Serious leg workout: Yin Style Baguazhang style

I seriously wonder if there is a leg workout out there more effective than the lying step?
Monday, at group training, we focused on lying step, building up to and showing the new guys (yea! new guys!) the lying step sweeping form. We did the form a few dozen times, and we took a bunch of drills out of it and some of the others to practice the lying step technique. A few days later, I'm still pretty well convinced (by the lingering soreness!) that the lying step might be the best way in the universe to get strong, fast legs.

Here are some lying step training ideas for you to work in:

1. Go the distance: find a long, relatively straight distance to cover (a driveway, a gymnasium, a hallway) and do a lying-step strike, kind of one-step method, turning either forward or backwards, all the way down (and back!). Do it several times and feel your legs shuddering for days! From the Lion System lying step forms, these kinds of steps could either be the ones in "moves 3 and 5" or in "move 1," which gives you two very different drills and very different ways of frying your legs;
2. Box it up: Do your lying step drills (like "moves 3 and 5") in the box-stepping method, one advancing, one retreating.
3. One-two-three: You guessed it! Try doing the lying step drills (like "moves 3 and 5") along a line in the three-step drilling method. We tend to step on "one" by drawing the leg back and then extending it before the weight shift, but you could just do a weight shift there. It depends on your training and use goals.
4. Lying-step squats: all the fun of regular squats except that you keep one leg straight out in the lying-step position and do all the work with the other leg. This isn't strictly martial, but it turns your legs to mush.

A goal for development and training can be to get deeper, lower, faster, and stronger lying steps. You can facilitate the first two of those goals using side lunging stretches (drop into a lying-step position and use it as a stretch with your hands on your knees or the floor for support and safety... add strengthening and balance when you're better at it and more confident by lifting your hands). Other wide-leg hamstring and leg adductor stretches are helpful too. To facilitate the last two goals, try doing a smaller number of each drill and really pushing hard, trying to get some explosiveness in the technique (i.e. make it pliometric).

Of course, the real point is to be able to use it as well as to do it, not just to get a workout in. Be sure to combine in your strikes (see the forms for ideas if you need them) and to do this a lot. For it to be usable, you have to have excellent balance and the ability to place your foot precisely in an instant. You also have to be strong enough and flexible enough to get your leg and body into the correct positions for use, so while you stretch, drill, and strengthen, think about the uses!

Armchair Training

Training in an armchair? What the hee-haw? Before anyone salivates like I'm about to throw out some crazy awesome secret tip for how you can achieve development without having to get out of your comfy lazy-boy recliner (such tips do not exist in real martial arts or development practices of any sort), let me point out to you my predicament and the reality of this. I'm injured in a way where standing and walking are kind of out for the moment, except for bare-minimum requirements. It's absolutely amazing how much pain and impediment a toe can cause you, let me just say that.

So I have this rule: never zero that I've talked about before. How can I hold myself to "never zero" if I can't really even move around? Standing postures? Nope, not with this injury, at least not in full. Standing with wide legs or toes digging into the earth (especially that second one) is blinding pain right now. That's out until I'm healed up.

Well, while development is considerably lower, there are modifications of lots of the exercises that can be done while sitting. I even trained the saber! Several of the isometric postures with the saber can be trained without having to get up if your feet, knees, or legs are in no shape to let you train properly. Please note: this is not a substitute for proper training, you hee-haw, this is making the most of a crappy situation. While holding your body in an active, upright posture, the saber can be held out in a variety of ways to strengthen various parts of the arm and hands. Here are a few examples:

• Hold the saber overhead as in "green dragon shoots to the sea;"
• Hold the saber out in front, as in "black bear carries the mountain on its back" or "rooster stomps into battle;"
• Hold the saber out in front or directly out to one side as if completing a chop or stab;
• Hold the saber in front vertically, as in "monkey king offers incense;"
• Slowly move the tip of the saber from horizontal to vertical by flexing only the wrist, usually done out in front;
• Slowly rotate the saber from pointing left to pointing right, and vice-versa, using primarily the forearm;
• Hold the saber extended and turn the blade over without moving the saber much, as if working a screwdriver, as far as it will go one way and then back the other, trying to keep the tip stationary.

Other things you can do don't require the saber if you can't get on your feet but are otherwise healthy and able. For instances:

• Focus on other activities like strength training (using weights) or stretching (preferably both);
• Watch some YSB instructional videos and make notes. If you're training properly, this is an activity that is usually hard to make time for (if you're like me, you're more time-limited than anything else in terms of what limits your total training);
• Review your notes from previous training sessions, video viewings, seminars, or intensives. Reviewing them can mean compiling them as well, which is harder but very useful;
• Train your mind. Try to do techniques, particularly combos, forms, and applications vividly in your mind. Research shows that this kind of training is nearly essential for greatness in a skill. The mind should be central in your training anyway, so if your body is telling you that you can't train any other way, train this way;
• Do modified versions of exercises that accommodate your injury. For instance, standing normally isn't too bad for me now that I'm on the mend (but not fixed), so I can do isometric standing strengthening postures without putting any hard effort into my legs, and this practice isn't causing me pain. It is, however, giving me some development in my upper body and building skill in doing the exercises correctly on that half.

As I'm learning, letting yourself heal from an injury before pressing foward is critical or you'll lose more training time than you would by doing a bunch of halfed training sessions. I learned the hard way, when this injury was initially on the mend and got to "mostly feeling better but still injured" that doing a hard session too soon on an injury makes the injury worse. Instead of having to take another day of careful, controlled stuff like I mentioned above, I made things way worse and have lost nearly a week of good training time. One workout isn't worth losing six or seven (or more, depending on the injury)!

What is Yin Style Baguazhang

"What exactly is Yin Style Baguazhang?"

The following two links provide better information than I can, since they're from the source. You should definitely check them out and share them with all of your friends: About Yin Style Baguazhang and A Brief Introduction to Yin Style Baguazhang, both links courtesy of Yin Style Baguazhang International.

I get asked this question more frequently than I'd ever have expected, although I honestly wish I was asked it more often by more interested people. The answer, like the answer to so many questions in the world has various levels of depth, depending on who I'm talking to:

• "Yin Style Baguazhang is a martial art." [Obvious answer to people that are completely clueless about the martial arts].
• "Yin Style Baguazhang is a Chinese martial art." [Still obvious answer, usually to the same people, although sometimes the addition of "Chinese" is a conversation-ender, unfortunately -- thanks a lot, wushu competitions and kung-fu tards.]
• "Yin Style Baguazhang is an internal martial art from China." [The addition of the word "internal" usually comes when I know the person knows a bit about martial arts and that bit is "karate is martial arts and martial arts is karate." The word "internal" here has two effects: either it ends the conversation or it evokes another question: "You mean like Tai Chi?" More on this below.]
• "Yin Style Baguazhang is a deep and complex internal martial art from China that is relatively young, newly opened to the world, and focused primarily as a very effective fighting style." [That's what I say to people that know more about martial arts than "karate is martial arts and martial arts is karate" but less about martial arts than people that do a lot of martial arts.]

None of those answers is incorrect, but none of them is complete either. That, of course, isn't the same as saying they're wrong, but we can do better. Perhaps the best answer that I can give, given my current, rather low level of understanding of this deep and complex internal martial art from China, is something along the lines of

"Yin Style Baguazhang is a branch of baguazhang, which is the art of changing [oneself to accord to and to find and take advantage of a situation] with its theoretical underpinnings in the Yijing, the Book of Changes, and Yijing's "bagua," meaning its eight trigrams (which are symbolic representations of possibilities), in particular Yin Style Baguazhang is the branch of baguazhang that studies each of the eight trigrams individually as its own martial art as well as in a combined manner while adhering to the concept of a 'hard palm' approach."

I don't think many people would do well with that... which reminds me starkly of what it feels like when people ask me things like "What, in a nutshell, is your (doctoral) dissertation about?" If I try to give a satisfactory answer, I always end up getting that face, to which I have to pause and ask, "What? Did I lose you somewhere? We're almost done with Page 1."

So, after that face, usually one of the following long pauses and ensuing questions comes out, making that a good way to communicate what Yin Style Baguazhang is by comparing it with what it isn't:
...
...
...so, is it like "Tai Chi?"

The answer to this, of course, is "yes and no." Yes, it's internal, so yes, it talks about qi and the cultivation and practices thereof. Yes, it's a longevity art. Yes, it's sometimes all smooth and flowy. But...
No, it's not all soft. No, it's not always all smooth and flowy. No, it's difficult to kick someone's ass with what passes as taiji in most corners of the world today, but that's not the case at all with Yin Style Baguazhang, which is directly billed and trained as a fighting art. No, Yin Style training will make you sweat, a lot, often, and if you're not sore, then you're doing it wrong. To phrase it as my compatriot, B.A.M., once did (speaking to someone that would have been somewhat confused with "it's a Chinese martial art"),

"It's a bit like taiji... like taiji on steroids... with teeth." -B.A.M.

