Volume ladder training protocol for massive development

There is a particular key to training a martial art well, and that key is repetition. In Yin Style Baguazhang, things are no different, and as every practitioner knows, massive repetitions of the basic drills and exercises are expected and required to move forward. Of course, these repetitions cannot be performed blindly if development is desired; there must a be a constant endeavor to improve coupled with smart training techniques and constant refinement. Still, doing huge numbers of repetitions is a daunting task that can begin to feel like grinding, possibly leading to burnout, stagnant training, or frustration. A bodybuilding protocol called the "volume ladder" can be implemented, however, to help with this situation.

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 and eating -- calorie intake and overtraining

So... Beast Mode is catching up with me, apparently. I haven't lost the mental fire and have kept pushing myself to do the workouts at my fullest capacity, but honestly, over the last several days, the physical gusto has just kind of been dwindling. This happened one day last week too. I noticed it particularly during last night's conditioning workout (details below) and in essentially everything I did with my training today. My body just feels tired and heavy, and the will to keep going is twice as hard as usual to maintain. I would figure that this is a symptom of overtraining, but I don't have any of the other primary symptoms of that issue right now (elevated heart rate upon waking, poor sleep, etc.). The problem is, I believe, undereating.

Beast Mode -- Heavy metal workout and line-stepping drills into infinity

Beast Mode continues! Much of the workout stuff is the same as the last several Beast Mode posts -- lots of turning and standing, then lots of striking and forms drilling, and then hard-ass conditioning workouts, pretty much every day. It's fun. Our group training session from this past Monday is worth noting, and I'll take this post to finally get around to describing my heavy metal (a.k.a. heavy weapons) conditioning workout that I toss in there every third day or so, usually before or after some hard-labor-style yard work involving a shovel and moving a lot of earth, mulch, and other yard rot (compost pile).

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.

Can't go to Beijing for the intensive? Ramp it up at home!

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!

Working, working out, and training -- Exercises aren't created equally

Since it seems that I've had a bajillion things to do around the yard this summer, mostly involving a fair amount of physical labor, I've had some time to reflect upon how working, meaning hard, physical labor, working out, as in the gym, and training are similar and yet different. As it is easy to get caught up in substituting labor or a workout for training, particularly since both make you feel like you've accomplished something physical and eat into your training time and energy, I thought it might be worth putting something down about some of the differences, at least in my understanding.

An hour a day... Turning training tips for beginners: Getting your time up

Turning practice is difficult, and to follow Yin Style Baguazhang's demanding schedule for maximum development, it is a goal of all serious Yin Style practitioners to turn for an hour a day on every day that their schedule permits (particularly if there's a seminar or intensive coming up!). If you've ever turned, particularly the way we turn in Yin Style, then you know that an hour is a long time to turn.

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!

Accessories Workout, With Pictures!

I figure it's about time I start putting some pictures on here. So... I did a workout today and took some of the process. Since I didn't have a photographer and didn't want to goof around with the timer and all of that, they're all from my perspective. That makes them probably quite a bit different from what you're used to seeing... awesome. I'm definitely the "different" sort of guy. The only pictures I took were of some of my saber stuff and some accessories, although my workout integrated those kinds of things with yard work and empty-hand drills -- standing, some turning, and striking drills. All-told, I went at it for about two hours before I decided I was too excited about putting up some pictures and too thirsty to continue.

Here are the tools of my trade today: saber (freshly polished), twenty pound dumbbell (for accessory exercising), and Heavy Gripper 200 lb (also for accessory exercising). They made for quite the little workout.



After the photo opportunity, I launched into some standing and striking and then picked up my saber for some harder work. The goal was to turn in the Green Dragon Shoots to the Sea posture for fifty revolutions in each direction, however many times I had to go in each directly to accomplish that goal. This picture is a perspective shot of me in the posture. Notice that the saber tip is at eyebrow height.

