New Year's training resolutions 2010

I feel like I should start this off with some classic New Year's resolutions words that seem to spell disaster: "This year's going to be different...." Well, hopefully it is. I've been thinking an awful lot about my training over the past month, not least because of my stupid toe that was making doing much training outside of a seated position (yeah, right) quite difficult if not impossible. I'm back on the horse full-tilt again now, though, and here are some of the things I think make good New Year's training resolutions. As usual, feel fully free to make comments to add some of your own!

Do _______ more consistently (fill in the blank per your needs)
For me, what this one comes down to mostly is standing strengthening and turning. Those two aspects of training either end up being the main component of my training or almost evaporate completely, and those two situations seem to occur cyclically in a-few-months-long intervals. That's not good. Some standing; some turning; every week. I'm not sure that doing some of everything every day is that good of an idea any more. Then again, perhaps I'm just not training enough.

Be more balanced and organized in training
It's really been an easy trap for me to fall into to focus almost all of my training on the saber: when I first got it I was nuts about learning the entire Nine Dragon Saber form and being strong enough to be able to get through it all in one go; later, I went completely ape with some basic drills. Like weights, the saber gives quick, obvious results. The price of falling into that trap has been a decline in the amount of other exercises that I do, many of which were daily staples in the past.

Move more
Maybe I'm just a turd like this, but I tend to notice that doing moving-step striking drills and forms, some things I really should be doing a lot of, kind of get ignored all too often for standing-in-place methods, which are great but a bit limited in terms of developing use and better coordination (both being highly sought training aims). I'm going to try to up the moving-step this year significantly. If you're not brand-spanking-new to the art, you might consider it too, based at least on what JB had to say about it last summer.

Be organized/have a plan for your training
Note that this point applies to any martial artist or even any active person, so if you read this and don't practice Yin Style Bagua, keep this one near the front of your mind. This is perhaps one of my weakest links in developing a solid training regimen. I tend not to be very organized, to my own chagrin, and I'm sure my potential development suffers for it. Usually, my method is that I get up, think about what I might like to do that day or something that I haven't done in a while, and then I just do some of that. Since it's easy to get into ruts, I tend to do those things repetitively for a while and then either get stuck doing them far too much (to the detriment of other training) or end up fizzling out. An organized weekly plan seems like a better approach.

On that note, an organized daily agenda would also make a good addition to my training program -- here are the times that I train, and I stick to those times and train during them. Furthermore, I tend to do very well if I develop curriculum for myself (subject to my recurring downfall -- curriculum is easier to write down than it is to execute). Spending a little time each week or month developing curriculum and then choosing specific daily exercises to do along those lines would greatly benefit me.

Set speficic, measurable, realistic, attainable, short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals (Another note for everyone)
In that same vein, I really need to do better with my goal-setting. First, goals need to be specific, measurable, realistic, and attainable to work. That means:

• Specific - "I want to get in better shape" or "I want to be able to do xxxx technique better" would be very vague goals that are hard to meet. It's important to be specific in goal-setting so you know what you're working toward and when you've met that goal. "I want fluid, solid body movement in xxxx technique" is more specific and easier to attain.
• Measurable - In training Yin Style Bagua, this one is the rub. Measurable is easiest in terms of doing things by the numbers: "Turn for an hour," "Do 1000 of xxxx technique without needing a break," etc. Those kinds of goals aren't really great for internal arts (but are awesome for supplemental training activities). What's needed instead are measurements that are more subtle: getting lower in your stances and maintaining them longer; turning well for an hour; routinely turning well for 10 minutes before needing to change sides, etc. Doing xxxx activity at least ##% of the days this year is also good.
  
• Realistic - Setting a goal like turning for 1000 hours in a year might not be a realistic goal -- even if you have that kind of time, putting in almost 3 hours a day on average might be outside of your body's ability, particularly if you can't turn well for 3 hours in a day yet. Set goals that are realistic if you want to attain them.
• Attainable - "I want to be able to levitate." Cool. I think most people would get excited about developing that skill, but it's probably not attainable. Many people that practice martial arts, internal arts in particular, come up with some ridiculous ideas about what they'll get out of their training. Try to keep your goals in the "pretty clearly attainable" box, and you'll probably have a lot more success.

