A question about lower spine alignment in internal martial arts and life

A reader, Tom, commented recently on my post about training standing strengthening postures (a post I could probably add to at this point--maybe a future topic if I get around to it). Tom writes,

I'm running into some lower back issues with the flattening of the lumbar spine that occurs with the admonition to tuck (the coccyx). Lumbar discs, particularly at L5-S1, are compressed and held under compression for extended periods during YSB standing practice. It's one thing for a tuck to be a momentary phase during dynamic movement (of the spine), but to hold the tuck seems questionable to me.

The short version of my answer to this question is that I think that "tuck" is the wrong word and "drop" is the right one. For the elaborated-upon answer, keep reading.

A note on negative feedback loops in training motivation

I've been in a real trap as far as my training goes lately. I've been keeping up with it, but it's been forced, and it's been weak. There are a variety of reasons this negative feedback loop--and that's exactly what it is--got started, and unravelling it by studying some classic motivation theory seems to have done the trick to get me back on track.

Feeling stuck? Train something you "already know"

Training Yin Style Bagua is hard for a variety of reasons. One reason is the sheer physical demand. Another is the amount of material that demands attention. A third is the intense mental requirement to get the techniques right. Another still is that all of this creates a nice, sticky web that tends to make training get really, really stagnant sometimes and tends to make progress feel incremental at best and invisible at worst. If you're stuck in one of these stagnant phases of training, what can you do? Go back to something you "already know" and haven't trained in a while.

Re: Turning the circle, keeping it real (by me) on Yin Style Bagua -- Knoxville

If you've seen it, great. If you haven't, check out my post on the blog I made for our study group concerning circle turning practice: Yin Style Bagua -- Knoxville: Turning the circle, keeping it real. As the day went on, I thought more about what I wrote, and I have more to say about it. Since I feel that what I have to say about it is more personal than "official," I'm saying it on this blog instead of on the group training blog.

Sam Harris weighs in on self-defense in an excellent article

I almost never do this. In fact, I don't think I've ever done this on this blog before, but this blog post by Sam Harris (of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, all New York Times bestselling books, and being one of the so-called "four horsemen" of the New Atheist movement fame) is about practical self-defense. It is very good, and anyone interested in martial arts or self-defense owes it to himself to read it, as should their family members. Anyone stumbling upon this site looking for something to do with African cats should probably read it too.

Ask Dr. Jimberly: Starting your own Yin Style Baguazhang study group

As promised about ten days ago or so, I would get around to writing a second installment to an "Ask Dr. Jimberly" post, this time addressing the question of how to go about starting a study group for Yin Style Baguazhang in your neck of the woods. Here's the link to the original post, answering "Why the Lion System?" for those that are interested. Of course, these questions are overlapping to some degree, as I indicated in that earlier response. For reference, here is the text of the email that I was answering again:

I started with the lion dvd's several years back as that is what was recommended by ATS, but I am far more interested and physically inclined to the dragon system, so that's been my focus for the last year and a half or so. Also, I am trying to start up a study group in my area - what do I need to do to make such a group recognized by the YSB association at large?

In this post, I'm addressing only the part of this email indicated in italics, as the rest has been dealt with previously.

Ask Dr. Jimberly: Why the Lion System?

Some time ago, I received an email from someone with the following in it:

I started with the lion dvd's several years back as that is what was recommended by ATS, but I am far more interested and physically inclined to the dragon system, so that's been my focus for the last year and a half or so. Also, I am trying to start up a study group in my area - what do I need to do to make such a group recognized by the YSB association at large?

I'll address the second question in this inquiry, about what needs to happen to start a study group, at a later date so as to keep this post as direct and on a single topic as possible. If you're interested in starting a study group in your area and don't have the foggiest idea of what to do, hang on tight for the answer! I'll probably get to it within the week or thereabouts. In the meantime, check out this related post on getting started: A Yin Style Baguazhang Beginner's Guide. Much of the info overlaps.

The reason I'm focusing on the "Why Lion?" question now is that it came up again for me. This week at our study group's weekly get-together, one of the newer members asked me point-blank why we study the Lion System first in Yin Style Baguazhang. I figure this is probably a pretty common question, and so I'll be happy to include the response to the email I got and kind bolster it with what I told our training buddy.

