Bagua standing strengthening practice--are you doing it right?

Apparently I don't post enough about Yin Style Baguazhang's standing strengthening (zhan zhuang-- sort of) practice. Guilty as charged. Let's see what I can say about it here to correct that, and in the process, we'll find out if you're doing it right or not.

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 -- a much-needed rest and hitting it hard again

Apparently, rest days are important, even during Beast Mode training. Yesterday's training consisted only of a half an hour of turning, mostly Phoenix with some Lion, and a half an hour of forms at medium pace and power, kind of like amplified learning speed. Yesterday's conditioning was only a grip-training routine and 60 squat thrusts. Done, and done, because apparently so was my body. Today, however, I picked it back up.

Beast Mode continues, and you need a GymBoss!

So much for daily posts! The Beast Mode daily workouts have been continuing, though, and they're apparently going well enough because I've got a classic overtraining symptom: nearly constantly elevated body temperature. Here's some of the stuff I've been up to over the last few days.

Beast Mode, Day 1 -- Training to prepare for a lunar perigee Super Moon

First of all, just in case you don't know: the current full moon is occurring at lunar perigee (use Google or Wikipedia or something if you don't know what that means), and lots of hee-haws are calling it a Super Moon and predicting all kinds of calamity that is very unlikely to have anything to do with the lunar perigee, which happens a little more than once a month, just because it coincides with the full moon, i.e. the moon is on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun, a coincidence that happens roughly once every 18 years. The only calamity that I'm aware of is Beast Mode (what I'm calling my ramped-up training right now) Day 1, which was pretty hard.

Flat back

A flat back... I have one.

At this year's successful seminar series, in which I was glad to participate in two tour stops, it was made literally painfully clear to me that I have an overly flat upper back, and that I am to work hard to correct this issue.

Serious leg workout: Yin Style Baguazhang style

I seriously wonder if there is a leg workout out there more effective than the lying step?
Monday, at group training, we focused on lying step, building up to and showing the new guys (yea! new guys!) the lying step sweeping form. We did the form a few dozen times, and we took a bunch of drills out of it and some of the others to practice the lying step technique. A few days later, I'm still pretty well convinced (by the lingering soreness!) that the lying step might be the best way in the universe to get strong, fast legs.

Here are some lying step training ideas for you to work in:

1. Go the distance: find a long, relatively straight distance to cover (a driveway, a gymnasium, a hallway) and do a lying-step strike, kind of one-step method, turning either forward or backwards, all the way down (and back!). Do it several times and feel your legs shuddering for days! From the Lion System lying step forms, these kinds of steps could either be the ones in "moves 3 and 5" or in "move 1," which gives you two very different drills and very different ways of frying your legs;
2. Box it up: Do your lying step drills (like "moves 3 and 5") in the box-stepping method, one advancing, one retreating.
3. One-two-three: You guessed it! Try doing the lying step drills (like "moves 3 and 5") along a line in the three-step drilling method. We tend to step on "one" by drawing the leg back and then extending it before the weight shift, but you could just do a weight shift there. It depends on your training and use goals.
4. Lying-step squats: all the fun of regular squats except that you keep one leg straight out in the lying-step position and do all the work with the other leg. This isn't strictly martial, but it turns your legs to mush.

A goal for development and training can be to get deeper, lower, faster, and stronger lying steps. You can facilitate the first two of those goals using side lunging stretches (drop into a lying-step position and use it as a stretch with your hands on your knees or the floor for support and safety... add strengthening and balance when you're better at it and more confident by lifting your hands). Other wide-leg hamstring and leg adductor stretches are helpful too. To facilitate the last two goals, try doing a smaller number of each drill and really pushing hard, trying to get some explosiveness in the technique (i.e. make it pliometric).

Of course, the real point is to be able to use it as well as to do it, not just to get a workout in. Be sure to combine in your strikes (see the forms for ideas if you need them) and to do this a lot. For it to be usable, you have to have excellent balance and the ability to place your foot precisely in an instant. You also have to be strong enough and flexible enough to get your leg and body into the correct positions for use, so while you stretch, drill, and strengthen, think about the uses!

