Training tip: How to improve your endurance for circle turning practice

It's been a long time since I've posted. This is because I've begun, hopefully professionally, another writing project that more or less consumes all of my interested-in-writing time on any given day. My apologies to those of you who expected better.

That aside, I've been experimenting with another method that beginners can use to really improve their endurance when it comes to turning the circle, although this same method should work with some modification for any practice requiring endurance, including the other aspects of training Yin Style Baguazhang or any other martial art. I've adapted this method from the one that I used to study for my doctoral qualifying exams and have found it very useful in a number of regards. The chief benefit is that one can find steady, marked improvement without ever falling into the dangerous trap of over training, which even with practices like turning the circle can result in a net loss in valuable training time in the long run. The method employs incremental improvement from an intelligently chosen starting place. The idea is that each training session is taxing without being overkill. The result is remarkable, quick improvement.

To jump right to it, the basic essentials of the method are to

1. Identify your current training capacity, what might be likened to a maximum-ability;
2. Strategically use this capacity to devise a workout that is within your tolerances and yet still likely to be taxing enough to stimulate improvement;
3. Incrementally increase the workload at regular, planned intervals to constantly be pushing yourself while staying within your most effective training window;
4. Periodically re-evaluate and reset the method, as needed.

Before discussing how to implement each of these four steps, there are a couple of basic requirements that this method absolutely relies on. One absolute requirement is a strict regimen of regular training. To be effective, this protocol needs to be followed at least three days a week, although six is ideal. Taking too long of a break will undo any progress being made and undermine the method. Of course, for beginners, less is sometimes more. A special note about this will be made later in the post. A second requirement is the discipline to stick within the program and not to jump ahead to Step 4 too soon. In the long run, over training will set you back. You will need a timer of some sort to employ this method.

 Step 1: Current assessment
Other than the required discipline to stick with the practice, this step is the most demanding. This is how you will set your bench to determine what your training tolerances are. For simplicity, I will assume that you are focusing on training circle turning in a single animal system of Yin Style Baguazhang. If you're trying to develop in more than one system at once, say by having studied the YSB Circle Turning DVD, then an alternative plan is required with some mention below.

To get your current endurance assessment, all you need to do is to set a timer to "stopwatch" mode (or just check a clock or watch before and after your session) and then turn in your chosen animal, switching sides as needed, for as long as you can, endeavoring not to put your hands down at all. By "for as long as you can" is meant that you should turn until it is so overwhelmingly demanding and uncomfortable that you are wishing for the session to end. In other words, it should be the point where the main thing that keeps you turning is willpower. This stage occurs after uncomfortable switches to painful and starts to give way to it being a real challenge to maintain the posture correctly, and it should require you to turn in both directions at least three or four times, perhaps several more, even as a beginner. Complete beginners may find this time to be somewhere around 10 minutes or less, but it would be typical to see it come out in the 15-20-minutes range for healthy individuals putting in serious effort. Whatever this time is, make note of it. For the purposes of example, let's suppose you did this and made it for 22 minutes.

If you have particular health concerns, you might assume that this time is around 10 minutes to give your body a chance to build up even more before jumping into tolerance-level training. The method will still work, but it's a slower-building curve at the beginning.

Step 2: Design a tolerable turning workout
Once you have your endurance assessment, you want to pull it back into the range where it is tolerable, healthy training without falling into the trap of over training. This is achieved by applying something like the old Chinese "70% Rule," although my experiences indicate that 80% is a bit more effective and in line with the Yin Style training mentality. Basically, take your endurance assessment time and multiply by 80% (or 70% or even 60%, if you are sure you'll need more time to gain the strength and health to do the practice well -- do not use less than 60%). We will call the result your baseline turning time. In our example, where our endurance assessment yielded 22 minutes, 80% of that time is 17 minutes and 36 seconds (which we might call 17.5 minutes, for convenience).

The use of this baseline turning time is that your next turning session, which might be after a rest day, should be for this amount of time, here 17.5 minutes, using the timer in countdown mode now. Change sides as often as needed, but per usual, stretch it out as far as possible! This workout should take you right about to the point where the practice first started to really suck but not too far beyond it. You will want to turn for this amount of time for the next one to three sessions, depending partly on how you feel and partly on if you know you have certain physical health concerns to overcome. After that, you must increase the amount of time that you turn.

