Structured time makes better training

After years in the education field and in having dealt with organizing and running both lessons and workouts, I am completely convinced at this point that the place your workout or training session should begin is at a desk or table with pen and paper. Your goal is pretty simple: to transform the time you plan to spend working out into structured time, which is far more valuable than other kinds of time when it comes to getting things done.

The concept behind structuring your time is very simple: take a few minutes each day or week to outline your training sessions and workouts. Typically, you'll want to be very specific and attempt to be reasonable, setting your workout at a level which should push you and cause development and yet that is attainable. Then, when it is time to do your workout, do your best to follow what you've put down. What you're likely to find is that by planning not just the activities of your workout, but also by planning how you intend to spend your time doing that workout, you're vastly increasing the likelihood that you will use your time effectively and push yourself adequately. This concept is even more important, by the way, if planning training sessions for group training or for others.

The first key to creating properly structured time is to evaluate how long you have to work out, and then to try to go so far as to even schedule your workout. A line like the following should almost definitely be in a daily plan or planner because it helps you organize the rest of your time in the day and increases the likelihood that you'll do your workout and that you'll train for long enough.

Workout and training: 6:00-7:30

Once you have an overview, you want to structure that time well, creating a plan that is both realistic and challenging. For the sake of argument, let's assume for a moment that your general thoughts are that you want to work on the chopping palm requirements and techniques in the Lion System. Here's an example of how you might structure a structured workout:

• 6:00-6:15, standing strengthening in Lion representational and chopping palm posture
• 6:20-6:50, basic strikes of the chopping palm (~8 min. each)
• 6:55-7:15, combinations of basic strikes from the chopping palm (6-7 min ea. on these specific two)
• 7:20-7:30, drill Moving with the Force, Chopping, from the Lion System.

You could go further, detailing within each bullet how you want to break up that time, including scheduled breaks (which you'll notice are partly included in the above schedule) and even include ways to use that rest time actively with other low-impact, low-difficulty exercises tucked in them for added conditioning. While you don't necessarily want to plan every second with tremendous detail because it would be too hard to follow, being very clear about what you want to do and how you want to do it can make a huge difference in your training.

In a way that relates to the theory of Taoism and the bagua, then you might also consider structuring your time on bigger scales as well. This activity can add a lot to your training and to your ability to achieve the goals you set for yourself and should probably be done at regular intervals. For instance, you might have development goals that you hope to achieve over the next six months. Here, let's consider the example of improving significantly in your understanding of the seven strategies of the Lion System. You might make a six-month training schedule structured like this:

• January 2011: Moving with the force and turning the back, study and drill one or two forms of each kind (be specific!) as a primary focus in forms drilling practice;
• February 2011: Turning the back and holding and lifting, study and drill one or two forms of each kind (be specific!) as the primary focus in forms drilling practice, include review of moving with the force occasionally;
• March 2011: Holding and lifting and windmill, same, reviewing previous;
• April 2011: Windmill and lying step, same, reviewing previous;
• May 2011: Lying step and reversing the body, same, reviewing previous;
• June 2011: Reversing the body and enfolding, same, reviewing previous.

Then, at the beginning of each month, you might make specific notes about what you'd like to focus on each week, eventually working out how you'd like to do your drilling each day.

Speaking of weekly organization, it tends to be highly successful to get into a regular, structured habit for training over the course of the week that might read something like this:

• Mondays -- Focus primarily on turning practice and drill forms as a secondary;
• Tuesdays -- Focus primarily on strike drilling, both basics and single-action/combos from Monday's forms, stand or turn as a secondary and add in some conditioning;
• Wednesdays -- Focus on turning practice and standing strengthening, drill forms as a secondary;
• Thursdays -- Make conditioning a primary, drill strikes as a secondary and turn;
• Fridays -- Focus on turning and standing strengthening;
• Saturdays -- Drill forms and turn, do conditioning;
• Sundays -- Stand strengthening and rest

This, of course, is an example, but you'll find some major success if you try to make a regular schedule like this that fits your training goals and interests. If you happen to enjoy conditioning work or decide that it's needed majorly in your training regimen, for example, then you might choose three or four days a week to focus on conditioning for a while and specify how you're going to do it each day. Every Tuesday, for instance, might be hill-sprints day. The training you do in addition to that is up to you, but every Tuesday, you're still going to sprint up hills for conditioning.

Structuring your time can add a lot to your workouts as well as to your workout program overall, allowing you to achieve developmental goals by breaking them into scheduled parts that you can be sure cover all of your bases. It also allows you the ability to create something that you can stick with and make more a routine part of your life. You need not schedule something for every single day (though you might want to subscribe to the "Never Zero" policy of training that I believe in), but you do want to be structured in your use of time to keep yourself on-task and moving forward.

There's a lot of truth in the statement that structured time is useful time, and in my experience, it tends to be of critical importance for successful training.