. That means its going to be a bumped, bruised, bloody 2008. And that’s just fine by me!

My MarBloPoMo efforts have utterly failed due to D&D! We had a lot of running around to do today and I didn’t get to the computer to blog until just now. Rats!!

Tonight’s class was a lightly attended one. We ended up with Oedewaldt-san, myself, , Erbe-san, Snook-san, , Dobbleaire-san, Jane-san, and a gaggle of yellow and white belts.

Oedewaldt took the lower ranks and left the higher ranks to us. I took the opportunity to work on slow sparring, focused on relaxation, timing, and distance. I watched for several rotations and then couldn’t stand it anymore and jumped in with the rest of the crew. Among the highlights was getting to spar with and having a good ol’ time!

The second class left us with Jane-san, brown belts, and the black belts. Oedewaldt and split up the lower ranks which left Erbe and I to our own devices, which meant we did the basic seven black belt katas and then sparred for 20 more minutes.

We traded a bunch of shots, he caught me once in the chin pretty well. Also, I was staying in too close and he drove his knee into my thigh in the same place twice in pretty short succession… that made me take a few minutes as my thigh muscles spasmed around. I know I’m going to end up with a pretty good sized bruise there.

Oh lordy, how I love sparring!!

Tonight was the last and final phase of my birthday celebration! It was dinner at my parent’s house and some time for me to hang out with my niece!

I had a pretty nice day at work today too… I got quite a bit done, got taken out for lunch for my birthday, and then we had a team celebration event at Kelleher’s pub where drinks and food was on the company. Scored a new Land’s End shirt too!

It was a good way to finish kicking off my 28th year!

Tonight I got thrust into teaching the first class, and I executed a class that I’ve wanted to do for a long time: I focused on fudo-dachi, a stance predominantly used in the Sochin kata. We simply did a whole boatload of basics in fudo-dachi after working in some stances more familiar for the lower ranks. I was pleased to see that there were several yellow belts in a very good fudo-dachi by the end of the night!

The second class consisted of more of the same distance and footwork drills that we have been working on, capped off with some light slow sparring to end the night. Trent-san and I mixed it up a little tonight and it felt good, hopefully there will be more where that came from.

Got my perfect pushups in, two sets before class and my wide ones in between classes!

As mentioned yesterday, today is my birthday! I’m celebrating with a birthday feast of Pizza Hut (nothing but the best for us, let me tell you!) and then I have to perform a little business tonight as we have an amendment to our taxes that needs to get filed. I had the option of scheduling the appointment last month and I decided that we’d probably be out and about today anyway so we may as well stop in there for 20 minutes to see how it goes.

Aside from that, we’re going to head out shopping for a bit and then spend a quiet evening in. Sometimes a little bit of R&R is the best gift that a guy can get.

Thanks to everyone that has been emailing and calling with their well-wishes today, I’m a lucky guy to have friends like I do!!

Tonight was my family birthday celebration! Tasha made me a great cake and we went over to my aunt’s house so we could hang out with the rest of my family. It was nice to get to spend some time with them, shoot some pool on my uncle’s pool table, and eat some food.

Tomorrow is my actual birthday! woot!

Today’s workout started late for all parties involved. I arrived around quarter to nine and had only missed one pass up and down the gym floor, so I joined in with , , and Erbe-san for a good set of nidan sparring combinations, including a handful of additions devised by .

At the end of each pass, we did pushups and situps like last week. My grand totals were 100 perfect pushups, 30 tricep dips, and somewhere in the vicinity of 180 crunches. We were wrapped up with all of that by 10 am, so it was a very compressed and concentrated set of karate goodness. Good job everyone!

There was some talk of Sandan (third degree black belt) test preparation, so I’m going to give some thought to what my near-term and long-term goals are and post ’em up here.

Now that I’m eleven workouts in to augmenting my karate training with perfect pushups, I thought it would be good to take some stock. The testimonials on the box of the Perfect Pushup handles claim results in only 10 workouts… and I actually have to say that it works!

Two different elements spring to mind when I have to quantify the improvement. First, I have more stamina and strength. I can now do the 8-6-4-2 plan with relative ease when you compare it to how difficult it was at the start. I have some plans to add the second set of regular pushups to the mix, which would be my fourth set of 20 pushups per workout. In addition to the incremental strength, I was able to accomplish a “max session” of 100 perfect pushups in a two hour span. For me, that’s astonishing.

The other noticeable improvement is the improved definition. Granted, I had almost no visible upper body muscles when I started so the argument can be made that starting from nothing ANYTHING is an improvement. But I can really see a difference in the definition around my chest, arms, shoulders, and back. I have some visible muscle where there was none before!

To further bolster my body’s ability to add muscle I have started to drink some whey protein powder that I started on during my Sochin training in 2006. I tapered off from drinking it after awhile for some reason, but I still have half of a large jug left.

For those of you that are interested, I ran across this article on Lifehacker that explains why adding pushups to your workout routine is a good thing. Its a short, good read so go for it!