How a Timer Can Help Your Training

Someone's going to jump up and down about this, particularly after my recent post about tips for circle-turning practice in which I had a subject heading labeled

Do Not Base Your Turning on a Clock, a Number of Revolutions, or Some Other Crap that Isn't Worth a Damn.

I hope not to be flamed about this because a timer can be and is a helpful training tool if it is used correctly. Here, I endeavor to describe more fully what role a timer plays in my training and how it could help or potentially hinder yours. Here are some proper uses of the timer in training:

Convenience
You can easily set a timer and decide to do an exercise, class of exercises, or exercise routine until the timer goes off. This is convenient if you have a known, limited amount of time in which to train ("my roast is done in an hour, time to rock out some training without worrying about burning it!") or if you need/want something external to really push you. Be sure to get a timer with an alarm that is loud enough so that you don't have any desire to go running over to it to check it periodically which is a sure sign that your mind is not fully on your training. A good use of the timer is to take your mind off of how long you have to train and let it do the worrying-about-that for you. This, by the way, is a distinct difference from using a clock, which you'd have to continually check.

Accountability
A timer is a funny little object in that it has no mind, no authority, and no power whatsoever as it is only measuring an arbitrary duration with arbitrary (but agreed-upon) units to some debatable level of accuracy, and yet it's pretty easy to hold yourself accountable to those little bad-boys. Set the timer, do whatever you've decided to do until the timer goes off, and let it be keep you on task until the time goes off. You can always do more if that wasn't enough or if it lit your fire, with or without the timer. Remember one of my golden training rules, though, when you set out on this kind of practice: things are easier to write down than to do.

Challenging Yourself
Let's say you have a good idea of how many such-and-suches that you can do effectively and roughly how long that takes. Using a timer to tack on a little more time ("a little" is defined in terms of the exercise you're doing) than what you are pretty sure you can do well and committing to trying your damnedest to perform through that whole time. If you can, then it benefited you. If you can't, then remember that the goal is quality, not quantity, and so you can do what you can do with quality, rest a bit, and then pick it back up to finish out the time (you might stop the timer while you're resting) when you've had a little break to regain steam. Since it's easy to be accountable to a timer, this is an excellent use of the timer in your training. After convenience (because I have a lot of crap to do in my life too), this is my primary use of a training timer.

Keeping Your Mind On Task
This really falls under "convenience" and was mentioned there, but it's so valuable and important that it gets its own little separate place too. If you're doing strikes or turning or whatever, and you're measuring what you're doing by counting them, which is totally natural, commonplace, and fine for certain things, then your mind isn't entirely on your training. It's great for group training, but then again, the timer serves the same function here. You can set a timer to a rough number by knowing roughly how many strikes you can do in a minute if you're doing them at the right speed (~30, btw). How can you find that out for yourself instead of comparing against my numbers? Do some strikes, count them, and time it. Figure out strikes per minute by dividing the number of strikes you did by the number of minutes it took (Math Note: There are not 100 seconds in a minute, and thus there is a meaningful difference between "one minute and twenty-three seconds" and "1.23 minutes." You can avoid having to convert to correct for this kind of thing by setting the timer for something like five minutes, doing your strikes, and letting the count be as it will). The same goes for turning if you're a revolutions-counter. Make sure to keep the timer out of view while you train, or this aspect probably goes right out the window as the timer becomes a distraction instead of a tool to increase focus.


There are also improper ways to use the timer and should be watched for and avoided: letting it be your cop-out if you're not pushing yourself hard enough when you have the time to train more than you are (the timer went off, so I was done), allowing "how long" you did something to matter in any way to you whatsoever other than as a rough measure of progress or conditioning, and allowing your training goals to start to center more on time (quantity) than on quality, for some examples. These insidious little problems are easy to let creep in, so you want to stay aware of them and let them pass.

