I love discovering I'm doing exactly the right thing already

[pktechgirlbackup]

Insurance cost for martial arts is vastly, vastly lower than that of dance or yoga. I knew that dance was horribly destructive mess, but the yoga thing surprised me. I put it down to a combination of bad teachers and "no one expects to pull something in yoga". You might get injured more often in martial arts, but you're not really in a position to sue if you break a rib when someone kicks you in contact sparring. You knew the risks when you signed up.

Warrior Girls brings up another possible explanation. All of the anti-injury programs focus on the following things: creating a balanced musculature, control, proprioception (knowing where your body is in space), developing the neuromuscular patterns to land softly and move deliberately. And what do you know, martial arts is all about all of those things. It even teaches you to do them at speed. Yoga does have the proprioception and control aspects, and I assume it develops muscles evenly, but it's easy to get lazy when you're moving so slowly.

This makes me feel substantially better for my tiny ninjas. I suspect a nontrivial number of them are, or will be, the highly focused one sport female athletes that are so prone to injuries. But not only are they getting cross training now (via the school's gym class rotation- which, coincidentally, also includes dance and yoga), but the things we're teaching them may be giving them the body and mind they need to prevent injury in the future. So there's another thing you can add to list of things I'm giving to the future.

Comments

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's not so much that yoga leads to "laziness", as that yoga's pretty much a "zero-impact" form of exercise, whereas martial arts tend to have "reducing the effect of impact" as one of their core components. :)

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

which would explain why it works at preventing injuries in others, but not why it itself has fewer (actionable) injuries than yoga. Or am I missing something?

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

What I was trying to say, was that I think martial arts tends to be better at teaching people how to safely deal with falling, slipping, and being unexpectedly hit by things. Which is, I think, a very useful life skill. :) Yoga, by contrast, tends to be more controlled and deliberate, and involves fewer encounters with unexpected situations...