Favourite New Year's resolution: do more sport
Today (at the time of writing) is 1 January, so we would like to take this opportunity to introduce everyone who has resolved to do more sport in the new year to a sport that can have an extremely positive impact on your life.
Our website is centred around the Japanese sword and the associated martial arts. In this article, we would like to explain why these sports have both physically and mentally positive aspects.
Why sword martial arts can enrich your life far beyond a resolution
The training of a martial art, or more precisely the training of Japanese sword fighting arts, is versatile and has many positive aspects. The New Year's resolution to do more sport and thus improve your standard of living fits in perfectly with training in these interesting sports.
In addition to simply improving your fitness, you can learn many additional skills that will be helpful in life.
Physical aspects of sword training
As most people probably want to do more sport for purely physical reasons, we would like to look at the physical aspects of swordsmanship first.
Increase general fitness
The training of a Japanese sword art is a mixture of movement and endurance training. The individual movements are comparatively less strenuous, but the numerous repetitions make the training a physically demanding activity.
Regular sword training increases general fitness.
Coordination and balance
In addition to fitness, coordination and balance are essential aspects of sword training. These skills are trained in every training session.
The precise execution of movements automatically trains complete body coordination and the variety of stances and positions that are practised in movements have an extremely positive effect on your own body awareness and balance.
Sports level like weight training
It is an aspect that will never come up in training, but of course the movement of the training sword also moves weight.
Depending on whether a Training katana with blunt blade or Wooden training sword This "dumbbell weight" is 500 grams to 1 kg. Long-term training with a sword is therefore more demanding on the body than simple movement training.
Additional training improves individual skills
When training in Japanese martial arts, you usually quickly realise for yourself in which areas you still have physical deficits. Supplementary training such as endurance training therefore comes naturally and offers the opportunity to increase general athleticism.
Mental aspects of sword training
In addition to the purely physical aspects, the mental training that goes hand in hand with training is an elementary component. Of course, we would also like to mention a few plus points.
Social interaction
Training takes place in training groups. In some schools the training consists almost exclusively of partner exercises, in others it is mainly individual exercises. In any case, the training always takes place in a group, where it is important to show consideration for your training partners and respect for other people.
Discipline
Discipline is an important part of any sport, as progress can only be made if you regularly take part in training and push yourself beyond your limits. This kind of discipline is helpful in pretty much all areas of life.
Structure
The training takes place according to a specific sequence, which usually has only a few variations and very structured core elements.
Training is therefore a real contrast programme to the rather chaotic everyday life. Doing more sport of this kind has a positive impact on your own well-being.
Learn skills
From the first day of training, the aim is to learn new skills. Acquiring these gradually strengthens self-confidence and, in the long term, skills are possible that would have been unthinkable at the start of training.
Eternal improvement
Martial arts are so profound that you never stop learning and there are always new things to learn. The humble attitude of the eternal student (even if you have long been a teacher) is part of the art of the sword and guarantees lifelong practice without tiring.
Access to other interesting topics
Training in a Japanese sword art opens the door to a variety of other interesting topics. The Japanese sword, meditation, tactics and strategy training and the study of Japanese history are just a few examples.
How the Japanese sword can bring peace and balance to your lifewe will cover in another article for the new year. Right after the resolution to do more sport, the desire to slow down is probably one of the most common resolutions.
How the resolution to do more sport can really be kept
There is only one way to keep your New Year's resolution to do more sport: You have to start exercising! You can find out where you can train in the Japanese sword arts in a corresponding Register on one of our partner sites.
Step 2 is then to stick with the training.
In any case, we wish you happiness, health and success for the New Year!