Here are a couple of examples of how I use a timer to get in some really nice little workouts (ignoring the obvious "convenience" factor labeled above):

• Turning: I set the timer, put it "over there" and turn until it goes off. If I cannot maintain the posture even by switching sides often, then I rest my arms by bringing them down or picking another posture to turn in (lower posture, chopping posture as a counter to the Lion posture, "tripod posture" for strength, Rooster posture because I got told to do it sometimes when I was in London, etc. There are lots of postures to choose from). After a bit, I go back to the Lion posture (or whichever you're currently focusing on) and do it as well as I can again. This process repeats until I use up all of the time.
• Saber: A favorite new drill of mine is to set a timer for a fixed time (usually 20 minutes) and then "not put down my saber" in that whole time. The real goal is, of course, to do drills for the entire time, and it's a wicked workout. There are drills, sections of the form, turning postures, and standing postures to choose from, and none of them lasts for a terribly long time with that beast, so it's a varied and exciting workout. If I "can't think of another drill to do" at any given moment, I do tracing the saber until something comes to mind. It doesn't ever take long. I do most of the drills as equally as possible in each hand to give one a rest while the other gets some work. It would be far harder to do it otherwise.
  
• Basic Drills: This applies to any martial art, actually, not just Yin Style Baguazhang. I pick one drill, set a timer, and try to do the best I can with it until the timer goes off. I usually pick a time period that pushes me a little but that isn't so hard that I have to really cheat to finish. For example, today I did tracing the saber for five minutes, switching hands whenever I needed to. It worked great. I got about 100 on each side, so now I have a rough timing mechanism too (40 traces per minute, roughly). I do this with strikes and forms as well. Strikes, I think, is obvious in method, and forms go by setting the timer to several minutes (5 or 8) and doing a particular form repetetively until time runs out, trying to make it as good and powerful as I can throughout. It's kind of sad to think about, but eight minutes straight of a form is kind of hard, and that's really not that long of a time period.
• Standing Practice: Obvious. Stand for a set time on a side, switch (helps to have a person working the timer for you). Do it again until you don't want to do it any more (two or three times on each side is usually pretty good). Alternatively, set a time (5-10 minutes is hard) and stand, switching sides as needed, until time runs out.

Be careful not to let tools turn your training sour, but don't throw them out arbitrarily!

Train FOR Something: Skills-Oriented Training

I've mentioned this kind of thing before, but it bears mentioning again and again. When you train, go train for something specific, in particular to get better at something specific.

Here are two examples of exercise-related/training-related goals, phrased in a fairly generic sense:

1. I'm going to work this exercise until I can do it 150 times without stopping!
2. I'm going to work this exercise until I'm very good at it, trying to pay attention to find and learn the proper mechanics and execution along the way!

Obviously, the second goal is a superior goal for a number of reasons. The first goal, first of all, is easier to meet because it's very specific. That's great if you're totally new to exercise or just trying to get some cosmetic results, but it's total crap if you want to actually master a technique, which is usually the goal of martial arts training. Who cares if you can do a technique 150 times without stopping if you can't do it once correctly? If what you're training is martial arts, then doing something wrong 150 times (while somewhat better than doing it none) is not going to do you much good if the (hopefully) unlikely situation that you have to use it comes up. Granted, if the exercise is something like squats (great for strengthening the legs and butt), you probably don't have to "use" it ever except as an accessory to a technique you're trying to perform, but still, doesn't it seem to mesh so much more deeply with the idea of training an internal or even just an intelligent martial art to extend those ideas to everything we do, exercise included? Of course it does!

Making your goals skills-oriented makes for a harder, more rewarding road. If you work hard and honestly to get good at something, chances are pretty good that you'll be able to do it several or many times in a row, but you'll have obtained more along the way: a deeper understanding of the technique or exercise. It's a difficult goal to meet, however, because it's abstract and lacks a clear finishing point. You know when you can do 150 squats without stopping (body-weight squats, of course), but you cannot know when you've honestly mastered a technique fully. Of course, that can be discouraging, but for a mature, serious person (like a good martial artist has to be), it's more of an opportunity than an impossibility. "Cool! I'll always have room to develop in this practice!" is the way you can look at it instead of "Shit! I'll never completely get this!"