...
...
...so, is it like karate?

The answer to this is also "yes and no," of course. It's harder, at least in its practice methods, than most of what folks in the West tend to think of as "internal," but, though hard, karate is external. Yin Style Baguazhang is not so hard on the body as karate, though the training can be more physically demanding. There's no free sparring that I know of, and if there is, it's not considered a central method of training. Yin Style Baguazhang's overall "shape" is more circular than karate. Importantly, there is no filler in Yin Style -- everything is for use. I might catch hell for saying it, but it's flatly true: There is filler in karate, stuff that either has no use beyond demonstration or that fills in gaps between useful techniques (i.e. stuff that no one can remember a use for or that hasn't been handed down, or both). Everyone that does karate, at least on this continent, knows that truth if they're honest with themselves. In fact, in all likelihood, many techniques in many kata in karate have been modified from useful techniques after the uses were forgotten (not passed down from teacher to student before it was too late, e.g., or purposefully withheld until that same time) in order to give them new, often fruitless "uses." Yin Style Baguazhang, then, is not like karate.
...
...
...so, is it like BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) or MMA (mixed martial arts)?
No, it isn't. BJJ is primarily a ground fighting style. BJJ has some stand-up stuff, particularly throws, sweeps, takedowns, joint manipulation, and some basic standing self-defense, but it's primarily a grappling/wrestling art. Yin Style Baguazhang has aspects of joint manipulating, taking-down, and throwing the opponent -- what martial art wouldn't?!? -- but it combines those seamlessly with striking, stepping, and moving. There's no distinction of "now is when you can strike" and "now is when you can throw," at least not in the sense of there being rules that dictate what is and isn't allowed. In many ways, though BJJ is a good art that produces or supplements a lot of good fighters, it is a lot narrower than Yin Style Baguazhang. Also, BJJ tends to focus on the sporting aspect of the art rather than on the fighting aspect, although most decent BJJ players would make rather formidable fighters in real-life self-defense situations.

MMA is a sport, not a martial art, so that question is moot. It's a bunch of arts combined into a fighting strategy to be used in a sporting competition worth a lot of money. It makes good, dangerous fighters that can take their "games" to the street if needed, but MMA itself isn't a cohesive art and can't really become one -- even its name indicates that. Yin Style Baguazhang, by contrast, is a single unified style with an underlying theory that just happens to be every bit as encompassing (if not more) than MMA. The Chinese bagua is supposed to represent all possibilities, so one could say that baguazhang is the art of all possibilities.
...
...
...so is it all... you know... kung-fu-ey?
No, no, no! It's solid. It's practical. It's attainable. It's realistic. It's pragmatic. It is not esoteric, mystical, or filled with hoo-doo. You're not going to stand around in pajamas (silk or otherwise) breathing softly for a period of time and then become invincible or able to fart lightning. Since Yin Style Baguazhang is a Chinese art, some of it looks like what you see in wushu competitions, but much of it doesn't.

So... what about all that cool martial-arts-kind of stuff, like black belts and stuff?
We tend to train Yin Style Baguazhang in (comfortable) street clothes, the kind you would feel okay working out and sweating in -- including shoes. We don't wear uniforms or fool with belt ranks. We don't do a lot of bowing or kowtowing or calling people by titles. You can wear a belt if you want to, but usually athletic-type pants have a drawstring that helps keep them on for you. We essentially just train as well as we can in a really cool art with a lot of depth and value in it.

So... what do you need to know to know about what Yin Style Baguazhang is, in plain language without all the "hard palm" and "trigrams" business?

You need to know that Yin Style Baguazhang is a great, effective martial art from China that can be fighting-centered or health-centered that martially practices changing a fighting situation into a winning fighting situation. It has tremendous depth and complexity, but the methods of practicing are direct and effective. It's not widely known or practiced despite its value and efficacy. It has practices that many Westerners would find strange (like turning the circle practice -- which could serve as another partial answer to the "what is it?" question, with answer "baguazhang is the art of turning the circle"), but then again, so does any activity originating in another culture.

That last bit reminds me of something I thought of the other day that really tickled me. Since we often get asked why we turn the circle, I often retort or think of retorting with "why do you run?" Is it any more ridiculous to adopt a strenuous posture and walk in a circle as a form of personal training than it is to run with neither the goal of escaping danger nor the goal of getting somewhere else? Nope. So I imagined, ironically as I was out running, asking a runner: "What exactly are you running from, anyway?" The answer I came up with tickled me to no end: "Obesity."

Overtraining

This is a martial art that I'm training. Martial arts bring up the idea of boot camp, as do the seminars that we go to in Yin Style Baguazhang. Boot camp is a popular notion these days (see over a million pages on Google about "weight loss boot camp," probably the latest craze in the fad-driven weight-loss program industry), and I think folks training in the martial arts like to envision themselves in a boot-camp like situation in which they come out highly trained, skillful, and chiseled. This mentality, unfortunately enough, leads to the easy potential for overtraining, which I think I'm suffering from to some degree right now despite a relatively low number of total (physical) training hours in the last month (about 35 since Nov. 1). You can check out some of the signs and symptoms of overtraining syndrome here.

My problem comes directly from deciding to focus almost exclusively on one or two things, which rapidly builds the potential for overdoing it in those one or two things. In particular, I've been overcooking myself with the large saber, committing myself to hundreds of repetitions of tracing the saber each day (nearly 7000 in each hand since Nov. 1 actually... I kept track) in addition to a fair sampling of the other basic drills that I know whenever the weather permits. Here are some of the symptoms I've noticed:

• I can do way more tracing of the saber per day now than I could at the beginning of the month (400 in each hand each day isn't a ridiculous request on myself now), but the first few sets are literally painful until I'm "warmed up" and the number I can do in any given set has actually decreased over the month. Near the beginning of the month, I'd do mostly sets of 50 with an occasional 60, 75, or 80 thrown in there (and 100 straight once!). Now, a set of 50 is very hard, but I can do 6 consecutive sets of 40 or 30 with relative ease. I'm not sure that's how I want things to be going. To my mind, both of these numbers should be going up over time.
• Turning with the saber, particularly in bear posture (one that's relatively easy to do regardless of working a lot or bad weather because it fits in a relatively small space with no special ceiling needs) went from being hard to easier to really hard. After an initial increase in both total number of go-arounds I could do without having to stop/switch hands and an increase in total number of go-arounds I could do in a workout, switching hands as needed, I've seen a marked decrease in both of those numbers over the past few days (I've only been doing this one daily for about a week now). That can't be good. I'm seeing similar results with turning in the dragon posture (from the form) because I'm doing it kind of maniacally and daily right now too.
• Other drills with the saber are kind of similar. I've had tendinitis in one of my wrists for a while, so a good many of them have been kind of on the back-burner, but as I've gone back into doing them, I'm seeing similar results with the ones I do essentially every day. I'm getting cooked by them so that each subsequent day is worse than the day before it.
• I'm showing a number of the "stagnation" kind of symptoms given on that list of overtraining symptoms from above plus some compulsion to do tracing and to do it a lot.
  

I keep pushing myself thinking that I'll train through this, or more specifically, that if this was real military "saber camp," I'd be picking that thing up for hours a day and sucking this up big-time or else. The thing is, while I'm feeling stronger in lots of ways from the workouts, I'm blatantly less able to do them now than before. Boot camp mentality or no, that's simply not how this thing works. Days off aren't just important, they're critical, at least for my physique.

I'm thinking that taking days off of using the saber completely isn't actually necessary, but a more complementary set of exercises should be arranged so that the same kinds of things aren't being done day after day after day. Besides the dangers to the tendons in some of those exercises (chops and stabs, in particular, for us little-wrist people), overtraining syndrome can eventually actually cut into baseline performance so that we could end up worse at what we're doing for having done a lot of it, basic skills improvements aside. The two things I've seen suggested to help deal with overtraining issues that aren't "put it down," which is the main advice, are to intentionally do "light days" as well as to shake things up by doing things that are completely different on different days. That's the plan, I think.

The funny thing is that with an art like Yin Style is that the drive to really get good at things through heavy repetition and single-purposed focus creates the compulsion to overtrain so strongly that it can put you in the problematic situation where it somehow feels inappropriate to train something different to "shake things up." Ironically, this occurs in an art in which there is certainly enough material in it so that many practitioners mention at one point or another that there's "too much stuff" in the art to give full attention to. Doing something else, some of that other "too much stuff," is just what's needed, though. I think this is probably how it has to be: Train a few things very dilligently and primarily, but incorporate other things for variety, interest, and to give your body something to work on while you recover from your primary training goal(s) (which should, of course, change over time and with changing interests). You must respect that your body will need time to recover fully from each exercise you do, anywhere from 12 to 72 hours depending on your fitness, your genetics, the muscle group in question, your diet, your level of hydration, the amount of sleep you get, and a multitude of other factors. Yeah, it's that complicated (actually more complicated than that!), and it can be different for each muscle group or system in your body!

