How do I become ready for Tae Kwan Do after not training for a month?

Question

I was practicing for a Sweet Sixteen for 1 month. Throughout the month, I was stressed out and I had a minimum amount of time to train. Since the Sweet Sixteen finished, I haven't been in my Tae Kwan Do class for a month and I feel like I would loose my strength returning there. I am currently a orange belt.

Answer 1

We'll start with the bad news. Yes, you will have lost strength, endurance, and flexibility after being gone a month. And yes, they have results specific to Tae Kwan Do. When you go back to class, you will likely not have the stamina that you did, and you'll feel incredibly uncoordinated for a while.

It gets better

The good news is that a good part of martial arts is also mental. The time you've spent training has essentially laid down pathways in your brain for how things are supposed to work, and it will take less time to regain your strength than it did initially to gain it. You can do this.

But be careful

Take things slow. Practice your technique slowly and gradually speed it up as the skills come back to you. It's easy to get injured going back into martial arts because it's surprisingly easy to move your limbs with significant power and part of what you will have lost is the mental state necessary to stop your movements before injury. I can speak from experience, having dealt with sprained muscles, a hyper-extended knee, and strained tendons when I went back to Tae Kwan Do after a lengthy absence. Resist the temptation to jump right back to where you were before, and hammer on the fundamentals. Don't move at full speed until you are entirely certain your technique is good.

Other things you can do

Other than, of course, resuming your training, you might consider some supplemental work. Cardio is going to be important, both because it's one of the things that diminishes quickly and because it's a strong factor in the mental state you may experience of feeling like you just can't do this anymore. Take up calisthenics, or running. Push yourself, but don't exhaust yourself. This is especially important if you can only get a few classes per week.

Also, stretch. I recommend PNF stretching, essentially pairing static stretches with short dynamic movements that move you just a little bit further, but not too hard. As with the endurance, you haven't changed that much physically, but your mental state has changed. If you're someone with high pain tolerance, be careful about pushing too hard. Lastly, you want to do dynamic stretching, but do it carefully. Essentially, this is practicing the kicks in a controlled manner. You want to be training the movements that you will do in your martial arts, so this will be running through stances in kata, leg raises, and the like.

Conclusion

The two biggest problems you will face are fear that you won't get back into the groove (accept that you will not be in top form at the start, but remember that it won't take too much time to recover it) and over-training. Have fun at it. And practice those fundamentals. You should have been doing it from the start, but this is a good time to check to be sure you're getting the weight distributions right on the stance, to be sure you're properly chambering kicks, that you're maintaining your balance and not "cheating" to make things easier. Start with your low belt forms and perfect each one before moving on to the next. Again, have fun.