Basically, any exercise you choose to do as part of your training can have benefit. The question you have to ask yourself is how much benefit a given exercise per unit of time that you have to train. Dr. Xie Peiqi apparently used to say something like "we're all given the same twenty-four hours in a day, so what matters is how we choose to use them." Realistically, with jobs and family and living, most of us might have an hour or two a day on average to dedicate to our training, which really isn't much (ten or fifteen hours out of 168 in a week, i.e. less than 10% of our time). That means our choices on how to spend our training hours have to be optimal. No matter which exercises you pick: standing strengthening, turning, striking, drilling, forms, dadao practice in any of those dimensions, applications, or accessory training like cardio, weight training, stretching, or what-have-you, you have to look at your goals in terms of developing certain skills. Stretching might seem much more valuable if you're too stiff to do certain movements (lying step, anyone?), and weights might really help you if you're weak. Weights can help you if you're strong as long as you're creative and serious enough to focus your weight training on meaningful exercises and routines that actually enhance your training, determined enough to make sure you put your mind into those exercises, and mature enough to drop the silly, empty, bullshit exercises that make up the majority of what is done with weights in the wide world of exercise -- no matter what they might make you look or feel like if you do a lot of them (is bench press really going to make you a better fighter? I somehow doubt it...).

Most importantly (in fact, so importantly that I'm going to repeat it even though I already wrote it), put your mind into your training, even if it's not a martial technique. If you're jogging to increase your wind, then put your mind into your breathing while you're jogging. That's the reason you're jogging, right? If you're lifting a weight to increase your ability to hit hard, make sure that the exercise you choose somehow uses the same muscles that are involved and that you focus on feeling those muscles, imagining how their strength translates into striking power. If you're stretching, then put your mind into your body and try to feel your tightness... and then try to let your mind help you release it. Bring your internal to your external, and you can really maximize what you're getting out of your training time.

Fire and Ice

"Sometimes you've got to think about presentation; you've got to make it look good for people."

He Jinbao said that to us while discussing variations on the Nine Dragon Saber form in our seminar in London this summer, and the extra little kick thrown in by Matt was "You've got to think about fire and ice sometimes." Since I don't speak Chinese, I don't know if Matt or JB said "fire and ice," but I'm assuming for now that it was Matt. I could be wrong.

I do know that Matt made "The Billionaire" and I do a fire-and-ice drill one day, and today I brought that drill to Bradley. The drill itself is completely insignificant to this post and almost insignificant to training: it's one drill out of several dozens and probably one that most people that work the dadao are have done: stab forward and then pull back, squatting into a low stance and supporing the saber arm with the back of the wrist, using the waist to drive the movement, of course.

The point here is really that doing this fire-and-ice drill made a normally "boring" drill a lot more fun, in other words, it increased the excitement that we had for the drill and encouraged us to do more drills in a similar way -- more drills, in fact, than we would have done had we not walked down this road. The basic idea for "fire and ice" is that you and some partners get together and do the drills a bit like a synchronized swimming team, so to speak. For us, we stabbed directly at the points of each other's saber so that they ended a few inches or a foot or so apart (measured ahead of time). Then we moved in step with one another. This drill would be particularly cool with a larger group also. I know for sure that it drove me to do more of them and gave me something different to focus on while I was doing the drill, so it really pepped it up for me.

The thing is, group training in Yin Style is an interesting phenomenon. As far as I can tell, it has some very useful purposes:

• Introducing the art to less-experienced practitioners or helping to advance their practice;
• Group accountability/encouragement to do more and better drills;
  
• Commeraderie;
• The ability to see and be seen, primarily for correction's sake;
• Share ideas and training tips;
• Practice applications.

There are surely others, but making an exhaustive list of such a thing on the spot is difficult, particularly when you get familiarity blindness (meaning we all know the benefits of group training and are so familiar with them that it's hard to see and say those things clearly sometimes in an exhaustive list). One thing that is particularly good about Yin Style (although it's true for every martial art, even if it's not explicitly encouraged) is that solo drilling really takes center stage, and the hard truth of the matter is this: you don't need a group to do it or to do it well (although for the corrections/learning aspects it's really helpful). Thus, why use your group meeting times for focusing primarily on the things you should be doing at home, training on your own?