The basic truth of how your body reacts to exercise as an adaptable organism is as follows: You have a starting level of fitness that I'll refer to as your "starting point." When you exercise or train, you stress your tissues, which takes away from their full capacity for a time for a variety of not-fully-understood reasons. This time is called the "recovery" phase and takes an amount of time that is very difficult to determine from the list of above factors. Following the recovery phase, your body adapts to the stress by elevating the particular tissues involved in whatever you did to a level that exceeds their original level of fitness. This is called the "supercompensation" phase. The supercompensation period decays exponentially back to your original "starting point" over a time period that is influenced by all of the above factors (including the myriad that I didn't mention).

The thing is, to sound smart and technical, that your tissues kind of deal with this sitaution in a Markovian way, in other words, when you workout again is something like your new "starting point." You enter a recovery phase that drops your level of fitness temporarily based on the intensity of your workout (harder workout; bigger drop). That, in turn, causes an overcompensating swing into a supercompensation phase (bigger drop swings to bigger peak, it appears). Thus, this is all about timing. If you work out again before you get "out of the woods" of your previous recovery phase, then you're starting from a lower point on the curve than if you would have waited a little while longer. If you work out again during your supercompensation phase (particularly near its peak), then you reap maximal benefits. If you wait too long, then it's essentially, in terms of your tissues (not your developed skills), essentially like you never worked out the first time. The tough part is that these time periods are very difficult to determine and variable on about a bajillion variables. Thus... be pragmatic: If you feel overtraining symptoms setting in, back off, slow down, and cross-train; otherwise, keep on keepin' on.

Some ideas for shaking things up include:

• Putting the saber down for empty-hand practice, if you're overdoing the saber;
• Picking the saber up if you're not doing so much of that;
• Turning more (always good?) and/or in different postures (try the various strengthening postures or what you know of different animal postures);
• Changing palms if you're focusing on a certain palm or small number of them;
• Picking up a new form (from the videos) and drilling it;
• Hit the gym or go running (worked for me yesterday... shook me up out of my normal mentality of how I "have to train" and had me moving at the same time -- plus made be suck wind like I ran an f-ing marathon even though I only did a rather slow 800m);
• Trying something out from another animal system (if you have the videos) for a couple of days to vary things up;
• Training the same stuff with intentionally and markedly lower intensity, focusing on some different requirement(s) of that technique or mentally "using it" more than just drilling it in the body;
  
• Something else that you've thought of that I'm not right now (leave a comment!).

To put things plainly, I suppose, the science says that if you're exhibiting symptoms of overtraining, more training will not make you better. If you're really lucky and really determined, you might improve in skills while you deteriorate your physical ability to improve, but more than likely, the built-up fatigue (unfinished recovery) will cause you to be sloppy and less precise than taking some time off and coming back to it another day. If you're less fortunate, you could actually end up simultaneously developing bad habits, getting weaker, and even possibly seriously injuring yourself (tendinitis, tweaked joints, repetitive movement/stress injuries, etc.).

Thinking Practitioners

I read something a while back on a forum that was discussing an encounter between some guy and another, one of whom practices YSB. I guess they decided to play patty-cake and see who would come out on top, and YSB guy: not so much. Based on the kinds of things I wrote in my recent post: The Best Martial Art, I'm comfortable saying that I don't really give a crap about how things went there, though to the author's credit, he seems to have run into his own share of "our art is better then the rest" from the guy labeled "not so much." So why am I writing this?

Well, the dude that won this game of tag was the poster on said forum, and he carried an attitude that kind of irked me (as folks on such forums tend to do, hence that being about the fifth time in my life to have been on one). Moreover, he said something that I've been chewing on for a while about the type of folks that seem attracted to Yin Style, at least in the study group that he interacted with. I don't recall the exact wording and kind of refuse to look it up (because its ridiculous), but it goes something like this: "...with a white, middle-class, Nietzsche-reading philosophy major flair." He went on to say that he met He Jinbao one time and that he was thereupon "complimented on his Chinese" (and nothing more about the meeting). That amounts to a rhetorical slap (via a form of paralipsis) at the entire style that's hardly warranted, particularly considering how Jinbao probably acted in the actual meeting: cordial if not friendly.

This is strange to me. It's pretty clear that the guy's tone is pejorative in accusing these folks of being of the "middle-class, Nietzsche-reading philosophy major" ilk, not that this particular group of people is usually associated with fighting prowess. Still... I would guess it's fair to assume he means a particular kind of person by this description, that, devoid of other characteristics or demographics, I can't help but guess includes the descriptor: "intelligent."

But isn't that what one might want in a martial artist?

Though controversial enough in its own right, B.K. Frantzis (who also looks a bit like a white, middle-class, Nietzsche-reading philosopher kind), who is considered an authority on (internal) martial arts would argue so. His basic premise (as I read it in the book in the previous link) is that a big part of the idea of an internal art is to take fighting man as animal and elevate him to fighting man as human and then to fighting man as thinker. I think fairly he points out that while animals have a significant number of advantages in fighting, humans uniquely possess a degree of intelligence that grants us access to a sort of superiority. Furthermore, I tend to agree that by training an internal martial art, we connect that intellect with the fighter and grant him access to that superiority. I've heard a number of respectable folks say, "B.K. Frantzis... don't get me started on that guy," in tones that suggest that maybe I shouldn't read too much into what he has to say, but I've heard the same number of respectable folks, in virtue of those being the same respectable folks, say similar-sounding things to what I just attributed to Frantzis.

That leads me, as things often will, to a ponderance: Is being the thinking type really a negative in the martial arts world? and if so, why? I too frequently hear people talking about the virtues of being a "smart fighter," though a good bit of the time I wouldn't describe the person in question as being an intellectual. Maybe it's a matter of pragmatism: less theorizing and more acting because all the theory in the world isn't worth even a little bit of developed skill. In addition, there are a few too many white, middle-class, Neitzsche-reading, philosophy-major types out there that get into the esoterica of "internal martial arts" (typefaced as hoo-doo to illustrate their greater interest in the mystery of the Far Eastern occult than in anything concrete, particularly when "concrete" means difficult but worthwhile to train). Of course, I label those people as "kung-fu tards" and seriously wish they'd get real and stop giving the rest of us a bad image.

Ah well... I suppose this post was a rant as much as anything. Being an intellectual that enjoys martial arts (and white and middle-class, though not so much into Neitzsche but well-read enough to be able to say that), maybe I just had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to reading that, or maybe it ate at insecurities that I have thanks to growing up a bit nerdy. On the other hand, I see direct value in chewing on (mulling over) what I'm training as well as the potential end result of that approach. Perhaps having seen that end result explains the apophatic rhetorical style of the author of the post that prompted mine. As a number of respectable folks would say: "Whatever gets you to sleep at night," I guess.

The Invisible Saber

Hopefully I'm not going to get flamed for this or start some kind of ridiculous trend of sissiness in the ranks of my loyal followers.

Due to circumstances somewhat out of my control, the time of day today when I really wanted to work out with my saber left me limited and unable to do so. I did some tracing with it because I can do that in the house without fear of wrecking things, but that's pretty much where the indoor saber line is drawn other than standing practice. Thus, I did a bunch of empty-handed stuff, mostly of the striking variety, and some calisthenics for about an hour and a half for my workout earlier.

In the process, because I wanted to do my saber and work on some of the fundamental drills, particularly some of the ones I feel less good at and a few that I've decided I really like at the moment, I started going through the motions of them without a saber in hand. Some of them only went okay, but on others, I really got a depth of understanding of the movements that I don't think I've had before, particularly in the use of the waist to drive the saber and generate power and economy of movement with it. Some of these "drawing back" and then "bursting forward" or "secretly marching" kind of techniques are particularly benefited, at least in my practice tonight.

I might encourage folks looking to build their ability with the basic skills of the saber to throw this kind of drill into your saber training. When you're working with the sword itself, being that it's a bit heavy and awkward (until you're ninja-good with it, like Swedish-powdered-steel good), it's more difficult to focus on the body movement. With it laying nearby, awaiting to ride the improved ride, you can refine your technique with otherwise difficult to access precision and attention to detail -- looking for the proper way to move the blade. Then you can wrestle the huge blade up and apply what you learned with almost surprising results if you've sought the movement carefully and honestly until you're pretty certain you really found something.

Of course, more time with saber than without is my advice for getting good with the saber, but as with anything: training means refining.

The Best Martial Art

No question in the martial arts world is more likely to bring about a controversy than that of "Which martial art is the best?"

