How a Timer Can Help Your Training

Someone's going to jump up and down about this, particularly after my recent post about tips for circle-turning practice in which I had a subject heading labeled

Do Not Base Your Turning on a Clock, a Number of Revolutions, or Some Other Crap that Isn't Worth a Damn.

I hope not to be flamed about this because a timer can be and is a helpful training tool if it is used correctly. Here, I endeavor to describe more fully what role a timer plays in my training and how it could help or potentially hinder yours. Here are some proper uses of the timer in training:

Convenience
You can easily set a timer and decide to do an exercise, class of exercises, or exercise routine until the timer goes off. This is convenient if you have a known, limited amount of time in which to train ("my roast is done in an hour, time to rock out some training without worrying about burning it!") or if you need/want something external to really push you. Be sure to get a timer with an alarm that is loud enough so that you don't have any desire to go running over to it to check it periodically which is a sure sign that your mind is not fully on your training. A good use of the timer is to take your mind off of how long you have to train and let it do the worrying-about-that for you. This, by the way, is a distinct difference from using a clock, which you'd have to continually check.

Accountability
A timer is a funny little object in that it has no mind, no authority, and no power whatsoever as it is only measuring an arbitrary duration with arbitrary (but agreed-upon) units to some debatable level of accuracy, and yet it's pretty easy to hold yourself accountable to those little bad-boys. Set the timer, do whatever you've decided to do until the timer goes off, and let it be keep you on task until the time goes off. You can always do more if that wasn't enough or if it lit your fire, with or without the timer. Remember one of my golden training rules, though, when you set out on this kind of practice: things are easier to write down than to do.

Challenging Yourself
Let's say you have a good idea of how many such-and-suches that you can do effectively and roughly how long that takes. Using a timer to tack on a little more time ("a little" is defined in terms of the exercise you're doing) than what you are pretty sure you can do well and committing to trying your damnedest to perform through that whole time. If you can, then it benefited you. If you can't, then remember that the goal is quality, not quantity, and so you can do what you can do with quality, rest a bit, and then pick it back up to finish out the time (you might stop the timer while you're resting) when you've had a little break to regain steam. Since it's easy to be accountable to a timer, this is an excellent use of the timer in your training. After convenience (because I have a lot of crap to do in my life too), this is my primary use of a training timer.

Keeping Your Mind On Task
This really falls under "convenience" and was mentioned there, but it's so valuable and important that it gets its own little separate place too. If you're doing strikes or turning or whatever, and you're measuring what you're doing by counting them, which is totally natural, commonplace, and fine for certain things, then your mind isn't entirely on your training. It's great for group training, but then again, the timer serves the same function here. You can set a timer to a rough number by knowing roughly how many strikes you can do in a minute if you're doing them at the right speed (~30, btw). How can you find that out for yourself instead of comparing against my numbers? Do some strikes, count them, and time it. Figure out strikes per minute by dividing the number of strikes you did by the number of minutes it took (Math Note: There are not 100 seconds in a minute, and thus there is a meaningful difference between "one minute and twenty-three seconds" and "1.23 minutes." You can avoid having to convert to correct for this kind of thing by setting the timer for something like five minutes, doing your strikes, and letting the count be as it will). The same goes for turning if you're a revolutions-counter. Make sure to keep the timer out of view while you train, or this aspect probably goes right out the window as the timer becomes a distraction instead of a tool to increase focus.


There are also improper ways to use the timer and should be watched for and avoided: letting it be your cop-out if you're not pushing yourself hard enough when you have the time to train more than you are (the timer went off, so I was done), allowing "how long" you did something to matter in any way to you whatsoever other than as a rough measure of progress or conditioning, and allowing your training goals to start to center more on time (quantity) than on quality, for some examples. These insidious little problems are easy to let creep in, so you want to stay aware of them and let them pass.

Here are a couple of examples of how I use a timer to get in some really nice little workouts (ignoring the obvious "convenience" factor labeled above):

• Turning: I set the timer, put it "over there" and turn until it goes off. If I cannot maintain the posture even by switching sides often, then I rest my arms by bringing them down or picking another posture to turn in (lower posture, chopping posture as a counter to the Lion posture, "tripod posture" for strength, Rooster posture because I got told to do it sometimes when I was in London, etc. There are lots of postures to choose from). After a bit, I go back to the Lion posture (or whichever you're currently focusing on) and do it as well as I can again. This process repeats until I use up all of the time.
• Saber: A favorite new drill of mine is to set a timer for a fixed time (usually 20 minutes) and then "not put down my saber" in that whole time. The real goal is, of course, to do drills for the entire time, and it's a wicked workout. There are drills, sections of the form, turning postures, and standing postures to choose from, and none of them lasts for a terribly long time with that beast, so it's a varied and exciting workout. If I "can't think of another drill to do" at any given moment, I do tracing the saber until something comes to mind. It doesn't ever take long. I do most of the drills as equally as possible in each hand to give one a rest while the other gets some work. It would be far harder to do it otherwise.
  
• Basic Drills: This applies to any martial art, actually, not just Yin Style Baguazhang. I pick one drill, set a timer, and try to do the best I can with it until the timer goes off. I usually pick a time period that pushes me a little but that isn't so hard that I have to really cheat to finish. For example, today I did tracing the saber for five minutes, switching hands whenever I needed to. It worked great. I got about 100 on each side, so now I have a rough timing mechanism too (40 traces per minute, roughly). I do this with strikes and forms as well. Strikes, I think, is obvious in method, and forms go by setting the timer to several minutes (5 or 8) and doing a particular form repetetively until time runs out, trying to make it as good and powerful as I can throughout. It's kind of sad to think about, but eight minutes straight of a form is kind of hard, and that's really not that long of a time period.
• Standing Practice: Obvious. Stand for a set time on a side, switch (helps to have a person working the timer for you). Do it again until you don't want to do it any more (two or three times on each side is usually pretty good). Alternatively, set a time (5-10 minutes is hard) and stand, switching sides as needed, until time runs out.

Be careful not to let tools turn your training sour, but don't throw them out arbitrarily!