Goals also come in a variety of time scales. Generally speaking, shorter-term goals are more realistic and attainable, although longer-term goals can be more driving. Since this is an article about 2010 resolutions in training, I'll keep my longest-term goals at around a year.

1. Short-term goals: These are best set in the weekly-to-monthly time scale, depending on the goal. "Short-term" monthly would be in terms of development, and weekly might be in terms of hitting a particular variety of exercises or spending a set amount of time training or working on particular activities or techniques. These should be very attainable, which means there should only be a little bit of a change (in the positive direction) as compared with what you can do now.
2. Medium-term goals: These are best set in the monthly-to-quarterly time scale, again depending on what you're talking about. Learning a particular set or group of exercises or seeking out a noteworthy degree of development in a particular technique or method ("finding the force," for instance) would make for good medium-term goals.
3. Long-term goals: In the context of this article, these would be quarterly-to-yearly in length. You might be looking for a dramatic change in coordination, agility, flexibility, endurance, or strength on this time scale.
   

A little warning: I used to be very good about developing specific numbers-oriented goals in all three time scales, but they became a bit of an obsession that I'm now sure was detrimental to my development overall. I frequently pushed myself beyond my capacities (good, but only to an extent) and cared more about doing 2000 of xxxx technique by next Tuesday than I did about getting better at xxxx technique. Not good.

Quality first and then quantity
Based on my previous goal-setting line, let me admonish you that the easiest, most realistic and attainable, most clearly specific goals always involve numbers. Remember that for real development, you have to get it right first and then ramp up the numbers, so if you decide to attach numbers to your training (do X repetitions of activity xxxx, or do activity xxxx for X minutes), make absolutely sure that you don't count poor-quality. Your main focuses, I think, should be on doing things well and getting better at those things. If you're not meeting those goals first, then all the numbers in the world don't matter.

Another little warning here: numerical goals are an awesome way to ensure some overtraining issues will develop. Some that I've done or seen done in the past and now consider to be a bad idea are:

1. 100,000 pushups in a year (before I was doing bagua). That's a lot of damn pushups. I did it, but my pushup ability turned to crap. I could do a lot of sets of small numbers of pushups, but doing a large number in one go was right out. I'm not sure what kind of fitness that is, but it's certainly not optimal. I also was not getting stronger after the initial phase of the training.
2. 6,000 tracing the saber in a month (in each hand) -- originally conceived as 200 in each hand per day. I actually did 7000, for the record. This was specifically a test to see what that kind of training would do to my body. The result was similar to the pushups experiment because to keep up with the numbers, I felt like I really needed to trace the saber every day to do it. I think that caused some overtraining issues, though I definitely am stronger now that I did it.
3. 100,000 strikes in a year. Back before I knew anything about training (the first year and a half or so), this is how I approached doing lots of strikes: try to get some thousands of each one every year. I did a lot of poorly executed strikes and got in pretty good shape. I also got a bunch of injuries and didn't get a hell of a lot better at the techniques I was working on.
4. Turn for at least 30 minutes a day (on average) for a year (~180 hours or ~10,000 minutes). This was good for getting on the circle more, but it turned the practice into a serious chore that I started to dread. It's also really easy to get behind when work gets busy, and then it gets really easy to beat yourself up over it.
5. Run 4000 miles in a year. I didn't do this. F*** that! I have a friend that did it, and I can't imagine anything good coming out of it. This didn't have much to do with anything in the post actually; I just really like telling people that I know someone that ran 4000 miles in 2009 (on purpose).
   

Build the group
Most training in Yin Style Bagua is individual, and that's fine. A lot of good stuff comes out of training together: obvious need for curriculum, bringing new people to the art, comeraderie, partner practice, help and corrections, motivation to keep working, group accountability and encouragement, a sense of family and group unity. For us in Knoxville in particular, I really hope to see 2010 as a year in which we really build up the group aspect of our training: more frequent and regular meetings, more folks, more curriculum, a good location, etc. This is our group's roughest challenge, I think, and a big goal for us this year is to make our group a little more solid.