There are dozens of sites and forums floating around out on the internet, perhaps most popularly Bullshido.net (which isn't designed exactly around the question but seems to center on it), begging the question and fighting about the responses, often presenting this argument or that for or against whatever martial art they feel like talking about, defending, or decrying. Often these arguments get quite heated, becoming flame wars and escalating to the point of trying to call out practitioners for a head-to-head battle to determine which art is really supreme.

Of course, this same question has spurred several popular television shows coming out of every "learning" type cable channel in the world, for examples Fight Science, which used pseudo-scientific means to investigate the question, Human Weapon, which kind of approaches the question directly but in a high-glam-low-realism way, along with several others of the sort, all of which I'd grade as being "interesting" but only semi-educational and starkly unscientific about their approach to quantify or legitimize the question at hand.

It's possible as well that one of the most popular fighting movement in the world today (and probably the fastest growing movement in terms of popularity, passing boxing and kickboxing some time ago), the mixed martial arts (MMA) movement, got its start in the no-holds-barred arenas first widely popularized in the West by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). This, of course, is not a single martial art, but it seems to be the case that its original conception was to take fighters at the top of their games from different backgrounds and pit them against each other to see which fighters and styles reigned supreme. As is well-known, there are certain standouts: notably Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), but almost always in some kind of combination.

From what I've seen, this is how I think it works: essentially every style thinks that it is the best style, if not universally at least for some specific purpose. That makes sense, if it wasn't true, these styles would have died out long ago because people would have just pitched the study of them for better things. Furthermore, the question seems not to be one that can be answered because while all arts have the same overall goal, each hopes to achieve it in certain different ways that work better in some specific circumstances than others. Wing Chun (Wing Tsun), for instance, is pretty good for fighting in the tight, closed-in spaces that it was designed for, but in other circumstances, calling it "The Ultimate Art" seems a little inappropriate. BJJ is similar in that in some situations, it's pretty hard to argue with its effectiveness, but in others (on asphalt in a situation where your opponent might have a buddy or two lurking), it seems not to fit so well.

Incidentally, this "Ultimate Art" thing comes from a rather popular t-shirt that I see floating around a lot of BJJ programs that reads: "BJJ, the ultimate art," often with a picture of someone getting choked out or something alongside it. That claim seems a little too substantial, in my opinion, for anything. Still, I've heard similar statements (even from the top) about baguazhang and Yin Style Bagua in particular. Are they true? I think context has a lot to do with it.

Instead of delving into why I think one art or another is great or not so great, I would rather raise some questions for anyone interested in the pursuit of knowledge of this kind. Maybe these will spur discussion, and perhaps they'll just sit in people's minds.

First, what would qualify an art as the best?
Since there are many factors and goals to be considered within any art, this is difficult to address directly. Obviously, the ability to win fights against trained and untrained opponents should definitely be considered. Should the level of physical (or other) development of the body, mind, mind/body, qi, etc., be taken into account? Suppose, for instance, that there's an art that develops the body tremendously well but produces relatively poor fighters. How does that compare with an art that produces fantastic fighters whose bodies are fit only for wear, tear, and eventually destruction over time? There are too many goals and directions to be considered here to answer this clearly unless there is some art out there that is superior in most if not all of these regards: building the body (strength, flexibility, balance, movement, etc.), improving health, fostering longevity, developing the mind and internal systems, as well as obviously creating adept fighters. It seems scoring highly in all of these would be a requirement of any art contending that it is "the best."

Second, how do you measure?
The UFC and its likenesses present one method of measurement: take rather seasoned fighthers from a variety of backgrounds and let them beat on one another until we see who comes out on top. Of course, the modern UFC breaks this up by weight classes and includes a number of reasonable rules to make it more and more sporting (and so they can make more and more money off it). Is this a good measure of an art, though? At least in terms of ideals, we'd like to think of martial arts as giving the little, weak guy an edge over the big, strong guy... so weight classes aren't so good. Also, it seems that this approach measures the ability of the art to develop good sport-fighters, not the actual depth and effectiveness of the art itself. I know that BJJ guys can poke people in the eyes and add that kind of thing to their game, but this aspect of measurement does not take that into account in any realistic way.

Fight Science tried a different approach: quantifying various aspects of the art to see who can hit harder or faster, move more nimbly, or what have you. It didn't really do anything from the perspective of actually fighting one another, however, and it certainly didn't do what it did scienfically. For instance, the boxer, kickboxer, Tae Kwon Do, and karate guys on that show were all pretty big guys. The "kung fu" guy (practicing Shaolin) was comparatively tiny. I was kind of put off by the obvious discrepency when they tested punching strength (the boxer won, of course, and probably should/would have in a more scientific approach). The kicking strength evaluation was even more ridiculous since the folks threw different kicks, including the TKD guy running halfway across the room to throw his kick. This makes for cool tv, folks, but shitty science. More uniform conditions, larger samples, averages, and statistics would have said a lot more about things than that relatively influential show could hope to.

Third, when/who do you measure?
When should the effectiveness of an art be measured in terms of judging its practitioners? I often hear about a guy doing this art for six months beating up a guy that did that art for a year. So? This is no good for a few reasons: What if the one guy just sucked? What if the one guy trained less in that year than that other guy did in six months? What if [insert any of the dozen or so reasonable arguments the loser would contend makes it unfair]? On the other hand, should it be measured by comparing people at the very top of their arts? That seems equally not good: what if this guy is better than that guy regardless of which art they studied, i.e. if they had studied the same art with the same intensity, the one that won still would have won because he's just better. Again, this would require averages over large samples to have any real meaning, and the samples would all have to be standardized for effort, size, strength, training duration, and a host of other factors that can't really be standardized very well.

Honestly, most people that do something aren't really that good at what they do, and therefore those people probably aren't very representative of the art. On the other hand, it seems unreasonable to judge the matter only in terms of the outliers because they are, by definition, atypical and would likely excel in any art they worked at. Basically... I don't think this can be measured.

Fourth, who the hell cares?
This question of superiority in arts reminds me of the question of superiority in religion. It's maybe slightly more likely that you'll convert someone than from one faith to another, but in either case, it probably requires you to use force. If you like your art, I say train it. If you don't like your art, find a new one. If you feel like your art bottomed out on you, look for a deeper one or one that fits you better. If your art is too complicated or difficult for you, find something you can handle. We're all supposed to be doing martial arts because we like it, right? It's not like martial arts have a huge military meaning any longer (cf. the Boxer Rebellion), so do what you like to do.

Essentially, my opinion is that this question is kind of crap to begin with. Certainly there are some arts that do not offer practitioners as much as other arts would. Those arts might be considered worse than others, but even the content offering is difficult to quantify objectively making even this difficult to measure meaningfully. Certainly also, there are just exceptional people who can do exceptional things even with a crap art, so almost any martial art, save perhaps totally made-up ones (what I like to call Redneck Ryus), could potentially create good or even great fighters.

From what I've experienced, for those interested, Yin Style Baguazhang seems incredibly thorough and complete. It seems to contain a startlingly deep amount of potential development in every arena I can think of that a martial artist would possibly be interested in: physical development, skills development, health building, fighting ability, self-defense quality, training diversity, internal growth, mental challenge, physical demand, etc., combined with a high degree of realistic practicality to its methods and theory. It is deep and complete with nothing seeming to be lacking. That much is true. Would I expect most of its practitioners to be able to go win a fight against people that train other stuff? Not really... but I wouldn't expect that out of any art.

Will I say it's the best? I'm unqualified to and therefore loathe to say anything is objectively the best, but He Jinbao will happily say it is. Of course, he's the boss of the style, so he really should be saying that: it's his, for the time being, and he is it, in some sense, as he is its true representative in the world right now. I agree in that it offers, in some respects, far more than many other arts do. From what I've gathered, its reputation in China supports his claim as well, but reputations are hardly an objective basis.

For me, what's most important is that I like it and feel that I get a tremendous amount out of training it. If that doesn't earn it some points where they matter: for me, then nothing really does.

The Bagua Dadao: King of Martial Arts Swords and Training Anchor!

Finally I get some time for training again after having to have dedicated a hugely inordinate amount of time to work requirements. In that time, I kept myself connected to my training with little sets of this or that, primarily by swinging around my dadao, which I might dare to call the king of martial arts swords (perhaps unfairly? Probably fairly.).

Since I did most of my little breaks in five- or ten-minute spots coming out of the in-home office we have, my mainstay was with sets of tracing the saber back and forth, usually to the tune of a quick fifty in each hand. I started this little routine on the first of the month, reaching into the corner and picking up my cold steel sword and carrying it out into the only open space in the house a few times a day and trying to maintain a minimum of 200 repetitions in each hand each day, clustered as close together as possible.

