I heard that there are two kinds of people after the pandemic, those that got fit and those that didn’t. I somehow went from one to the other. It took me roughly two years to improve my general fitness from a relatively low point.

Lifestyle choices got me to a relatively low point in early 2020. The onset of the pandemic, work from home, absence of childcare, and the uncertainty of how and when to reopen the business made things worse. I crossed a hundred and something kilograms in spring 2020. I started to notice health ailments in a good friend around me, who was just a few years older than me. I felt this was a breaking point and something had to change, or approaching my 40s would likely be past the midpoint in life. When you think about it, this is more than just your own fitness, you have a responsibility to your family and kids to stay healthy. Fading to preventable ailments should never be an option.

Having lost considerable fitness, I started doing walks in the fall of 2020. I would be out every morning regardless of the weather and slowly build up to a 10km circle around the neighborhood, or a route I could achieve in less than 1.5 hours. When that goal was reached, I started adding in heat. I’d wear a sauna suit under the winter clothing. That alone caused the weight to disappear quickly. To pass the perceived monotony at first, I’d make it a ritual to schedule audiobooks for the walks. I rediscovered Jim Rohn and Steven Pressfield and went through dozens of autobiographies, including Matthew McConaughey, and Roger Moore. To carve out time and not upset my breakfast-making duties at home, I would be out by 5:00 – 5:30 am and back for making breakfast at 7:00 am. It wasn’t until mid-2021 that I discovered the system behind this from Robin Sharma’s book. Getting up early, has been a game-changer for me since Grad School.

A few months into the routine, I needed more cardio and had to regain more flexibility. I started watching Scott Atkins flexibility tutorials, first with envy, and eventually followed through. In an odd way, the lockdowns and being confined to his own space yielded in many instructional videos. The same also happened to other martial artists that started to crank out a treasure trove of fitness-under-lockdown videos.

I started adding in suspension training and freaked out my wife by buying a heavy boxing bag. I used to have a low-end weight machine that caught dust before moving to the new place, that got Marie-Kondo’d by wifey. I was put on notice that anything I buy that takes space and catches a few grains of dust will suffer the same fate.

Around summer 2021 I had a decent routine down and regained some fitness. My neighbor down the street also became interested and we started doing walks together. I added in swimming in open-air public city pools that started allowing people back in. I started to gradually replace the walks with suspension training, strengthening exercises, and jump rope. When I discussed my routine with the wife of my walking buddy, herself a fitness geek, she recommended adding in high-intensity-interval workouts (HIIT). I thought to myself well, there was something I did in my 20s that resembled the best HIIT workouts.

I remembered the time in the mid to late 20s when I discovered martial arts while I was in grad school for my Ph.D., and it for a while became quite a journey. In my 20s, I’d train at least three-four times weekly in Goju Ryu Karate, then added Kendo two times a week, and eventually took Jujitsu classes organized by the Karate club on weekends. I was fit, weight about 30kg less than at the start of 2020, and spent as much time on the mat as in front of books. I wanted to go back to that self again and hit reboot. My first tournament around 2009ish at the University of Toronto.

It just happened that after two long years of lockdowns, clubs slowly started to open back up. That 10-year break was big, but so was the two-year gap for anyone else. My initial goal was to survive tryouts at my old university club without injuries while training with people that are easily 10-21 years younger than me. I survived, the journey was back on in September 2021. There is something incredibly powerful to training with young folks. Most of them are the embodiment of the Beginners Mind. Everyone trains hard, with no politics, no complaints, and no obsession with gear and tools. Some of them made it to compete at the provincial and national levels. It’s this pool of future-looking folks that just breeds enthusiasm. After a failed attempt to make the grading after just a few months of training, I managed to grade to brown, a term later, in Winter 2022. With a lot of work, Shodan might be in the cards next year.

Balancing family and training time became a bit of a challenge. I traded half of my winter training earlier this year for my wife going back to ski-racing lessons. I am working to get my kids into martial arts as well. Training time at the club is still an ongoing point of contention with family time and business. You cannot easily move club hours to odd times when kids are asleep, and significant others are hooked on KDramas. The shift in training is bleeding into gossip in odd ways into wider social circles too: “Is it normal that he trains five times a week in his 40s?”. Social pressures sometimes bring me back to Steven Pressfield’s words from Turning Pro.

There is still a long journey, if ever a finish line, to get good at Karate and Jiu-Jutsu. The most noticeable feat of hitting the 40s is for me probably the loss of reaction time and flexibility, including mental flexibility. I feel that, especially in Jiu-Jutsu, I fall back to brute force rather than technique when in a difficult randori situation. This might be due to a lack of technique, and stress shutting your mental abilities down. Everything becomes a club. In hindsight, this seems like a dangerous approach and a recipe for losing friends or not making them in the first place. This still needs work. Internalizing combos of Karate drills seems to take me substantially more effort than in my earlier years. Mundane things like cartwheels during warmups are something still being worked on. I think about it as a process, something to fix, rather than giving control away by attributing it to circumstances.

For anyone in the same boat, get started, start slowly, and do not relent. Life passes too fast to defer opportunity. This is not a self-gracious celebration of hitting some peak, mere a celebration about making it out of a dark valley. Two years on, I am still way off the fitness and weight I had in my late 20s. I hope this story helps anyone still looking to make the first few steps out of a valley.

… “Green Light!” (Matthew McConaughey)

Published: 2022-05-28
Updated  : 2025-10-04
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