Because of my desire to improve that aspect of my Yin Style Bagua training and the resultant new year's resolution to turn more, I've been on the circle this week far more than what has (shamefully) been average in the last while. That, of course, has me thinking about turning more, and, for the purposes of this blog, that has me thinking about the challenges related to turning. Of course, these lessons are far more broadly applicable than this particular useful, if esoteric, practice.
Turning (or other long-term, grinding practices in martial arts or otherwise) is physically demanding if done correctly. In fact, it's downright hard: miserable even, at times. It's also, relatively speaking, quite time consuming compared with apparent benefit, say in comparison with something like HIIT, especially the monstrous Tabata protocol. That means that mental discipline is a huge part of the requirement of doing these kinds of practices well. For internal stylists not floating around in the land of woo, that's a huge part of the "internal" part of internal style.
Turning, in particular, and perhaps uniquely, requires and thus cultivates a certain mental toughness. The practice is superficially dull, on its own requiring very little mental attention to do at a functional level, but profound and deceptively complex so that it, in fact, requires a tremendous amount of mental focus to do well (and thereby maximize development per minute trained while minimizing potential injury). Additionally, being that it is distractingly painful, maintaining the discipline to continue, particularly to continue well, quickly becomes difficult even when fully engaged. For me, then, I have to believe that a successful turning practice is far more than half mentally demanding, despite its overwhelming physical difficulty.
I do well for about fifteen minutes. For that span, I can keep my interest actively up without too much effort on my part. I can pay attention to meeting and improving the requirements in hands, eyes, body, waist, and stepping; I can keep my posture and position good or in constant repair, my eyes focused on the right places, my chest concave and body properly tensed and relaxed per the requirements, my waist engaged and driving the motion, my footwork steady and improving (I have a hard time with the footwork, in addition to the concave chest requirements, so those are my big struggle with turning). After that, my mind starts to wander. I think about other aspects of training that I could be doing, exercises I'll do later, various ideas that pop into my head... and as I do, my focus wanes, my posture becomes less secure, my eyes dart around, my footwork becomes more lazy, and sometimes my waist even disengages. From that point on, whenever it happens, the rest of the turning session is a wrestling match between my mind and my will with my body tossed about like a ship on stormy seas, attempting to follow the requirements and then forgetting them.
This process is intensified severely when uncomfortable (or in pain!), which is inevitable. These postures are highly physically demanding, and meeting the various requirements becomes increasingly challenging as the practice lengthens. When something starts to hurt, say my hips from the strict stepping requirement in that rather-tight circle, the focus comes out of some other requirement, particularly keeping the footwork precise and the chest concave (for me), causing the practice to suffer. The small details that hurt most, which are failing on their own and thus increasingly difficult to meet, get all of the attention while the others start to go to crap (instead of dumping attention into what can still be done highly accurately).
This phenomenon is, no doubt, not unique to turning practice. Within baguazhang alone (Yin Style, at least), there is the same phenomenon going on in other ways in the other pillars of training--long striking or forms sessions, standing strengthening postures, engaging in sometimes-gruelling applications sessions. It is also not unique to baguazhang, though I might argue that it finds a certain type of pinnacle here since baguazhang may be unique among martial arts for having a practice so dedicated simultaneously to obtaining physical development in a long-term, continuous fashion while staying firmly connected to pragmatic fighting skills. Certainly other arts will experience a similar challenge in protracted sessions of practicing basic drills, forms, or sparring sessions. Even distance-covering athletes (and others) separate from the martial arts will run into the same kind of mental discipline difficulties that threaten to undermine their development.
Training the mind to eat the bitter and endure the physical aspects of training while maintaining focus is critical to obtaining development. Baguazhang, it seems, is designed with this particular goal firmly fixed at the roots of a seamless training methodology designed upon the goal of creating formidable fighting skill, and I think that, inter alia, makes for one of the reasons it is such a respectable martial art.
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