For what it is worth, I've found the following method of applying this plan the most useful for rapid gains in improvement: I turn on one side until the point where normally, if I wasn't pushing myself, I'd switch sides. Then, I pick some number of revolutions (which I don't count otherwise) around the circle to complete before I switch, usually 30 in animals I'm comfortable with and 20 in animals I'm less comfortable with. Only after those grueling rounds, I switch sides.

Step 3: Incremental improvement
From here, we want to stretch the turning time as time goes by. After one to three sessions at the baseline time, we want to improve incrementally so that we stay near that cusp of tolerance, in accordance with the 80% Rule. To do this, much research and personal experience indicates that an increase of 10% every one to three sessions is usually most effective for most people. Playing it by ear as to how many sessions (one to three) is a good method here to determine when to increment: if a particular session was quite hard, you probably need another one that takes the same time to complete; if it was remarkably easy, then you should increment on your next session.

To simply math and matters, a good rule of thumb is that

• If your previous session time is in the 5-10 minute window, increase by 30 seconds in each increment. 
• If it is in the 10-20 minute range, increase by a minute in each increment. 
• If it is in the 20-30 minute range, increase by 2 minutes in each increment. 
• When you're turning for 30 or more minutes in a session, increase by 3 minutes per increment. There's not much need to stretch it beyond that point, unless you're aiming to get to marathon turning times, in which case an increase of 5 minutes per increment is appropriate if your total time turning is more than an hour.

So, in our example, your first proper training session after assessment would be for 17.5 minutes, and your next training session, supposing the first wasn't overwhelmingly taxing, should be for 18.5 minutes. The next time you increment after that, go to 19.5 seconds. At the next stage, you might go ahead and jump it up to 21.5 minutes, and so forth. The real test here is to avoid going past that planned time. Let the building up take place over time. It is rather surprising, in fact, how quickly you'll find yourself in a position where the increments are happening in every session. Secretly, there's a psychological advantage playing here too: if each session feels just a little short of satisfying, it strongly encourages both more training at the moment (of a different kind) as well as an eagerness to engage in that next session.

Step 4: Reassess
Your body will probably want to develop faster than this plan accounts for once you get used to it. If you find yourself in this situation, where every turning session leaves you feeling unsatisfied because it seemed too easy, you can reassess by basically starting the entire process over. For me, I've noticed that this becomes a necessity when I don't finish turning on both sides once (or sometimes can complete the entire session on one side only without having to change sides at all), and this may be as good as any an indicator that you're under doing it. The process is simple. Just start the whole thing over: do an all-out turn one day to see where you are and set it all up again.

As promised, a special note for beginners on the number of sessions per week to engage in. My recommendation, other than to "listen to your body," since general fitness and health will come into this naturally, is to shoot for three full-out sessions a week according to this protocol and to do two or three mini turning sessions between your main turning sessions. A mini session might be somewhere between 50-60% of your full session times, so if following our example of 17.5 minutes for your full sessions, you might do something like 9-11 minutes on the days in between. When these feel altogether too easy, turn one of them into another full session, repeating that process until all six are full sessions.

Also as promised, a special note for more than one animal system is due. This problem is more complicated. The simplest approach would be to repeat the assessment for as many animals as you're interested in training and to build a unique schedule from there. Best of luck with that. Theoretically, this approach can be applied to any complicated system you want to invent, but I'm not getting into all of that.

I currently turn in two animals in which I have nearly equal total time abilities (although I can go longer per side in Lion than in Phoenix), and my solution is somewhat schedule limited and thus complicated. I currently do not train a significant amount of turning in the other animal systems. My solution for now is to engage in different kinds of full sessions, which are a bit longer than this plan would accommodate otherwise. Some days, I do 100% Lion turning. Other days, I do 100% Phoenix turning. Some days, I do a straight 50-50 split between the two, and most commonly, I do a 60-40 split between the two. So, a typical week for me right now looks like this: 1 session full in Lion, 1 session 50-50, 1 session 60-40 favoring Lion, 1 session full in Phoenix, 1 session 50-50, 1 session 60-40 favoring Phoenix, 1 day rest. It is not ideal, and it really hits home in the "desire to turn more" department. As I said, I'm schedule limited, however, and can't do much better. For what it is worth, on mixed days, I always turn Lion first. I don't have a particularly good reason for that choice, but I haven't done it any other way yet.

Try it out, if you want. Let me know how it goes!