Friday, April 22, 2011

Ask Dr. Jimberly: Starting your own Yin Style Baguazhang study group

As promised about ten days ago or so, I would get around to writing a second installment to an "Ask Dr. Jimberly" post, this time addressing the question of how to go about starting a study group for Yin Style Baguazhang in your neck of the woods. Here's the link to the original post, answering "Why the Lion System?" for those that are interested. Of course, these questions are overlapping to some degree, as I indicated in that earlier response. For reference, here is the text of the email that I was answering again:
I started with the lion dvd's several years back as that is what was recommended by ATS, but I am far more interested and physically inclined to the dragon system, so that's been my focus for the last year and a half or so. Also, I am trying to start up a study group in my area - what do I need to do to make such a group recognized by the YSB association at large?
In this post, I'm addressing only the part of this email indicated in italics, as the rest has been dealt with previously.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Beast Mode: Coming to a close and facing reality

If you've been following the blog lately, then you know I did something of a month-long tribute to the 2011 Beijing Intensive, now at a close, by upping my working out and training regimen to what I termed "Beast Mode." In all, it must have been fairly effective: in the process, I've lost about eight pounds and dropped from 21% to 16.5% bodyfat, according to my scale, which probably isn't very accurate on either of those points. So... I improved significantly in my fitness via hard training coupled with hard conditioning workouts (and a fair amount of hard yard work). How'd my bagua go? Well... that might be another matter.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Ask Dr. Jimberly: Why the Lion System?

Some time ago, I received an email from someone with the following in it:
I started with the lion dvd's several years back as that is what was recommended by ATS, but I am far more interested and physically inclined to the dragon system, so that's been my focus for the last year and a half or so. Also, I am trying to start up a study group in my area - what do I need to do to make such a group recognized by the YSB association at large?
I'll address the second question in this inquiry, about what needs to happen to start a study group, at a later date so as to keep this post as direct and on a single topic as possible. If you're interested in starting a study group in your area and don't have the foggiest idea of what to do, hang on tight for the answer! I'll probably get to it within the week or thereabouts. In the meantime, check out this related post on getting started: A Yin Style Baguazhang Beginner's Guide. Much of the info overlaps.

The reason I'm focusing on the "Why Lion?" question now is that it came up again for me. This week at our study group's weekly get-together, one of the newer members asked me point-blank why we study the Lion System first in Yin Style Baguazhang. I figure this is probably a pretty common question, and so I'll be happy to include the response to the email I got and kind bolster it with what I told our training buddy.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Beast Mode: Post-burnout workout, promised and delivered

It's only been about three hours since my last post (which will challenge you if you're a one-a-day kind of reader). That post was about burnout keeping me from maintaining my Beast Mode status so well over the last week. It also suggested some tips for you to beat and overcome your own burnout issues when training too frequently and too hard gets you down. This is a continuation, delivering on my promise to update you with another Beast Mode workout that I'm using to improve myself and celebrate the ongoing 2011 Beijing Intensive for Yin Style Baguazhang.

Beast Mode: Burnout and what to do about it

Beast Mode is wearing on me. In fact, over the last week and especially for the last three days, despite doing some decent workouts and training in that time, I definitely cannot call what's going on "Beast Mode" any longer. I hit burnout, which I could have predicted. It's beyond the problem characterized in my last post about not having enough to eat for my training (which I've decided is mostly because of my head injury leading to a wrecked sense of smell and therefore taste leading to almost everything currently tasting really bad, sort of like vomit). This is straight up "I've done enough hard workouts for now" style burnout.
"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