As any and all but the newest members of the Yin Style Baguazhang community are aware, this is the time of year during which the annual journey to Huairou takes place for the Beijing, China, Yin Style intensive. Attending this intensive is considered by many practitioners to be something of a Yin Style Bagua pilgrimage, if not at least a rite of passage. Fortunately or unfortunately (who's to say?), not everyone can make the trip to Beijing and on to Huairou for the intensive due to expense or work requirements or a variety of other issues that "real" life presents. Having to miss this year's opportunity in China, however, should serve as a motivator to train harder than ever rather than as a reason to shelf your training until it becomes more pressing for your own workshops!
For my part, my workouts typically at least double in intensity and often in duration for a few weeks leading up to and for the three weeks during the China intensive. I do this obviously for my own benefit, but it's also got a couple of other layers to it: I want to pay homage to the incredibly hard work that's being put out in China (8-10 hours of hard training per day for three continuous weeks!), and I want to use it as an excuse to ramp up my own dedication and level of effort.
To try to make it a bit more public this year, I think I'll try to keep some kinds of tabs on what my workouts are looking like during this year's "ramped up" period. This will help with my accountability and will hopefully show some of you that haven't had the chance to train directly in one of He Jinbao's seminars what kinds of intensity those of us that have try to engage in -- keeping in mind that here in "real life" Tennessee, I don't have the time to dedicate to training that I could be taking if I got away from my other responsibilities by going to Beijing for this period. In other words, these workouts will be rather on the light side, so far as the measuring stick lies.
Don't hate on what I've got to say, though, because I'm currently fascinated with conditioning work. My efforts aren't entirely Yin Style training, therefore, but I've chosen activities and exercises that I believe are excellent complements to training and to being a martial artist in general. Hopefully I'll make/find time to post something of a log for the next few weeks essentially daily or every other day.
If you start doing or are doing some killer workouts of your own, by all means share them in the comments! I'd love to know what others of you are up to and to rise to your challenges.
No comments:
Post a Comment