I followed that exercise up, which was hard, with tracing the saber to the count of fifty in each hand and then dumbbell shoulder presses (two sets of twelve) to further tax the muscles that hold the saber up, although my hands were way more taxed by the posture than my shoulders were. Here's a perspective shot of the "closed" position with one of my lovely maple trees in the background.


After the dumbbell, I did a set of ten with the gripper. Actually, I did a set of ten with it after each of my three turning exercises with the saber. It's really hard to close. Two hundred pounds is a lot of required force. Then again, four people in London told me that they believe that I have, in the words of the Iced-JohannesBerg himself, "the bone-crushing strength in my hands." I only use these things about once a week and only after crazy saber and crazy ox-tongue palm workouts, which I think do more for the grip anyway (unless I do seizing and grasping postures... I'll do grippers after those too... whew, burner).


After doing some yard work and some more empty-hand drills and another round of standing Lion (I'll have to take a perspective shot of that sometime... I can't believe I didn't think of it), I decided I should turn with the saber in Lion posture. Good thinking. That was hard. It took four sets, but I went thirty times in each direction. Can someone say shoulders? I almost couldn't by the time I was done.


Since the Lion section of the Nine Dragon Saber form seems to have a lot of chopping in it, I think more than any section except the Rooster one, I decided to do hook-chop after that: twice in each hand so that I ended up with 30 total on each side (18, 12 for the breakdown). That was kind of hard. Here's a perspective shot of that, which was hard to take because I posed for it after the sets. I followed that up with lateral and front shoulder raises with the dumbbell (ten each in each hand) and then the gripper again and then more empty-hand striking drills of the zig-zag stepping variety.

Okay, so what would I do after that? A short turn in the Lion posture, of course, and then... good times of all good times:
You're damn right you know what that is. Turning in the Qilin (Unicorn) posture. That sucked bad at that point, and so I only went twenty times around in the right and fifteen in the left (my left wrist still isn't 100%). That took four sets to get to. I've really got to turn more with that thing, seriously. I don't even think that I'm twisting my arm under far enough since looking at the picture indicates to me that the blade isn't pointing straight up. Damn, yo. The followup to this monster is the most Qilin/Unicorn feeling of the basic saber drills that I could think of: arcing. I can do a bunch of those, so I did fifty on each side in one go. Then I picked up the dumbbell and did curls and then forearm curls (one set of twelve of each) and threw that thing on the ground because my forearms felt like they were going to pop. In response, I did another set with the gripper and tried not to cry.

Afterwards, I busted out some more striking drills, working striking combinations from the Lion System basics and did a little more yard work before deciding to hang it up for the day and get to other things. I'll probably do a bit more in a little bit now that I've had plenty to drink and a little to eat, and then I'm planning to stretch and do my Taoist energy exercises that I've recommited myself to (for the third time) before bed.

As I went out, my wife saw me, and so I showed her how shiny my newly polished saber is. She snapped a picture of me admiring it. By the time my workout was over, I was as shiny as it... probably shinier. So... that's how I rolled today. What fun!

Stirring the Ashes

I went out to work out this evening. I decided that my wrist could deal... I just wouldn't let my left hand play much. I started out with the saber, as I usually do, and did tracing in my right. It felt nice but like I haven't done it much lately (I haven't). Then I decided to test my left hand (having no sense or indomitable spirit or some such) and did fifteen repetitions of the exercise. That compares very favorably with yesterday's zero. It still hurt a little, but a little is not a lot. Then I did some chopping drills with my right hand, some turning with my right hand, some standing with my right hand, and then took my saber for a walk down my really long driveway to get the mail, which earned me some awesome stares from people driving by. I came back from the mailbox and did a couple of sections of the form several times and decided that I was really forcing the workout: I really just didn't want to do it. The momentum of half-assed workouts that have been mostly all I've done since getting back from London had killed my spirit. I put my saber away, kind of disheartened, and then I forced myself to go back out and work on strikes.

