Looking for advice, and a change

[mecalder]

I am wondering if people that read this can list me some good exercises that will help me with Karate? In the next paragraph, I will type out some stats, and how I am currently training, as well as my goals.

I am currently 5'9, 290 pounds. I am quite overweight, and have been working on losing weight for the last 4 months. Starting weight was 330. However, in my first few months, I was being slack in my training. Now I am trying to push myself harder than I have before. In the past, my style of training has been a bodybuilding/powerlifting style. I am trying to get out of the habit of training like this. In my opinion, people that train this way, have to many unnecessary rules, such as drink so many protein shakes, don't do too many sets, do this many reps, not too much cardio, and the list goes on.

Now, I train twice daily. My first workout is at 6:30 am. However, I am still unsure what to put in this workout. I am unemployed, only working small jobs here and there, so to make up for not working, I am trying to train at least 2-3 hours a day. Many call this overtraining, but many of those also have jobs. For my morning workout, I think my main focus should be going over kicks, punches, blocks, and kata. But that isn't all I want to do. I also want to work on doing exercises that will help me to do better in my Karate experience, and the morning would be a good time to do this I think. So first of all, can you tell me what I should be doing along with the technique training?

For my afternoon workout, I train at 4:30 pm with my uncle, who is also in my Karate class. For this workout, we mainly work on muscular endurance, and power. But there are workouts that we add in exercises that are more for cardiovascular. Usually our workout will start with 30 minutes of weight lifting. Our lifts are giant sets, taking 1-2 minutes in between giant sets. For example, shoulders day would consist of doing front, side, rear lateral raises, and shoulder presses, one right after another for as many sets as we can get in, in 30 minutes. For the second 30 minutes, we do all outside activities. Here is a list of activities we choose from: 5 minutes on the elliptical, 5 minutes of jump roping, 5 minutes punching the punching bag, Farmer walks using 80 pound dumbbells for around 100 meters, vehicle pushing, 150 pound tire flipping, wood splitting, or jogging. The majority of these activities use all of the body, and all of them cause fatigue about halfway through, to push us to a new level.

For a diet, I eat meat on occasion, but my meals consist of mostly fruit and vegetables. I try to eat around 5-6 pieces of fruit each day. Eat 1-2 salads each day, and drink alot of water. The only supplement I use is actually a juice with several fruits in it. The juice is called Monavie. It's kind of expensive, but I find it works better than anything I have ever tried. And it's a natural supplement.

My goals are to continue through Karate. I really enjoyed my visit the first time. I want to reduce my weight to around 220 pounds, gain punching power, kicking power, speed, agility, stamina. Anything that makes a good student, I want to work on.

So this is my training and diet. I have wandered into ALOT of motivation right now, and am still not satisfied with my training. I want to train as much as possible. Whether it's weight lifting, techniques, cardiovascular exercises, or even meditation, if you think that is a good idea. But currently I am looking for advise. Also, I currently only go to karate once a week, since it's a 1.5 hour drive. The class lasts for 2.5 hours.

Thanks. And I will be back on to check this after I wake up.

[Fish]

When do you rest and how much rest do you get in any week? Remember the golden rule: stress + rest = success. If you don't rest, eventually you will get an injury or your immune system won't cope and you'll get sick, which will put your training back.

[mecalder]

Well, like I said, I'm sort of unemployed. So I try to get in a lot of vitamins to help me recover from workouts. The reason why I think I should train more, is some people with Labour jobs would be applying stress to their body at work, and still training at home. So I thought that if they did this, several hours of training a day shouldn't be too bad.