This was partly about maintaining that minimum, partly about achieving "never zero," and partly about optimizing what little time I had to train (often working more than 15 hours a day, even on the weekends, over the past couple of weeks). We get little pockets here and there in our lives: my wife needs to use the desk for some paperwork, e-mail, etc., or the kids need it for homework, blocking much of what I needed to do, and we need to try to find/make opportunities to improve ourselves (i.e. train) in those times. It's too bad that this activity has constituted roughly 50% of my training time over the past few weeks, serving as a little anchor to training and getting stronger even though the Ivory Tower kept me chained up for the lion's share of my time (I love puns).

I've only missed one day with the saber this month, in fact, and as of this writing, I've done 2510 repetitions of tracing the saber in each hand (or just short of 210 per day, on average, in each hand or 5020 total!). Of course, the main part of this exercise is about getting stronger. I can now say that belting out a set of fifty tracing is pretty easy, although it gets tough the third or fourth time around when I switch back and forth and try to do "all" 200 in pretty much one go. That would be a kingly feat with the "king of martial arts swords."

One of the goals I have with this in the relatively short term would be to be able to "easily" do sets of 100 with the saber... and then maybe more than that? Of course, the real long-term goal is to have the saber feel "light and playful" in my hands, which is why I'm trying to put attention into the other basic drills with it again now that I have time to do weird things like "go outside" and "not work all the f-ing time." I'll periodically mention about how these goals are going, I think.

Typing this just got me uber-excited to go do a few more, maybe to get that count over 2600 in each hand for the month-to-date, so that's where I'm off to. You too? Oh, yeah... and that day I missed... I kind of finished earning my Ph.D. that day, so I think I deserve a little breathing room for that.

Training Buddies and Borrowing Ideas

Get a training buddy.

You can have one in real life that you actually get together with, but it's not necessary. People tell me frequently how lucky I am that I have my faithful sidekick (who is better than I am) Bradley to get thrown around by. Reality is that I'm only a little luckier than everyone else because of this cool get-up called the internet which in some ways makes the globe a bit like a neighborhood, at least in terms of communication. Cell phones with nation-wide calling plans condense the areas we live in even further.

My training partner and I trade off "I did this today" stories frequently, and if one of us lagged behind the other in terms of time invested or difficulty of the drills we worked, as often as not, we pick up our sorry tails and do some more whenever time and life allow. I know that personally it's committed me to a lot of training I wouldn't have done otherwise. There's no reason this kind of relationship wouldn't work electronically, though, since most of what my partner and I do is talk. We only usually see each other once a week, maybe twice (at the group get-togethers and occasionally otherwise).

We're also borrowing an idea from the increasingly popular program Cross-Fit. Our goal isn't to replicate their kind of workout so much as it is to kind of keep each other going. While grinding techniques for raw numbers is usually a bad thing, as can be turning to the clock, it makes a nice little motivator to set up a workout (we take turns) and then both, separately, try to meet it as our daily minimum: maybe it's turn at least for x minutes or to make sure we do at least y repetitions of some saber drill. Perhaps it's more ambiguous like "hit chopping strikes hard and seriously." Maybe it's a combination of these kinds of things or several others.

This kind of accountability is great for keeping motivation up. It catches the phasing "eh... I'll let training slide today because..." right by the tail and helps us both get more out of ourselves than we might have otherwise. It also solidifies our relationship.

Maybe in the future we can get some kind of system like this set up more formally and in a more widespread manner. Who knows? If you have a great workout to suggest, though, leave a comment!

Training Through Stagnation

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working crazy-busy hours trying to prepare for my academic/work demands, and so my training has suffered a little in the meantime. I've been keeping it up with little bits here and there, drills and standing and other quick things in between long bouts with the (rather boring) math book I wrote (but won't be getting published). In the last few days, however, I've been doing less and less of that, despite the fact that I don't feel "ready" for what's in front of me yet. I'm stagnating with it.

This is putting me in a position that I'm sure is unique but not unique to me. I keep finding excuses not to work on my stuff that I'm supposed to work on (yet while remaining productive) and yet I'm not doing the training that I could be doing with the spare time because I'm "not supposed" to be training because my focus is supposed to be on this math. I get like this sometimes, and it's silly. Basically, I feel guilty for not working on the math and then somehow manage to "waste" a bunch of time doing little piddly (but important enough) things not working on what I'm supposed to be doing and still not feeling willing to use that time to train because I somehow feel like I'd be doing something I'm not supposed to do. It's weird. I know that just about everyone that gets serious about academics (and probably any career, particularly ones that don't really end up being "left at the office" at the end of the day) has times like this. It's a trap.

I broke out of it today. After spending an hour or so staring at the thing I'm supposed to work on next and then not working on it for more than about five minutes of that time, I decided I was just going to shake myself up and get unstuck. I went out for about 90 minutes and trained, hard. It did the trick. I felt great to have trained. I felt great to have exercised. I felt great to have done something different, and I came back in from my little workout feeling great about getting back to work on my mathematics, which I actually did for a while before making dinner. Still somewhat enthused about it (now that I feel unstuck), I'll be getting back on it once I finish this post, which I'm taking time to write partly because I want to and partly because I'm so excited about getting unstuck and know there are probably lots of folks out there that read this (meaning a fair proportion of my small readership) that could benefit from the following advice: if you're caught up with a lot to do and feeling a burn to train or to just do something different, get unstuck -- go train.

Believe me, you'll end up getting more done. I think this is like the people on diets that deny themselves cookies and can't stop thinking about them. I denied myself proper training so I could "focus on my mathematics," and I found that I wanted to train WAY more than I wanted to do mathematics and therefore thought way more about the training I wasn't doing (and wasn't willing to do). Stupid. Set some time aside, and go train.

When Time Is Short: Training Ideas for When You're As Busy As I Am Right Now

I'm crazy busy right now. In fact, the only reason I'm typing on this is because I temporarily have a mental block on what I'm working on: preparing to defend my thesis. I've been given the task of preparing the entire defense by November 9, which is barely over two weeks away. I think usually people have the date pretty well narrowed down a few months in advance, so I figure this can only go "well." In any case, the posting will be a bit lighter than usual during this time, but when I'm kind of burnt up for the moment (as now), I'll find time for this sort of thing when I'm not squeezing in some training, which seems to help unknot my fatiguing brain.

I know a lot of folks are crazy busy much or almost all of the time, and so I think this is an appropriate topic, even if left drastically incomplete. As usual, I invite folks training other martial arts to comment and add in ideas, though I'll focus my post on what kinds of baguazhang-related training I squeeze in when my time is short.

Generally speaking, I think when your time is short, you're going to get the most out of picking one or two basic things and drilling them in bursts during your free time. Perhaps you really want to get better at a technique or a movement, nothing as large as a typical "form" or "kata," unless you practice something like Yin Style which has just short of a billion very short forms in its canon. You also want to choose things that provide a lot of bang for the buck, which means that you're taking time to carefully master one fairly complex movement or you're blasting your body with an exercise that can provide a lot of benefit in a short period of time.

In Yin Style or any other traditional art, for me the exercise that fits the "bang for my buck" bill the most powerfully is standing strengthening, which admittedly I usually go a little short on in my overall training profile. Standing strengthening practice, one of the four pillars of Yin Style training, is by necessity a shorter-duration exercise than most of the other practices. It's difficult to get a good, worthwhile session of striking training in a five- or ten-minute break between other obligations. Five to ten minutes of standing strengthening is a pretty solid set of it for most folks. It also requires a minimal amount of space since very little is in motion: just the space of a yoga-mat-sized area is needed to really rock out some standing strengthening, and those fit just about anywhere. Unlike many of the other practices, as long as you're a bit discrete, standing strengthening is easy to "sneak in" in places like your office with less likelihood of being noticed (or having security called on you thinking you're an escapee from a mental ward -- true story of a member of our group) than doing something "absolutely ridiculous looking" like turning practice or strikes. Thus, when I'm in hard-academic mode, like now, I end up quadrupling (or more) the amount of standing strengthening I do while dropping almost everything else so that I can have back-to-back fifteen-hour work days for weeks on end (weekends included).

Drilling something complicated that I want to get a basic hang of is another favorite. I do this a lot (in my house or on a quick jaunt into the yard for some fresh air and breathing space, though behind a closed door can work too without drawing too much attention) when I'm trying to gain a new skill. The back-step drills that came out of Beijing this spring are a notable example: often enough I'd have time to really go drill them and other things, but right about then, I got academically slammed and had to hang a bunch of training up for a while. When I wasn't standing, I was trotting across some room in my house (en route to the kitchen for refreshment, bathroom for relief, or back to the office for more toil) going through those back-step drills as a means of locomotion toward my destination. I might only get 6 or 8 reps in each direction, but I got a lot more comfortable with the stepping pattern and coordination in the process, and since I'd take breaks about once every hour or so, usually with three runs of this kind of thing involved, I actually ended up with a fair number of repetitions in a day, 6x3x10=180 to 8x3x10=240, which is far more than I would have had if I just gave up and said I was "too busy" to train.