That's where doing drills with the fire-and-ice mentality comes in. The drills are the same, but they feel and look different. If we all stand in rows and just do them, that's fine, but it's very similar to what we are experiencing in our solo practice just with more people around (who might be added distractions?). Fire and ice gives a different kind of purpose and a certain novelty to the exercises, and it is certainly not something you can do on your own. As far as training practicality goes, more attention to distance and positioning are required for the drills, so those aspects of training become more realistic than when drilling solo, say out in the middle of your driveway (in case you don't want to tear up your grass or something).

Apparently, fire and ice can be applied to the form as well. In fact, it was mentioned, since we were doing the form in fours, how cool it would look if we all did the "boatman plunges his pole" maneuver so that our saber tips all pointed to the middle of the room at the same time. Then it was suggested that we should all think about our positioning and movement so that we could accommodate that goal. Then we didn't do it, not even once. Looking back at it now, I think of it as a missed opportunity. Putting some thought into these kinds of things, not as a center of your practice but rather as a peripheral sort of drill can add depth and fun to what otherwise might seem tedious, repetitive, dry, or even boring. Plus, when we do it, we get to look cool, and how cool is that?

Some Yin Style Bagua Training Tips

It occurred to me last night that most of this blog is kind of an adventure in describing my trials, errors, and tribulations with training Yin Style Baguazhang, and since it's kind of giving me a slightly authoritative voice (or so I hear), I decided it would be nice to provide some tips for training. None of these will be too fancy, and it will certainly not be a comprehensive list. It's just a short catalog of some of the things that I've done that seemed to help me. I think it would be great, in fact, if anyone that's interested would post some of their own successful tips as comments to this post. I also think that many of these training tips would help folks that practice any martial art, or with a little more creative stretching, any endeavor whatsoever, so feel free to pass it along if you know someone that might benefit from it, inside Yin Style or out.

1. Never Zero
This is a rule that I've lived by for almost three years now, and what it means is that I do not let a day go by with no training. That doesn't mean, necessarily, that I'm throwing strikes or turning or even sweating every single day. Sometimes I'm sick. Sometimes I'm working a lot. Sometimes I'm busy or traveling (no, I didn't practice my sweeping strikes on the plane to London). Sometimes I'm just tired. On those days, I have videos I can watch, notes I can review, and an active imagination that I can tap into. All of that counts as training too as long as it's not the main body of your training. Of course, never-zero usually means sweating for me, at least thirteen days out of a fortnight.

2. Do Something
Yin Style Baguazhang has umpteen thousand things to train in it. There are four pillars, each of which is huge, plus saber. There are scores of forms, hundreds of strikes, at least a dozen stepping methods, eleventy billion postures to stand or turn in, and who knows how many ways to put them together. Sometimes that overwhelms me, and then I just start doing something. Almost always, I get into something that I really want to train, and things go great. It doesn't have to be organized every time you set out to train, and with so many things to choose from, sometimes it just comes down to choosing something and going with it.

3. When it Works, Capitalize On It
Some days, I feel like hot potatoes with my sweeping strikes, for instance. On those days, I work the crap out of sweeping strikes, and I tend to get a lot of benefit from it. Also on those days, I sometimes decide to work on something else that I'm not feeling so great at, and I've noticed that I don't get as much from it. Then, when I'm smart, I go back to sweeping strikes, or whatever it is that I'm rocking out, and crank it. Yin Style Baguazhang has a lot of things that need getting good at, and those things have to be developed one at a time. Working on things that are working for you is a great way to develop a lot in a short time, capitalizing on your gains for future gains. It's like compound interest of training.

4. When It Doesn't Work, Make it Work
I don't know how many times I've sat there and thought about it for a while, and then, with a look of disgust on my face, decided "I suck at such-and-such." I used to get discouraged by that. Now, I see it as an opportunity. "I suck at cutting strikes, so I'm going to go do cutting strikes until I don't suck at them," I might tell myself. Then I go do a lot of cutting strikes, looking for why I suck at them and trying to make them better. Eventually, usually over the course of drilling them like that for days, I don't feel like they suck any more and I start to like them instead of feeling discouraged. Then, I can go back to Tip #3 and make some serious progress.