I got outside and started doing some striking drills: standing in place method -- not interested; box stepping -- not interested; zig-zag stepping -- not interested; standing in place method again -- not interested; think of applications and work on homemade combinations drills with those -- not interested! I almost gave up at that point and then, for some reason, I started doing the zig-zag stepping method again, only striking with my right as I went (and stepping through and "parrying/redirecting" with my left on the interim steps) -- very interesting. I did a ton of those, right hand one way down the driveway, left hand on the way back. I varied it across several strikes that I feel have things in common but interesting differences, and almost a half an hour later, I felt like I'd really stirred the ashes. It fired me back up.

Habits only take a few days of ignoring to break, so if you want to train well, I think that means you have to be consistent.

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?

Buffening Up

Word on the streets is that my peeps are worried about if I'm getting stronger yet. Those peeps should rest assured that I'm working on it, day by day, and hopefully will have something to show for it despite the hee-hawing I could do about having a dissertation to write, correct, rewrite, correct, and rewrite a few more times in the intervening months and some kind of apparently serious lower-back injury that I'm only now getting somewhat out-of-the-woods on... being very tight and stiff on one side but not the other now with far less of the overwhelmingly painful and frustrating "stuck" feeling I've lived with since last summer. Today was no exception for buffening up.

This morning, after only a super-mini breakfastish snack, I hit about an hour and twenty of calisthenics and basic saber drills, followed by what sections of the form I know, along with my new favorite way to burn myself up that isn't the saber. This afternoon, I'm planning more saber drills, more saber form, some saber turning, and some zig-zag step strikes, probably with some more of my awesome strengthening drills and standing. If I can still stand after all of that, then I'll turn. If not, I'll probably get some of that in this evening. My puny weights were yesterday, so I don't expect they'll make it into today's routine.

So... this new exercise thing was kind of motivated by a few factors: 1) daoyin exercises; 2) weightlifting; 3) the overwhelming feeling of pointlessness that consumes me while I'm weightlifting, causing me to hate it not because it's hard but because it's lame; 4) little-to-no weight equipment here and a general disdain for the gym, and 5) standing postures. I'm doing weightlifting-like exercises with "extreme isometric tension" instead of actual weights. I haven't yet found a weightlifting maneuver that I can't do this way, though I'm not sure it's quite as hard as lifting a massive piece of steel, but I've also found about 100,000 exercises that I can't figure out how to do with weights that I can do this way. Isometric, by the way, isn't the correct term because there is moving in the joints. It's more like performing the exercises in super-slow motion with overwhelming internal resistance to them. Notably, I can do static strikes this way, which I'm nicknaming "mud striking" because it feels like dragging my arms through mud when I do them. Doing even ten to each side is really tough, and if at any point during the movement, there's a loss of "connection" within the body, it's immediately apparent because the strike starts to feel empty (like the mud suddenly disappeared). Mixing sets of that in with sets of strikes done normally seems to work both aspects of powerful, effective striking: strength and proper mechanics, and doing them so slowly and mindfully allows me to experiment nicely with putting my thought on various aspects of the strike or its goals.

Wicked. I'm about to go get at it again now, so for those about to rock... I salute you (with a badass workout).

Thinking It Through

Since my main partner in crime has been half a world away, I've had to turn off my "testing it out" engine almost completely and sink into total visualization to achieve my applications designs. This isn't too far from normal, really, since we really put a strong emphasis on visualizing what we're doing and how to make it work, including, when we really try, a subtle tactile understanding even though we're not making contact. It's been fun, and today, though not with Bradley, I got to give some of these things a go. I was pleasantly surprised again.

These techniques that today I was able to test/feel out for the first time on another person were surprisingly effective... much better than a lot of the half-forced drivel that I normally have to pass off as applications work. Things were smooth and effortless with a definite "one-two-three" feel to their balance going out from under them. The coordination was almost immediate on my part too. I was most happy to see it bouncing a 220-pound willing subject around a little with nearly the same, small amount of effort as it worked on the 115-pound other willing subject. The feedback that gave me made it more clear in which situations to apply those kinds of techniques as well as, in one case, the proper kind of stepping to use with it, and now I feel confident about drilling those moves ad nauseum, whereas before I wasn't entirely so sure.