Weights are a temptation in tight times. You can feel like you get a lot of effect for very little time input (pick up your nearest 25-pound dumbbell and do 20-30 bicep curls straight with it, it only takes about a minute and a half and your arm puffs and cramps up like it's going to explode, split, or fall off). The downside to this is that while you get a little strength training out of it, you don't get any martial training. Since you're not going to have enough time to really bust out some seriously good routines of either sort, I think it's better to do an exercise like a drill that builds up a skill over time rather than something that just gives me a little pump in my arm or leg, although squats are a great way to revitalize you when you've been sitting for too long (so those get thrown in sometimes anyway just to get the blood pumping quickly). Standing strengthening really seems to be a better choice, though, another reason I like to hit it hard and often in these busy periods, because it seems to really open the body up and get things (Blood and Qi) flowing and moving smoothly. Weights never do that for me, and standing strengthening is really an all-body kind of activity, so it feels a lot more complete for that short amount of time (working your whole body in 10 minutes instead of two muscle groups, for instance). If I'm in the market for something heavy to balance out my desk job, five minutes of basic drills with the saber (if I'm working at home!) usually is enough to get a fair sweat going and make it feel like I've done something -- something martial!

Speaking of having a job that keeps you crazy busy, you might not have one like I have that keeps you sedentary while you're working. If you do, then these kinds of exercises are perfect and great. In fact, they're pretty much necessary. The sitting still really starts to take a toll on your body, mostly in terms of circulation and muscular tension, after thirty or forty minutes. Your brain gets sluggish after that much time of relative inactivity also because of the less smooth circulation of blood (and Blood and Qi). Getting up and doing something that promotes its flow on at least an hourly basis (I've been told half-hourly by several reputable sources) is almost a necessity, so don't think of it as taking away from your work to stretch out and move yourself around a little.

If your job is more physical, and you're crazy busy, then you're probably too tired to train much. What you need, though, is something that puts you back together. Ironically, if you can put the heart into it, standing strengthening is great for that, as is "running through" drills, focusing more on the mental aspect of mastering the inherent skill rather than the physical aspect of putting in power and ferocity (like "learning speed" practice). Another option, one that I frequently employ even as a mental worker at a desk, is to get up and do some stretching. It's just nice for opening up the flow (again of Blood and Qi) and making me feel better kind of all over. It's not as directly martially beneficial as training would be, but being physically wrecked makes for a difficult push into some training, even if it's light.

Finally, when time is tight, there's a time that everyone has free: just before they fall asleep. Even though you're probably tired by the time you hit the pillow, on days that I'm crazy busy, I usually am a bit wound still when I lay down. This is a prime time to be opting for visualization of the techniques, skills, combinations, applications, forms, and other practices in the art, which is a very valuable constituent of good training. Even if there's no time, energy, or will to get up and really stand strengthening in between job requirements, it's quite easy to get yourself thinking about your training and training in your mind. That, my friends, is better than nothing when you're really strapped for time.

That's some of the stuff that I do when my time is tight: more standing strengthening, more running through "confusing" drills in slow/medium-motion, a couple of sets of saber basics (when apropos), stretching, and visualizing. What do you do?

Local Introductory Seminars in Yin Style Baguazhang in and around Knoxville, TN

In an effort to achieve two goals, our study group has decided that we're interested in offering the opportunity for us to come in and discuss some of the principles of Yin Style Baguazhang with friendly local or regionally located martial artists, preferably at their schools. To be clear, let me elaborate.

Mission Statement and Statement of Goals:
Mission: We, as the Knoxville, TN, study group, officially recognized by Yin Style Baguazhang International, are interested in seeing the growth of martial arts and martial artists in the area as well as promoting interest and growth in the art of Yin Style Baguazhang itself.

Goals: Our goals with these seminars are twofold -- to introduce Yin Style Baguazhang as a martial art to local/regional martial artists to enhance their training in their own arts or to generate interest in studying and training Yin Style Baguazhang directly.
Furthermore, we'd like to drum up enough interest to have more folks attend our (hopefully) annual seminar (see here for some details concerning the one that we just held) with He Jinbao of Beijing, our teacher and a true master of the martial arts with nearly unparalleled skill.

What is meant by local/regional:
Local: We live in Knoxville, TN, and some of the very nearby communities. If you live or train in Knoxville or a town very nearby, then we'd be happy to come by and share a little of what we've seen with you.

Regional: If you don't live really close to Knoxville but are within an hour or two away, we'd be willing to consider visiting your group or school as well.

What we can offer:
There are three things, really, that we can offer to local martial artists that already train in some style or another.

1. We can offer insight provided via our training in Yin Style Baguazhang into how you can improve your current training methods for real, remarkable results. We can do this by introducing some of the methods of training used in Yin Style Baguazhang and offering advice on how to tailor those methods to the arts that you already train.
2. We can offer a basic introduction to the art of Yin Style Baguazhang including a variety of its basic practices, methods, and some of its underlying theoretical framework.
3. We can offer Yin Style Baguazhang based applications and host the seminar in a self-defense-for-martial-artists perspective.
   

In all of these cases, you'd be guaranteed something different and interesting, and in the first two cases, an excellent workout would no doubt come as part of the package.

Ultimately, we feel that this art is very underrepresented given its effectiveness, and we'd like word to spread. Realizing it won't spread without someone spreading it, we feel that we can reach out and offer something to the local martial artists that they can really take home with them to enhance their training and potential. We'd also like to increase exposure of the art so that more folks will feel that it is worthwhile to take the opportunity to meet He Jinbao when he comes to this neck of the woods, his level of expertise in the martial arts being high enough so that certainly anyone that spends time training under his direction will be able to improve in their own practices substantially.

What we're not interested in:
Challenges:
I know it makes me look a bit the puss to say that we're not interested in challenges. We're offering to spread knowledge here, which you can reject freely if you don't like it. Our goal isn't to prove ourselves to anyone. I'm more than happy to have you leave thinking that I suck without anyone having to eat a knuckle sandwich to prove it or say otherwise. I'm also more than happy if you think I'm awesome, particularly if I don't have to kick you in the jangles to prove it to you. Personally, I tend to thank people for not kicking me in the jangles and like reasonable folks that feel the same way.

Making money:
Our goal with these seminars is not to get rich or even to make money. We would be, however, asking for a small honorarium or per capita fee for our time, and that money would only be used to offset our travel and training costs, which are rather modest and would therefore be reflected with a similarly modest fee (approximately $10 per attendee per hour or thereabouts). Furthermore, we're not interested in making money via invitation to the seminar with He Jinbao. We do not make money off those seminars: we are charged an honorarium/per capita fee for those (pay this much or however much you bring in, whichever is more) and do not retain any profit from them. Additional seminar income would be used to help us offset our expenses in hosting/lodging/feeding He Jinbao and his translator when they come to town. We're about getting more attention and interest in this art and recognize that direct access to He Jinbao is just about the most effective medium for that goal to be realized.

Gathering Students:
We do have a study group, and it does get together. It's nothing even closely akin to a martial arts school, however, and thus, while we do want our group to grow larger, it does not present realistic competition to an established, real (if you will) martial arts school. We currently meet once per week and have no set curriculum. We offer no ranks or anything of the sort, and we meet where it is convenient, as often as not in someone's yard or garage or in a public park. Generally, we get together and work on what we're individually working on in a community-like setting, and those with more experience help and direct those with less experience in that endeavor. This group is and always has been open to anyone that's interested in trying it out, no strings attached, no commitments to ever come back, no requests to put a halt to any other training you might be doing or interested in. Feeling competition from our group would be like an established church feeling competition from a small-scale Bible-Study group that meets once weekly. With the seminars, we are hoping to be able to come and share our slightly different perspective on the martial arts with folks that are interested in learning martial arts.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you're even remotely curious or interested in hosting us!

Training Anchors

Training the martial arts, particularly Yin Style Baguazhang, can be very dry and very challenging at the same time. That's a recipe for making it very difficult to pay the full attention to the practice that you need to in order to develop well. With physically demanding practices that have to be done repetitively a large number of times, it is very easy to "check out" mentally and just let the process become one that is mechanical until the body points out that it's just too much to continue. That's pretty much the last thing you want if you want to get real development in this (or any) art. So how can you avoid it?

The easy answer is "mental discipline." Forging your will to your practice (one of the internal harmonies). Unfortunately, that easy answer is tough to act on when you're pounding out hundreds of repetitions of something and starting to feel the wear on your body that those repetitions bring or when you suddenly have all kinds of interesting ideas for what to do next, later, or in a way entirely unrelated to training while you're training. Those ideas come up often enough on their own and distract the mind even during training. Something I've found that helps in those kinds of situations are what I'm referring to as "training anchors."