5. If You Like It, Then You Should Get Good At It
Most of us are into Yin Style because we like it, right? That means there's something in Yin Style Bagua that we enjoy, and if we enjoy something, then we should do it a lot (that's what enjoying something means). When we do it a lot, we should be getting good at it. So, if you like something particular, like in Tip #3, do it a lot, get good at it, and capitalize on your interests and fancies. You don't have to train things that you hate all of the time. Eventually, we're each supposed to start making Yin Style personalized to ourselves, which means focusing upon and using mostly the things we like and the things we're good at. It's best if those things are the same things.

6. If You Hate It, Train It More
See Tip #4 for this... really, it works.

7. Concentrate Your Training
For me, it's been much more effective to spend most of my training time over several days or even weeks working the same form or strikes a lot of times. It seems like that would be dry and rote, but it's kind of the opposite. It really helps make the techniques improve which makes them likable which makes a feedback loop on training because it puts you back into the realms of Tips #3 and #5. It also seems to speed development more than choosing lots of different things and trying to work all of them. That latter method just feels too scattered.

8. Be Details-Oriented
The devil's in the details, particularly here. Pay attention to the details of the requirements of the things you practice, going over the checklist and trying to kinesthetically feel them for yourself. If you don't feel them, then they're probably not there or lacking. Look for proper form, execution, and economy of the movements, and you'll be on the right track. Ask yourself if it feels right: e.g. "does this form really feel like it's windmill?" or "this strike comes from the Lion System... my force should be heavy and full... would I describe it that way?"

9. Be Purpose-Oriented
Why are you doing the things you're doing? To get good? What does that mean? Looking back at Tip #8, you should be constantly asking yourself why you're doing what you're doing. Every part of every movement should be economical, efficient, and make sense in terms of use and application. You cannot get good by trying to get good; you can only get good by trying to develop your training to the point where it achieves specific goals that you are aware of: get stronger, more rooted, balanced, more powerful, develop a heavy and full force, be cold, crisp, and fast, etc. If your purpose is "to get good like Matt and JB," you'll never get there because their purpose was to develop each technique according to the rules with an active, alive, refined execution.

10. Watch Yourself
Pictures or (better) videos of yourself training are really valuable. You'll see that in a lot of ways you're lacking more than you think. Some folks post their training in private or public venues on YouTube or other such places. You don't have to. Just check yourself out and see what needs to be seen. No technology? No problem: try a mirror.

11. Train Themes
This is a training method I feel I've had a lot of success with: training material that's related by a theme. Maybe I'm into cutting strikes. I stand strengthening in cutting, do some turning in cutting (it feels different if you've never done it), do oodles of cutting strikes, and try to learn and practice several or all of the cutting forms from the videos. I might spend a few weeks or a month just on cutting strikes, and at the end of it, I have a new and real appreciation for cutting strikes. It really works. Maybe instead your theme is an attacking method, i.e. a particular kind of form. Fine... you're into Lifting and Holding? Do as many Lifting and Holding forms as you can. Try out different palms within an animal system, or, if you have the videos and a little background, try out some of the Lifting and Holding forms of a different system. It's adventurous and teaches a theme, and afterwards, you'll have a better grasp of the idea of Lifting and Holding, its use, its applications, and even, in this case, some small insight into the Dragon System. Cool.

12. Make a Routine and Do It
Write down what you want to train in a day and then go out and train it. You can get a really well-organized training session that way and develop a lot. Just be warned: writing down training ideas is far easier than executing them! Example: "Today's goal: 1000 tracing the saber in each hand." That was easy. Now go do it. Yeah right.

13. Mini-Intensive
Get your crew together occasionally for a mini-intensive. Plan it out ahead of time and make it long and hard, similar to a normal intensive or workshop day. Start early on a weekend, say at 8 am, and train until lunch. Come back after lunch and bust it until dinner. Try to cover all four pillars and make it as much like a day pulled from an intensive or workshop as you can manage.

14. Four-Pillar Days
Sometimes you should concentrate your training on just striking or just forms or just something. Sometimes it's great to try to hit all four pillars in a day and feel like you've really accomplished something.

