Sunday, November 29, 2009

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.).

Friday, November 27, 2009

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.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

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.

Monday, November 16, 2009

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.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

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.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

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!

Sunday, November 1, 2009

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.
"The most important thing when studying the martial arts is not to be lazy. These skills are not easily attained. For them, one must endure a lot of suffering." -He Jinbao