Practice After Long Rests
 

Hi, I have been practicing Kendo for over 5 years now, and I seem to face one tough challenge every time I go back to practice after a long period of rest.

I get out of breath, my hands never react the same, my feet stay glued to the floor, and my form gets completely off.

It always seemed to me that I have always took the longest out of my dojo to recover back to the state I was before the rest.

Are there any tips you have to offer?

Go to practice more often? Most people will have the same issue after break.

+1 to that

Well, "go to practice more often" is the simple advice to give. Let's choose to assume that you have serious reasons for missing practice for long periods of time. Maybe your doujou closes for summer vacations, for instance.

Anyway, once you've let yourself get out of shape, there's little you can do. Thus, if you have to miss practice, you should keep yourself in shape--and the way to do that is suburi. Suburi every day, maybe more than once a day. If you have 5 half-years' worth of experience, then you know what "correct suburi" feels like, so do it. Find a way to do suburi in your house--squatting suburi take little place and don't put your ceiling in danger. Make hayai-suburi a routine and you'll maintain your physical condition for as long as it takes. To ensure your form is not off, you could take a video of yourself and review it for mistakes.

Of course, suburi don't teach you distance and timing, so if you're lucky enough to have someone else to practice with, do kirikaeshi, kihon-kata, or even regular kata. If you can't find anyone... well, you'll still have troubles when you start again, but you'll be fine after 1-2 practices.

I hope this helps you somewhat.

You don't need to tell us any details for why you are taking long breaks, that's your business, but you do need to think about whether you need to be absent from practice completely or if you can attend and only participate to a limited extent. Even a limited participant at practice will preserve some of their skills, but if you skip the whole thing you don't keep or gain anything.

As someone who has dealt with some serious injury issues, I can say from experience that you can still work on certain skills or at least preserve your form even without doing everything everybody else is doing. It's frustrating, but not as much as feeling like you are going backwards.