15. Be Complementary
Yin Style Baguazhang is a complete martial art, so nothing extra is needed to develop. Still, in the words of The Man, "how could more strength be bad?" Add in complementary exercises to your routine. I, for instance, noticed that my shoulders were a particular sticking point for me in terms of dadao development, so I would do drills with the dadao and then lift medium-weight dumbbells in routines that benefit my shoulders. Then I'd pick the dadao back up and go again. Some movements and drills can even be replicated in slow motion using weights or semi-isometric contraction. Another particularly beneficial exercise I've incorporated is to hold dumbbells at shoulder height and do slow squats, starting off with holding a low horse stance and then holding it again every fifth or tenth (depending on the weight) repetition to increase leg strength. I've also incorporated jumping jacks and short sprints between sets of strikes to increase my aerobic capacity slightly. As long as the complements don't take away from the primary, these things can only help your training.

16. Turn a Lot
You knew it was coming. Turning is the cornerstone practice of Baguazhang, and it is in some sense the most simple and yet most profound exercise in the art. Training turning seems to benefit every aspect of development, and it should take years of hard practice with it to get really good (meaning you and I both need to turn more!).

Hopefully these tips are of some use. If you have some to add, please leave a comment. As I think of more, I'll make another post of this sort in the future.

Mayhem

Following the clever titling protocol of a friend from high school (note what month it is!), I'm engaging in (continued) Mayhem in my training. I'm also, apparently, cool all of a sudden, my saber having earned me a little notoriety and neighborhood celebrity. The neighborhood kids (actually in my mom's neighborhood, where some of my working out has been going on a -- while my brother was in town, and b -- while they're putting a new roof on our house) are all duly impressed with the guy down the street with the "giant pirate sword." Sigh. I suppose, though, it's better than the guy down the street that keeps banging his giant pirate sword into the ground, because, happily, I'm not doing that!!!

Mayhem, which started a couple of weeks ago, is rocking my socks, though. My hands ache in one way or another constantly. One of the requirements is that I do at least an hour with my saber every day, although I'm reasonable enough to let myself rest at least once a week if I feel like I really need it. I'm also drilling standing and striking, poking my nose at some forms (with recommendations both for them and against them -- hedging my bets a little and trying to learn something at the same time), and learning some of the Phoenix stuff that I heard I should take a look-see at. It turns out that the Phoenix posture hurts.

On the side, after/between my drilling, throw in some calisthenics, yard work, and some serious visualization, contemplation, and meditation, and you pretty much get an idea of what this month is going to be like for me. It's fun and awful at the same time, and I'm totally blessed for the opportunity (and taking it). Hopefully, it's making me better too.

So, mayhem, anyone?

Dogwood Winter

My tribute continues with harder workouts involving more resistance: I got a saber, like a real one, finally, at long last, with many thanks due in probably a dozen directions. I'm also incorporating a lot of body-weight resistance type exercises and general strength builders, in addition to the usual. This is partly due to my high desire to develop a lot more physical strength at the moment and partly due to the fact that we're having (another) Dogwood Winter right now. The weather here in the spring is pretty variable with lots of rain and temperature variations, and at the moment, it's finally starting to warm up from the last blast of sub-40 temperatures. It's also clear for the first day in a few, yesterday spitting snow on and off all day and the day before cold rain and sleet. Today looks better, but at the moment, I'm trapped in the office (with no immediate assignment).

Feeling rather creative and not wanting to waste the hour that I'm stuck here (waiting on a student), I decided to do some more of those body-weight exercises including plenty of squats and pushups... but nothing too "weird" in the office. Then, I was struck by an interesting/clever notion. I took a box filled with books and slid it to the middle of the floor, picked it up (it weighs around 60 pounds), turned around, carried it across the small room, and put it on top of the filing cabinet, which is about at shoulder height. Then I stepped back, went back to the box, and proceeded to put it back in the floor. After standing back up, I repeated the exercise a few dozen times. I don't know if it was a great one or not, particularly since I didn't work up a mighty sweat (which suited me just fine here in the office), but it was different and interesting and hopefully building some kind of functional strength, as opposed to just doing repetitions of routine calisthenics.

Hopefully the weather will persist today so that when I get home I can go spend time with my saber (and other drills, outside) again. My hands are mightily sore, though, since I've hardly put it down since I got it. I don't know if that means that I should ease up or not, but I'll push myself a little more first to find out.

Becoming the Rooster?

