Private Tough Times Begs Some Toughening Up!

"Hmm."

J turned to this person. Her sensibilities told her to help if people asked her to, so she considered her options while eyeing this young woman.

"You do know that there is no physical training that has massive immediate effects? I am just a trainer, not a magician, though there are plenty on the island," J said bluntly.

She paused from her own work and fanned herself a bit with her top. "I can train you, but unless you're clear with what you want to achieve and acknowledge that I can only do so much, we won't get anywhere. You want to be tougher. Do you mean you want to be able to fight people, or 'throw hands?' Or do you want muscle that makes you harder? Or something else..."

Hopefully, that got the point across. It wasn't like J was someone with special abilities that let her alter people. She was just her.

That narrowed it down a bit, but not quite enough to figure out what sort of regimen would work.

"So you are saying that you want to experience a great deal of pain in order to mentally prepare yourself for something?" J asked, thinking back to her training. She knew well enough how to create physically painful experiences, though her expertise was more in painless finishers.

"There are some things we can try if that's the case. Katas, hand conditioning, sparring..."

"Yes, but what would you like? We can train you to withstand blows, temper your limbs, or train you to fight. Or we can put you through strongman training. I understand that you are willing to train hard, but you still have to pick," J said, drafting up potential training regimens in her head. Two weeks wasn't a lot of time, and if all that was needed was pain, that was easy enough. Except she had to consider actual benefit as well.

Partial training it was then. J nodded and disappeared for a moment into the storeroom, coming back with a few makiwara. It probably wasn't the most painful thing to work with, but standard gyms weren't intended to have materials for partial training to begin with.

"We'll start off with this," she said, putting up the makiwara. "Uechi-Ryū hand conditioning. Since you want to just experience pain for two weeks while also having some side benefit, we'll do this. We're skipping quite a few steps, actually, since you have such a short timeframe."

It was simple enough as she demonstrated. Simply striking against the makiwara, over and over and over and over, until the hands moved beyond pain into numbness, and then moving on to the feet with kicks. Sure, it was simple, but the more one did it, the more painful it would get as damage accumulated.

Such training was not meant to bear fruit within the span of two weeks, and yet it was the chosen option.

"Seems that you're familiar with these. Then, you should know what to do, when to stop... and when you hit the point where you should stop, keep going," J said. She herself had gone through conditioning in her past, and her hands were hard and tough even before she used her abilities because of what she'd been through.

"We'll stick with these until you can't take any more, and then we'll spar. You wanted something harsh... here it is."