Enlight 21

Overstressing My Body

Author: Jake Kim | Category: Health | Reflections | Date: 05-01-2020

There was a time when I overexerted my physical strength. It was during a taekwondo tournament preparation class, which I was most definitely not cut out for during that time. I had just finished a big event for another extracurricular activity, meaning I was extremely out of shape. The logical decision would have been to stick to regular classes until I could keep up with the tournament level of training. Every time I came back home from training, I felt exhausted and unwilling to do anything for the rest of the day. The training was extremely intensive, and my mind couldn’t keep up with it. Eventually I performed poorly during the tournament.

Similarly to my taekwondo situation was a book that I can’t remember the name of, but I do remember my mom reading it to me a lot when I was a child. It was about an ordinary family who thought it was a good idea to go bear hunting. Just as I was at the time of the taekwondo tournament, they were also not cut out to do any kind of hunting whatsoever. Yet they insisted on traveling through many different biomes, enduring a long and harsh journey, to face a bear that they stood no chance against. Upon meeting the bear, they immediately ran back home, going right back through the path they came from, and enduring the same harshness that they had to go through at the beginning of the journey.

I think this story says something about preparation and knowing your capabilities. Just as I did during the rigorous tournament training, the family endured hardships during their journey to the bear. While these hardships did serve as a bit of training for the task the family was to face, they still lacked the bare minimum of experience and strength to capture a live bear. The logical choice would have been to learn how to hunt first, then climb up the levels of difficulty for animals to hunt, until they were finally able to hunt a bear. This also means that they were unaware of their capabilities. At their current state, they would not have been able to hunt any hostile creature, yet they didn’t know that they were incapable of hunting a bear, so they went for it anyway.

My taekwondo tournament experience was very similar. Although I knew that I wouldn’t be able to perform at my tip-top shape, I still went for it and performed poorly. I thought tournament training was adequate to get me from rock bottom to top condition. While I was technically aware of my capabilities, I lacked the proper training to get my sluggish state to an athletic state. Through this mistake, I was able to learn a valuable lesson: it is important to know your abilities and take whatever amount of steps necessary for you to grow, as it would be illogical to tackle a high-level task immediately after starting at a low-level.