While I was practicing my lying step drills for a while today, someone came up and started watching me. After a bit, the woman said: "You look like a rooster." I took this, immediately, as a compliment on my technique and was excited to have heard it. Then it sank in how ridiculous that comment would be to someone who had no idea about Yin Style Bagua, and so I stopped what I was doing to ask her if she had meant her words the way I had taken them. Immediately, she clarified the situation by saying, "I wasn't saying it to be mean. I grew up on a farm, and that looks a lot like how roosters move." I was excited, to say the least. After all of these months of hard work on those techniques, someone accused me of looking like a rooster.

Other news in training has been, again, that it's not my dissertation, so it's been limited. What there has been has been focused almost entirely on the Lion hooking strikes for the week, doing various drills with them, some of which I thought were rather inspired though surely basic. This week is to follow up on last week's rather weak attempt at working the chopping strikes. The main thing I got out of last week's lesson was that it's a shame I didn't have more time to put into the chopping strikes because I think they're probably really effective. I'll address that later with my new-and-improved training regimen, to begin (and to be explained) once life gets back to "normal."

Worldwide Readership and No Time to Post

I've been meaning and wanting to post for a while, but finishing (please, please let it be true) a Ph.D. sucks sometimes. My teaching (read: grading) load has been abnormally intense lately too, so it comes down, frequently enough, to get in 30-60 minutes of training or type on here for a few minutes. I think it's fairly obvious which I've been choosing and why. I wish I could include a sweet example of the kind of crap I spend my days doing, but it's apparently a bad idea to publicly display any of one's thesis before it's done. Besides, I'm not sure how to load up the sweet math text into this thing anyway without pulling some screen-shot business. I'm digressing.

My newest bit of research into the art has been going well and is very interesting, at least to me. The thing is, I don't know if it's a good idea to be doing or not, but as I seem to be deriving benefit from it and am keeping it in its proper context, I don't think it will do any harm. I've been studying the forms, actually just two of them in-depth, and running through them while turning for nearly my entire practice time (30-60 minutes, usually) other than a few minutes at the beginning when I do a little static posturing. I also, of course, have a background-noise level of studying the basic strikes, popping out a few and trying to use what little mind I have while I do them, maybe for a minute or two here or there while someone else needs to use this box, preventing me from typing for a bit. In any case, I'm digressing again, which is what makes my writing so much fun to read.

After I do the form, with power, a few times, I'm investigating the techniques in it, including many of the transition techniques, sometimes on more than one level (different stages in the transition) by freezing and holding them in isometric tension as a static posture. I force myself to connect with the ground in a stable manner and feel all of the places I'm supposed to be applying force along with trying to recreate the sensation of an opponent being there to receive and be affected by that force. I then hold the position for 3-5 breaths and move on, slowly. Each time something significant happens, I try to hold that position and feel it and increase my strength and awareness of my strength in those positions.

For example, in Lifting and Holding from the Sweeping Palm, the first technique is the opener, so I hold that with strength, trying to imagine clearly that particular use of what is, in essence, an opening sweeping/rising sweeping strike. The "second" technique doesn't occur, though, until a bunch of things happen in transition. First, the opening hand changes, pushing forward and threatening while lifting the opponent's arm. I pause there and try to feel all of that clearly. Then the foot opens and the other arm comes in, lifting with the elbow. I pause there too. Then I execute the remainder of the transition into the "second" technique, sometimes pausing yet again at the point where I could conceive of my leg making contact or my hand/forearm of the top arm reaching the opponent's face, neck, or shoulders. Wherever I pause, I spend time and effort to apply the appropriate strengths and to imagine feeling and visualizing the effects.

Remarkably, I think it's helping develop my usage and development of power in the forms, particularly in that it seems to be really enhancing my ability to find out what I'm not doing well enough or fully enough and refine it. Usually I'll repeat the slow business once or twice to each side before going back to practicing the form in its usual, much more mobile design, trying to keep attention on all that I had put attention on by being slow and deliberate.

So, now I feel better that I've said something on here again. Now I can go back, I guess, to typing up things I don't really like typing up so that eventually I don't have to type it up at all any more and can turn my nose back to training much more seriously!