A training anchor holds you to your practice. I'm going to take it as a given that unless you're an absolute Superman with an unnaturally disciplined and tamed will that during longer training sessions, you're going to check out sometimes. The goal isn't so much to prevent this naturally occurring process, which will become a distraction in its own right, as it is to pull your attention back to the training at hand. Like an anchor for a ship, which doesn't keep it fixed in one place, it holds a slightly drifting ship close to where it's supposed to be. We all know, if we train Yin Style, that we're supposed to be putting certain attention on several things at once while we drill: proper hand form, proper alignment, proper execution, proper breathing, proper body use, proper motion of the waist, proper speed, proper timing, proper standing, proper generation and emission of force, proper harmonies, proper etc., etc., etc. We also know that it's frickin' hard to do it the whole time and that our minds wander. If Jinbao was watching us train when that happened, he'd tell us that we need more spirit in our training and have to keep our minds on the task.

So when my mind wanders, I've found a number of "anchors" that help me bring it back to task. For me, one of the best anchors is the feeling that properly making the hand-form gives me. In the ox-tongue palm shape, it's the stress in the opponens (thumb) muscles that I can most quickly and easily turn my attention to when I catch it wandering. When I'm making a fist, it's on keeping it as hard as rock. From there, I can do one better and, since my mind is already on my hand: I set my new anchor as double-religiously watching my hands as I practice. For some reason, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on my hand opens the door to being able to focus again on something more subtle, perhaps the tension in my waist properly generating and emitting force, without the desire to close my eyes and just feel it happening. This same kind of attention works great for me during standing and turning pratice as well as during striking and forms drilling.

When I turn, I have massive amounts of mind-wander that sometimes (frequently?) overcomes my ability to think about the hand and settle everything into that first as a gateway to running through the checklist of proper form. Often, I find myself thinking over-much about my feet to the exclusion of attention on my upper body. When that happens, I redouble my effort, usually pulling harder with my thumb (which makes it hurt) to force my attention to that area until I reaffix my gaze and mind to my whole-body experience.

I don't know what anchors other people use and am curious, though. If you've got something to share, particularly something more effective than the "think about the stress in your thumb and then watch your hand" that I use, I'd love to hear it!

Mirrors and Training Martial Arts

I think a lot of folks are hoping for something different for my first real-content post after our seminar, but since we trained in an indoor facility equipped with mirrors, a first for me in training baguazhang, I was able to pause and think for a while about how the mirror was helping my training... and messing with it.

Here's what I've decided: mirrors are a great training tool as long as you can ignore them.

Mirrors are awesome for checking yourself out, so you can correct abnormalities in your posture that perhaps you can't feel so well. Once you correct them, you can learn what the proper posture feels like, be those standing strengthening, striking, or otherwise, and that gives a tremendous advantage in being able to get into the correct position or movement later on. A quick glance at the mirror can tell you if your wrist is bent incorrect, arm is too high or too low, hips are cocked one way or the other, or lots of other little mistakes that are really easy to make and make into habits. For that kind of correction, nothing short of video of yourself training or direct, hands-on corrections from a more senior practitioner can compare.

On the other hand, mirrors are awesome for checking yourself out, and don't we all like to see how awesome we look when we're training? That's really the problem with them! I found myself checking myself out far too often during the seminar, mostly because I could. That really started to help me after a while, not because of the little tweaks to my training it provided but rather because of the amount of extra attention it forced me to place on watching my hands while I trained instead of my sweet reflection. Mastering myself to that change in focus, however, was really difficult, so I can conclude that ignoring a mirror is far harder than it seems!

As far as other martial arts go (since I like reaching a broader audience), I know that in karate we are usually told to look straight ahead, instead of at our hands, as if we're staring at the opponent (during kata/basics practice) and at our opponent during sparring practice. I have no commentary on whether that's right or wrong at this point -- they're just different methods of training, each surely with its advantages. I also know that an awful lot of students doing both of those exercises are enchanted by their reflections, so I know it's just a dangerous and helpful a thing in many other arts to train near a mirror.

My verdict on the matter, then, is that mirrors are a good tool to help you train, but ultimately, you have to learn to master yourself an ignore it completely once you've used it for its purpose, and added difficulty comes from the fact that most people are quite fascinated with watching themselves do things.

Fall Tour Seminar, Knoxville, Success!

He Jinbao and Matt Bild just left Knoxville yesterday morning after our first-ever, mostly successful seminar! The intensity of training was maintained at a pretty high level for most of the workshop, even if our attendance was a bit on the low side. All-in-all, though, I'm quite happy with our first stab at hosting those fine folks.

As for what was covered, it was a beautiful blend of solid foundational practices, with fantastic attention to small details, and some really new stuff: kicking practices courtesy of the Monkey System, which are completely different from essentially everything else that we've done in our trainings in the past.

I had a lot of time to think about things before and after the training sessions, and I think that the seminar itself provided me with a number of interesting topics to talk about in the near future on here, hopefully some stuff that will really help some folks out there with the training.

Probably, if anything, the only down-side to the entire ordeal was that our attendance was rather low. Recruiting for one of these things is apparently fairly difficult despite Jinbao's level of expertise. Thus, for the next year, because they will be back next year and we'd like to see a better turnout, we'll be trying to get around and introduce this art to folks via very affordable seminars.

This particular workshop seemed to strengthen our group, though, not just in terms of our training and knowledge but also in terms of numbers. Hopefully I didn't misread things when some of the folks that attended the seminar asked many very curious questions about our study group.

Belts and the Martial Arts

Since Yin Style Baguazhang is such a tight niche within the martial arts, as I've mentioned before, I'm going to try to expand the audience of this blog by posting topics on occasion that relate both to Yin Style and to other martial arts. Nearly ubiquitous in the martial arts are belts, usually of varying colors to indicate level, or some equivalent: I've seen colored shirts, pants, uniforms, sashes (which I consider belts), and necklaces all to the same function, and I'm sure there are even more variations on the theme. For the purposes here, all of these "equivalent" indicators will be considered in the same pile and referenced as being "belts" and will mean "rank-distinguishing belts." Now for the particularly interesting bit that makes this post worth making: belts are "nearly ubiquitous" in the martial arts world... but in Yin Style Baguazhang, they are not used at all. I'd like to discuss some of my thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages surrounding belts since I've spent considerable time and made considerable observations on both sides of this fence.

A quick history, if my information is correct, on this practice is that thin cords of various colors were worn in Japan by swimmers to help distinguish them at some point in that sport's history, and this practice was observed by Kanō Jigorō, the founder of Judo, and observed to have merit for ranking students, since the judo gi required a belt to hold it properly closed as it was. The practice then spread to other martial arts, and then all kinds of ridiculous legends about where the colors came from arose, such as the following: "In the beginning, everyone's belt was white, and then it yellowed with sweat over time and got grungy. Due to being thrown in the grass repetetively, it took on green hues, and then eventually grime built up until it was mostly brown from dirt, grass stain, and sweat. Eventually, the stains were so substantial that the belt appeared black, and hence a black belt meant someone who was accomplished." This story, given the meticulous clenliness of the Japanese alone, is absolutely fantastic. Belts could be washed and surely were, and the amount of rotting and degredation to fabric for it to turn black from that kind of soiling would have caused diseases that just didn't happen. Furthermore, why are students only thrown in grass at first, preventing dirt stains on their belts from arising until it's so grass-stained that it is largely green? If you throw someone down a bunch of times in one spot, the grass dies and there's dirt, usually before there are all that many grass stains. Honestly, I can't believe this kind of thing has been spread through time, continues to be spread (obviously without actually thinking about it), and (worst of all) was something I actually believed made sense when I heard it the first time.

Advantages of Belt-Ranking Systems
Ranking markers have a few distinct advantages, some of which are objective and some of which are subjective, or, rather, cultural. For the purposes of the ensuing discussion, unless otherwise noted, assume that the belt-ranking system is ideal and genuinely meaningful in an objective way. Points about how it is, in practice, sub-ideal will be discussed primarily in the "disadvantages" section below.

