Surviving Christmas as a Martial Artist

My rant about the holiday season and the Dojo being closed

As most Dojo's do around this time of year, my dojo is closed and the UK being how it is with the weather here I can't train outside.
As I write this it is now day 5 of 18 of the Christmas Holidays and already I can't bare not being at the dojo, I guess I now know how a crack addict feels after 5 days, who would have thought i'd get withdrawal from martial arts.

As a result of training hard for competitions in 2025 my body is wrecked and it's only through having time off I realise how much more wrecked it is than I thought. A quick overview of the injuries I've found out about both shins and knees have pain when pressure is applied and my left hip hurts when laying down, to think I'm only 17 I've managed to physically accomplish what many do by their 70s, everything in pain. And what makes all of this worse is my body is used to 2/3 hours of training each day and the calorie intake required to sustain that, even though all I do now is lie around the house I still each the same amount, meaning when the Dojo doors reopen I'll most likely be up a weight class or two.

Procrastination is a bitch, I should be sleeping now as I'm writing this it's 1AM but for some odd reason I can't and instead of doing something that will help me sleep I'm writing this. Last week I told my Sensei "I'm thinking of booking myself in for a physiotherapy sports massage." That was a week ago, I was supposed to book for today but I'll try to get in by the time our doors reopen.

2026 is looking to be a busy year with many National, British, European and World level competitions available for me to attend. In our lineup we have some notable competitions AFSO 4 Nations, WUMA World Championship, WUMA European Championship, and the AFSO World Cup.

I'd like to thank whoever has stuck about and read this rant and remind you to watch this space as I've got stuff planned to write in the next 9 months, anyway as I should have done about 3 hours ago now, I'm going to try to sleep,