Beast Mode: Burnout and what to do about it

Beast Mode is wearing on me. In fact, over the last week and especially for the last three days, despite doing some decent workouts and training in that time, I definitely cannot call what's going on "Beast Mode" any longer. I hit burnout, which I could have predicted. It's beyond the problem characterized in my last post about not having enough to eat for my training (which I've decided is mostly because of my head injury leading to a wrecked sense of smell and therefore taste leading to almost everything currently tasting really bad, sort of like vomit). This is straight up "I've done enough hard workouts for now" style burnout.

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.

A Yin Style Baguazhang beginner's guide to what you need and what should you do with it

Suppose you're just starting out on your adventure in training Yin Style Baguazhang, or perhaps you've been at it for a while and want to be sure you've covered the bases. There's not a whole lot of stuff out there, as you've probably found, but there are some things. This post is meant to be a little introductory guide to what you need to get, a little commentary on that and other YSB material out there, and a quick note about how much you should train. Since this topic is potentially huge, I'll do what I can to stay brief with it!

Snow day! Train hard!

The other day I posted some training tips for training in cold weather, notably after we trained out in some cold. Today, something relatively rare happened in East Tennessee: it snowed and stuck. I took some advantage of the opportunity to test out some of my tips with a short training session outside (and even got a picture for you, although it's posed, from after some of my training). After going out today in snow and ice, I have a couple of things to add to that previous post.

Training tips for cold weather

After reading "When Cold......", by George on the Beijing Yin Style study group's training blog, I decided to put together some of what I have to say about training in cold weather, which is, obviously, appropriate for the season for many practitioners right now and will be again soon enough for our Southern Hemisphere friends. Definitely check out George's post on Y.S.Behind Enemy Lines when you get a chance, and take his advice to heart since it's solid information. It's also a poignant topic for us right now since the Knoxville study group trained this week outdoors in 25-degree Fahrenheit (-4 Celsius) for a couple of hours while damp snow fell lightly on us.

Setting goals

One of the absolute most important aspects of finding success in any endeavor, particularly long-term endeavors like those presented by training a martial art, is proper goal setting. I've talked about this before (like here and here, for a couple of examples), and I'm going to mention it again because I've put more thought and effort into the project recently than ever before.

Tip to get better at martial arts -- stop thinking you're good and train

I had a bit of an epiphany while I was driving today, hopefully to further my career (rather to start one?) -- the key to getting good at the martial arts is leaving room to get better, and that starts with realizing that you're not good yet, no matter how good you are.

On training Yin Style, to paraphrase Laozi

To paraphrase Laozi, here is a comment on training Yin Style Baguazhang:

No reasons to cut corners

Maybe it's the weather, or maybe it's something about my cultural approach to training that I just can't shake, but at least a couple of times each year, despite things that I might write (and mean and stand behind) in high-press articles, I get all into researching "other" forms of "complementary" exercise. I'm not even sure why, and after doing it the other day and realizing something, it just seems kind of futile.

As far as cross-training goes, it can be a benefit to training in Yin Style Bagua or any martial art. The proper proportions, as indicated by those in-the-know are suggested by the following: Train what you are training for 2 hours for every 20 minutes of cross-training that you do. That way you can keep your focus on your training -- where training implies more than just working out, getting stronger, or getting in shape. Training implies skills-building. The thing is, with a martial art like Yin Style Baguazhang, I'm left strongly with the feeling "why bother" in regards to cross-training exercises when I really think about it.

You see, Yin Style Baguazhang is a very, very complete art that is very, very well thought-out. Not all arts are. The upshot of this completeness and intelligence in design is that YSB has everything in it that is needed for great development. You can add weights, stretching routines, cardio, caveman workouts, or what-have-you to your regimen, but the training is designed so that you don't even have to consider it, a major contrast with many arts.

Here's what got me the other night. I was hunting around on the web, researching wrist strengthening exercises since I and many other folks that talk with me seem to injure their wrists on the rock that is the bagua dadao. I've currently got some tendinitis (in the other wrist this time), and it's pretty common. If you've never hunted around for wrist-strengthening exercises, let me save you some time: not much that goes on in the gym does a whole hell of a lot for wrist strength. You can do forearm curls one way or the other, you can roll up a rope with a weight on it, you can rotate a dumbbell back and forth, and you can hold heavy things, particularly heavy things with thick bars. That's about it.

