Loren W. Christensen - Solo training : the martial artists guide to training alone

I was 19 years old when I began studying karate in Portland, Oregon, and I fell in love with it the first time I saw that room full of people dressed in their white jammies, kicking and punching like a chorus line of dancers gone mad. I joined that night and quickly became one of the mad ones, devouring all the goodies like a chocolate lover in a candy store.

In the beginning, I had a hard time with the kicks because I was recuperating from a spinal injury I had suffered months earlier in a power lifting contest. The doctors told me to quit lifting and to find something else to do with my youthful energy that was less strenuous, like checkers or stamp collecting. It was 1965, and I, along with most of America, was uninformed as to what the martial arts were all about. I had heard something about karate, so I thought that it might be an easy-on-my-back way to burn some calories. Naive, huh?

That first class taught me how to rotate my hand when doing something called a reverse punch and how to sit in a. a what? A horse stance? When the session was over, I was pleased to find that my back had survived, but that second class was a different story. That was when we were introduced to the front kick, and man oh man, did it ever hurt my lower back. Not only were my injured spine and damaged nerves rebelling against lifting my legs, but the tight adhesions that had formed over the injury prevented me from kicking higher than a short persons knee cap. I wasnt sure what I was going to do. After two lessons, I was already in love with karate and there was no way I could give it up before I had even started.

I decided to work on the problem at home. I held onto the back of a kitchen chair and swung my leg slowly forward and back, like an ancient, creaking pendulum. It made for some serious sweat-producing pain, but each day I trained at home, my leg went an inch or two higher to the front and a tad higher behind me. In class, I continued learning new material, which I did as well as I could. But at home and at my own pace, I pushed to break down the adhesions and work through the pain. Within a few weeks, I was able to kick as well as the other new students.

My instructor had not been sensitive to my problem and had been too busy with the huge school to give me special attention. If it had not trained alone at home, where I worked specifically on what I needed to work on, I would have never progressed. In fact, I would have probably dropped out because of my inability to do the techniques.

Although I initially trained alone to work through my injury, I discovered I enjoyed those workouts and began doing them regularly. I still lived with my parents then, and my mother complained that I was killing the grass in the backyard where I trained virtually every day. I also worked out in my bedroom, kicking at my bed post and standing along the wall trying to snap my punch out and back so fast that my fist wouldnt make a shadow. What the heck are you doing in there? my dad would call out at 2:00 a.m. when my snapping kicks and punches would awaken him.

For the next two years I enjoyed many wonderful workouts training alone. I continued to train in the backyard and in my bedroom, but I discovered other places, too. The garage, which had a dirt floor then, was dark and dank, but I trained in it anyway. I trained in my buddys basement, as he slept away in another room, and I trained in the country under towering fir trees.