For those of you that can do it, let me urge an active imagination. It serves as a brilliant proxy when a partner isn't around, and it's probably entirely necessary even when one is. In fact, it almost feels as if the partner is more of a "check" than a required part of the equation.

As for my tribute... it still continues, even though the intensive is winding down. Now it's a quest to get mighty as well as competent. Part of that involved taking a conditioning class last night, which was a pretty decent workout, though some of the exercises seemed to aggravate my hips. Once they're feeling better (hopefully in a matter of hours), I have a feeling that the saber and I are going to go have a few more rounds, even though I've got a pretty decent bruise on my right hand now (probably from the saber).

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.

Integration

A number of things are going on. I have trigger point work steadily improving the dilapidated state of my low back to the point where I feel *mostly* normal again. I'm still leaning forward somewhat, but sooner or later, I'll get that released. My (outer) body is feeling more integrated.

I found a book on my shelf on "Internal Exercises" that looks totally crappy because it has no artwork and is mustard yellow, and I've been reading it. It's really freaking cool. The exercises I've been up to with it for the last few days seem to have made me feel generally better, are helping my back along more quickly, and seem to be improving my myopic eyesight. My inner body is feeling more integrated.

I'm doing a fairly powerful intestinal cleanse. I feel lighter. That's all I want to say about that.

I figured out a great way to "integrate" the saber into training as well as into life. First of all, when I make my "rounds" in the yard (checking on the various plants we're cultivating), I carry my proxy saber around with me until my arm burns so bad I want to drop it. Then I switch arms. However long my little yard adventures last, that carrying around does as well. That's day-to-day activities. Secondly, I just did a fantastic workout where I alternated between saber drills and empty-hand drills. I'd do some standing or striking or forms work without the saber, and then I'd pick up the saber and do a basic drill or turn or go through the three sections of the form that I know. Back and forth, back and forth, one or two drills each time. It was pretty nice and kept me busy for roughly 90 minutes straight. If I sucked wind in between, instead of standing there and waiting, I walked around my driveway (which is a little loop) at a brisk pace, in a low stance when my breathing wasn't terrible and in a relaxed manner when I was huffing and puffing (some of those low-stance saber drills wipe me out still). The only thing I didn't "integrate" was turning. I'll do that in a little while.

So this is the beginning of my humble tribute to my friends suffering and improving in Beijing, since I couldn't go with. They should be sleeping now, but I'm sure they're dreaming about the warm spring sun I was just soaking in while I sweat, keeping them in mind.

Saber Circuit

Even though we don't have *real* sabers yet, we've embarked on doing a circuit-training routine with our proxies, and it is kicking my butt. It only has seven exercises on it: most of the basic drills we covered last fall in Vermont, and the idea is to get through the whole routine three times and reduce the overall time spent while maintaining/increasing quality. Today was the second time we did it, and it wrecked us again (last time it ripped a bunch of skin off my hand, so I had to put it up for a while).

Basically, the first time through the routine, it took us about 12-13 minutes to complete all of the exercises, resting as little as possible between them. We essentially failed on the third time through, with 43 minutes on the clock, but we weren't done with all of the exercises yet (last time we only made it through twice, and only kind of on the second go). The lack of rest is a killer. Even now (about an hour later), typing this is brutal on my exhausted hands.

The goal, which seems reasonable enough, is to get through the routine three times in under forty(-five?) minutes without compromising quality. At that point, we'll be qualified to up our training to "Level 2," which is the same routine with more repetitions of each exercises. There's a "Level 3" also, which will be worse (more repetitions again and a reorganization of the drills to be in a more demanding order). It's going to take a while to get to that point, particularly at the two-days-a-week training pace on the circuit.

According to my sheet, I'm not done because I didn't turn yet today. I'd better get on that.