I was kind of pissed that all I could find about gaining wrist strength was a bunch of crap that I already knew that clearly didn't help with what I was needing help with. Then I thought about it for a minute... the saber's already perfect for this. Then I thought about it more. Do a hard seizing-palm-strengthening posture with one hand and feel the tendons and structure in the wrist with the other. I think we have a winner. Then think about grasping palm posture and all of the ox-tongue palm postures and all of the closed-fist postures. Compared with the silly stuff I was reading on the internet, the case was simply closed. YSB FTW.

So... pick your favorite exercise-related goal... think about it for a while. Yin Style trains that. You want stronger shoulders? stronger legs? stronger back? stronger arms? more endurance? more cardiovascular health? weight loss? (muscular) weight gain? enhanced tendon strength? functional strength and fitness? better grip? improved health? better balance? deeper flexibility? ass-kicking skills? to impress people with a giant-ass sword? Yin Style Baguazhang trains that, probably better than much else that you can find. One word comes to mind: superior.

Should you complement your training to develop certain goals more quickly? Sure, in relative proportions and if you really enjoy those complementary exercises and/or feel like you get a lot out of them. If you want a reason to avoid doing complementary exercises that you don't care for that much (or hate... read: running), then here's your excuse -- you can better use that time training something that Yin Style Bagua already offers and do it even better than you could with your complementary stuff.

New Year's training resolutions 2010

I feel like I should start this off with some classic New Year's resolutions words that seem to spell disaster: "This year's going to be different...." Well, hopefully it is. I've been thinking an awful lot about my training over the past month, not least because of my stupid toe that was making doing much training outside of a seated position (yeah, right) quite difficult if not impossible. I'm back on the horse full-tilt again now, though, and here are some of the things I think make good New Year's training resolutions. As usual, feel fully free to make comments to add some of your own!

Do _______ more consistently (fill in the blank per your needs)
For me, what this one comes down to mostly is standing strengthening and turning. Those two aspects of training either end up being the main component of my training or almost evaporate completely, and those two situations seem to occur cyclically in a-few-months-long intervals. That's not good. Some standing; some turning; every week. I'm not sure that doing some of everything every day is that good of an idea any more. Then again, perhaps I'm just not training enough.

Be more balanced and organized in training
It's really been an easy trap for me to fall into to focus almost all of my training on the saber: when I first got it I was nuts about learning the entire Nine Dragon Saber form and being strong enough to be able to get through it all in one go; later, I went completely ape with some basic drills. Like weights, the saber gives quick, obvious results. The price of falling into that trap has been a decline in the amount of other exercises that I do, many of which were daily staples in the past.

Move more
Maybe I'm just a turd like this, but I tend to notice that doing moving-step striking drills and forms, some things I really should be doing a lot of, kind of get ignored all too often for standing-in-place methods, which are great but a bit limited in terms of developing use and better coordination (both being highly sought training aims). I'm going to try to up the moving-step this year significantly. If you're not brand-spanking-new to the art, you might consider it too, based at least on what JB had to say about it last summer.

Be organized/have a plan for your training
Note that this point applies to any martial artist or even any active person, so if you read this and don't practice Yin Style Bagua, keep this one near the front of your mind. This is perhaps one of my weakest links in developing a solid training regimen. I tend not to be very organized, to my own chagrin, and I'm sure my potential development suffers for it. Usually, my method is that I get up, think about what I might like to do that day or something that I haven't done in a while, and then I just do some of that. Since it's easy to get into ruts, I tend to do those things repetitively for a while and then either get stuck doing them far too much (to the detriment of other training) or end up fizzling out. An organized weekly plan seems like a better approach.

On that note, an organized daily agenda would also make a good addition to my training program -- here are the times that I train, and I stick to those times and train during them. Furthermore, I tend to do very well if I develop curriculum for myself (subject to my recurring downfall -- curriculum is easier to write down than it is to execute). Spending a little time each week or month developing curriculum and then choosing specific daily exercises to do along those lines would greatly benefit me.

