What are you training for? A Catch-22

In any martial art, but particularly (from my experience) in Yin Style Bagua (though this might be more broadly applicable to internal martial arts), there is a certain Catch-22 to good and effective training. It really comes down to what you're training for.

Here's the thing--often when training, particularly in an art like Yin Style where everything seems to have dozens, if not scores or hundreds, of details that must be accurately adhered to in order to train well, we get caught up "training to do moves." This is not the goal, though, of real martial arts (though it is the goal of competition or demonstration martial arts--another topic for another day). The real goal is to produce results, and so we have to "train to achieve results," usually in the form of defeating an opponent (in one or more steps). In order to get good results, though, you have to train the moves accurately, which requires you to put yourself altogether too close for comfort to the realm of "training to do moves."


This problem is, I think, why applications practice is so challenging (and stressful for some people!). It is therefore a major source of the problem that we might call a "knowledge-use gap." If someone is very good at "training to do moves" and yet cannot achieve results, i.e. is not "training to achieve results," then we are likely to diagnose them as having a problem of a knowledge-use gap. They apparently have the knowledge, but their knowledge is not sufficient to produce results (and is thus, really, empty, not-real knowledge, however many wushu competitions it could win!). As erasing the knowledge-use gap is almost the definition of a serious martial artist, serious Yin Style practitioners should be very interested in understanding the dichotomy between "training to do moves" and "training to achieve results" as well as how to tell the two apart and to tell which mode we happen to be training in at any given time.

Since there's a Catch-22 involved, I will argue, in fact, that training in both modes is actually necessary. There has to be an intelligent and developmental interplay between focusing more on the fundamental requirements of the techniques (training to do moves) and the objective reality of those techniques as they are intended for use in application (training to achieve results). On the other hand, the constant check via application has to be there to ensure that the training to do moves is achieving the goal of refining technique to produce a more effective result. Neither works without the other, at least not in an intelligent, sophisticated art that possesses the capability of producing high-level practitioners.

The rub of the Catch-22 is that eventually "training to do moves" should disappear. When a skilled Yin Stylist is training, there is only "training to achieve results." This is key to the entire underlying premise of Yin Style and is, indeed, my current functional definition of "internal" martial art (much to the chagrin of people who would mislead us to believe in magical powers and fantastic abilities). Eventually, part of the training protocol, and the harder part of it (which says a lot given how physically demanding training YSB is!), is pushing yourself to the point where your training is almost entirely of the "training to achieve results" sort, beyond a short grace period at the beginning stages of training something new.

The rub of that conclusion is that the Catch-22 still exists. Training to achieve results will inherently reveal knew information to you about how you need to train the techniques in order to refine them and get better results. This brings you back periodically to "training to do moves" on a higher level. Of course, we can't get confused and think that it allows an excuse to train to do moves as anything but a bridge to better training to achieve results.

This, in fact, as I continue to explore it, defines more and more of my understanding of a significant part of the "first internal harmony" of Yin Style Bagua: that the xin and the yi must be in harmony. Internal stylists in many arts like to talk about the yi like it's a magical force. Perhaps I'm just too low-level, but I think this is mumbo-jumbo on their part. As I see it, and I've searched for credible evidence that I'm mistaken on this point, it's a tremendous mistake to think of yi as a substance of any kind. Instead, I see this aspect of harmonizing xin and yi to mean that one must be training to achieve results, not to do moves.

The reason I'm seeing it this way is pretty straightforward. Xin means "heart" and implies, in a sense, the aspect of the mind that wants. Yi is usually translated as "intent," but it is a word that implies a different aspect of the mind. To have the two in harmony means that the intention matches the desire. I can intend to throw my opponent down, for instance, and yet desire firstly to do the move well, and I'll get a bad result due to this lack of harmony. Instead, I could intend to do the move very well and yet desire to throw my opponent  down, and I'll also get a bad result due to lack of harmony. (I think this case is the most common situation when people are struggling with an application.) Ideally, my intention and desire should both be to throw my opponent down, and then I should be able to get a good result, so long as my body is trained to meet the requirements automatically. This requirement is, of course, why we train the techniques so repetitiously with so much mental focus and attention to detail.

This is not easily achieved and is probably the main reason that internal arts have a reputation for taking many years to achieve significant proficiency (although a serious practitioner of any decent art with a fighting-oriented teaching method should be a proficient fighter within a few months, if that is the main goal at the beginning). Give it a try and see what turns up in your training. Can you tell when you're training to do moves instead of training for the result? Can you tell when you are harmonizing those? What can you do to develop in that capacity? What do you notice when you do your applications in the right and wrong states?