1. Objective Advantage: A ranking marker like a belt has the distinct advantage of indicating hierarchy within the system in a clear way, which is useful for instructors to keep tabs on the general level of the group and of individuals without requiring extensive observation. It provides a level of expectation and allows a level of assumption that facilitate the process of instruction. It also gives a clear indication to lower-level students on which people from which they should be able to expect to gain valuable insight.
2. Objective Advantage: The belt-ranking system is a clear and effective external/extrinsic motivator. Students are likely to be able to identify with and find value in the promotion from one belt to the next. Sometimes, a little extra motivation is very helpful in getting a body out there and training. The method, for the beginners of an art at least, has a strong effect in both short-term and long-term goal setting. These situations, of course, have their downsides, discussed below.
3. Subjective Advantage: Students are likely to take pride in and elevate themselves to a perceived level of practice indicative of the rank they hold or belt they wear, particularly in the lower/initial phases of training.
4. Cultural Advantage: Prospective students and even students themselves place cultural value in the symbol indicated by the ranking belt. In what I've seen, belts and sashes are held in largely equal esteem culturally, since they are, in fact, essentially the same thing (belts carry the idea that they are for holding your pants up, but martial arts belts are no good for that purpose and are indeed used more appropriately as a "sash" to hold closed a kimono or gi, a typical traning uniform in Japanese-derived martial arts). It's often enough easy for the students to make the "leap" from belts to colored shirts or pants or even necklaces, and so there is a perception of value in any ranking system that lends credibility to the art and its instructor, since there is a perception of some objectivity in the promoting of students to various ranks (although no such objectivity truly exists in any meaningful way across the board). A high-ranking belt held by an instructor is therefore, objectively, a valuable marketing tool.
5. Cultural Advantage: Particularly prospective students, but indeed many students of the martial arts in the West, at least, associate belts with a "real" martial arts program. The concept of "black belt" is so deeply ingrained in the iconography of West that literally a program without belts, or some equivalent, is often deemed to be a charlatain operation -- a real and present challenge for recruiting to Yin Style Bagua study groups since we do not wear or use belts or any equivalents, at least not to my knowledge and certainly not officially. It is possible that the growing attention to MMA (mixed martial arts) which seems to discard this line of thinking may change that perception, but as there are also no rings, octagons, widespread media outlets, or multi-million-dollar cash purses for training YSB, I doubt we'll see much positive effect from the MMA-loving community. Time may change that, but we shall have to see about that... in time.

That pretty much ends my list of advantages, unless we want to talk about advantages to school owners/operators, which I've only barely mentioned above. Those advantages look like this, details sparing:

• Marketing, as mentioned above;
• Selling belts (or equivalents), typically at a steep profit;
• Belt testing (or equivalents), typically with steep testing/promotion fees, i.e. profit;
• Student retention, via goal-setting, though this usually eventually backfires;
• Marketing again, in a more insidious but increasingly popular way: Many schools now offer an all-inclusive, pay upfront deal "this much (usually thousands upon thousands of dollars) money now and all of your lessons until you earn x belt/rank (usually black) are paid for in advance, good for your whole life or until you achieve said rank." This is particularly insidious because only about 0.01 (one in a hundred) students make it from beginner to black belt even in a fairly watered-down program and would usually have therefore paid less to have tried it until they didn't like it, quit, and then paid out the remaining of their training contracts (another typical vestage of martial arts schools in the West). This kind of program is obviously manufactured to the owner's advantage or else it wouldn't exist, particularly because it starts to give off a strongly rotten stink of "buying a (black) belt," see below for more.

Disadvantages:
The disadvantages of belt-ranking systems in the martial arts world are probably more substantive than the advantages, although from a martial-arts-as-a-business perspective, I don't believe they're genuinely outweighed.

1. The belts are arbitrary: This is pretty clearly true to anyone that doesn't buy into them, and more strangely seems to be held simultaneously true and false by everyone that wears a belt for long enough in many of the martial arts programs I've seen. "The belt doesn't matter," people say. "It's what you know that counts, and you still know it when you take off your belt." Right. Then why are you holding it when you walk around and demanding people call you by your rank-given title? Why do you put stripes on it? Why do you care what color it is? One problem with this situation is that eventually people either realize this fact and lose some faith in the belt system and are kind of forced to believe in double-speak or they never realize it and live a proud, empty life centered on their rank and title (see below for more). Another problem is that the entire system, because there isn't an infinitely large rainbow and because there isn't an infinitely long belt, is that this system is inherently limited. That puts a "finish line" on the process for many people, and for most, that finish line is "black belt." Look at the attrition rate of almost any commercial martial arts school's black-belt level students compared with its rate among students that clear the first half of the "under black belt" ranks. I'm pretty sure more people quit within a few months of earning black belt than otherwise. That seems a bit disturbing and is obviously centered on the belt-awarding system itself: "I achieved this goal, so now I'm done with this." What an empty practice.
2. Ego and pride: I've met an awful lot of people that believe they're very important or, in some cases, some of the best martial artists in a town, state, region, country, or the world based on the fact that they wear a particular belt and umpteen-three people signed a certificate saying that they deserved to wear that belt. Many of them might deserve some recognition for what they've done, but as often as not it seems to grant more self-importance than anything else. It certainly doesn't grant martial skill, even in the case where it's warranted, and in fact seems, often enough, to grant just the opposite in a way (see the next point).
3. Sense of having accomplished: Possessing a sense of accomplishment about one's training is very important, I think, and valuable to the continuity of it. This, in fact, is one of the advantages of a belt-ranking system. This disadvantage, which is different -- a sense of having accomplished, which is in the pluperfect (past perfect) tense, is very common, as I've seen it. I've even been guilty of it. It can be summed up by the following attitude: "I am a Glory Belt; I have accomplished; I no longer have to accomplish," although the last part of that attitude is only actually expressed in regards to things like doing basic exercises and whatnot. For myself, after earning a black belt in karate, I essentially stopped the practice of stretching all together and lost a huge proportion of my once rather impressive and quite valuable flexibility. I figured that warm-ups and stretching were optional for black belts, and so I didn't really need to do them any longer. I had arrived, if you will. The prevalence of "coffee dans," as they're somtimes called (dan means black-belt-level ranks in the world of Japanese-based martial arts, usually with an ordinal number given before it to indicate rank and can be taken to mean "__-degree black belt," where the __ indicates the ordinal, like third) is pretty high. I'd guess more folks with 3rd degree black belts and higher don't do as much working out/training as they do talking and "instructing," as compared with how many do train regularly and honestly, and even fewer still work hard on basic developmental exercises. While that's a subjective proportion, I think I'm probably qualified in making that guess from my observations and experiences. I've also noticed that as the ordinal increases, particularly past "fifth," the amount of doing seems to decrease proportionally, though this is not a universal situation. In my opinion, though, higher rank should indicate more work, not less, but it usually goes the other way.
4. Extrinsic motivation: The motivation conferred by belt systems, because they are ultimately arbitrary and actually rather empty of meaning, is entirely extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation can only take you so far, particularly in a system where faith is lost in the motivator as time passes because of its obvious arbitrarity.
5. Non-objectivity: There is no, and really can be no, universal board that indicates meaningfully what the level of black belt means. It varies widely from style to style, system to system, and school to school within any given system. Of course, these requirements are typically a huge source of pride for people at each school, usually all of whom believe their belt requirements are the best, most comprehensive, most meaningful, etc. That means that one of the main values of a belt-ranking system is only valid in the microcosm: the tiny world within a particular martial arts school, occasionally a larger martial arts system of schools, or a necessarily rather small organization of similar martial arts schools. The rectification of this issue is a nearly impossible goal to realize, even on the small scale, because as everyone knows, the more rules, regulations, and beaurocracy that enter into any system, the more sluggish and ineffective it becomes. Furthermore, people in terms of both students and instructors are different people with different opinions on what is passing quality and what isn't, on what is important and worth ignoring, and so on. The only way to really make objectivity work is to have a central testing board with well-written, clear, objective proficiencies that must be obtained, and that is strongly limiting in terms of how large such an organization can hope to become. It also turns the higher-level practitioners into administrators instead of active participants in the art. They just can't possibly have time for both. That's going to lead to a degredation of the objective quality over time all by itself. Subjectivity is the rule in this regard, but it further renders the ranking system meaningless.
6. Money talks: It's commonly said and largely true: if a school is commercial and wishes to retain its students, eventually rank promotion has to occur. That means eventually, almost without regard to proficiency so long as some very basic requirements can be satisfied, people move forward if they've played for long enough, unless the instructor is so high in his/her standards that (s)he is willing to sacrifice his/her own business to adhere to principles. In this world, most people can't afford that kind of austerity, and those that can frequently aren't willing to. That further degrades the objectivity of rank in a deeper and more meaningful way than from school-to-school: it really means that a belt rank is meaningful only in context to the individual. This, of course, is the only real measure of performance that actually matters, and so this could be a good thing hidden within a bad one except that the rank is still billed, particularly within the school, as being substantive in an objective sense. Students aren't universally sheep and can see this kind of thing, which makes it clear that there is some level of double-speak even within the confines of a particular school. Of coruse, the ability (or perceived ability) to "buy a belt" at "McDojo" is perhaps one of the biggest injuries to the spread and growth of martial arts that's out there, turning off perhaps the most valuable sector of the population from training -- those that think training should be about getting good at something, not just about getting, earning, or wearing a belt (or equivalent).

To as well as I can think of them, that's a rather inclusive list of advantages and disadvantages of belt-ranking systems in the martial arts, according to what I've seen and experienced. As mentioned, it's difficult for YSB groups to grow without them, but with all told, I don't grudge their absence in the lesat. I'd love to hear some commentary about this topic, including especially points that I might have missed on either side of the fence.