Set speficic, measurable, realistic, attainable, short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals (Another note for everyone)
In that same vein, I really need to do better with my goal-setting. First, goals need to be specific, measurable, realistic, and attainable to work. That means:

• Specific - "I want to get in better shape" or "I want to be able to do xxxx technique better" would be very vague goals that are hard to meet. It's important to be specific in goal-setting so you know what you're working toward and when you've met that goal. "I want fluid, solid body movement in xxxx technique" is more specific and easier to attain.
• Measurable - In training Yin Style Bagua, this one is the rub. Measurable is easiest in terms of doing things by the numbers: "Turn for an hour," "Do 1000 of xxxx technique without needing a break," etc. Those kinds of goals aren't really great for internal arts (but are awesome for supplemental training activities). What's needed instead are measurements that are more subtle: getting lower in your stances and maintaining them longer; turning well for an hour; routinely turning well for 10 minutes before needing to change sides, etc. Doing xxxx activity at least ##% of the days this year is also good.
  
• Realistic - Setting a goal like turning for 1000 hours in a year might not be a realistic goal -- even if you have that kind of time, putting in almost 3 hours a day on average might be outside of your body's ability, particularly if you can't turn well for 3 hours in a day yet. Set goals that are realistic if you want to attain them.
• Attainable - "I want to be able to levitate." Cool. I think most people would get excited about developing that skill, but it's probably not attainable. Many people that practice martial arts, internal arts in particular, come up with some ridiculous ideas about what they'll get out of their training. Try to keep your goals in the "pretty clearly attainable" box, and you'll probably have a lot more success.

Goals also come in a variety of time scales. Generally speaking, shorter-term goals are more realistic and attainable, although longer-term goals can be more driving. Since this is an article about 2010 resolutions in training, I'll keep my longest-term goals at around a year.

1. Short-term goals: These are best set in the weekly-to-monthly time scale, depending on the goal. "Short-term" monthly would be in terms of development, and weekly might be in terms of hitting a particular variety of exercises or spending a set amount of time training or working on particular activities or techniques. These should be very attainable, which means there should only be a little bit of a change (in the positive direction) as compared with what you can do now.
2. Medium-term goals: These are best set in the monthly-to-quarterly time scale, again depending on what you're talking about. Learning a particular set or group of exercises or seeking out a noteworthy degree of development in a particular technique or method ("finding the force," for instance) would make for good medium-term goals.
3. Long-term goals: In the context of this article, these would be quarterly-to-yearly in length. You might be looking for a dramatic change in coordination, agility, flexibility, endurance, or strength on this time scale.
   

A little warning: I used to be very good about developing specific numbers-oriented goals in all three time scales, but they became a bit of an obsession that I'm now sure was detrimental to my development overall. I frequently pushed myself beyond my capacities (good, but only to an extent) and cared more about doing 2000 of xxxx technique by next Tuesday than I did about getting better at xxxx technique. Not good.

Quality first and then quantity
Based on my previous goal-setting line, let me admonish you that the easiest, most realistic and attainable, most clearly specific goals always involve numbers. Remember that for real development, you have to get it right first and then ramp up the numbers, so if you decide to attach numbers to your training (do X repetitions of activity xxxx, or do activity xxxx for X minutes), make absolutely sure that you don't count poor-quality. Your main focuses, I think, should be on doing things well and getting better at those things. If you're not meeting those goals first, then all the numbers in the world don't matter.

Another little warning here: numerical goals are an awesome way to ensure some overtraining issues will develop. Some that I've done or seen done in the past and now consider to be a bad idea are:

1. 100,000 pushups in a year (before I was doing bagua). That's a lot of damn pushups. I did it, but my pushup ability turned to crap. I could do a lot of sets of small numbers of pushups, but doing a large number in one go was right out. I'm not sure what kind of fitness that is, but it's certainly not optimal. I also was not getting stronger after the initial phase of the training.
2. 6,000 tracing the saber in a month (in each hand) -- originally conceived as 200 in each hand per day. I actually did 7000, for the record. This was specifically a test to see what that kind of training would do to my body. The result was similar to the pushups experiment because to keep up with the numbers, I felt like I really needed to trace the saber every day to do it. I think that caused some overtraining issues, though I definitely am stronger now that I did it.
3. 100,000 strikes in a year. Back before I knew anything about training (the first year and a half or so), this is how I approached doing lots of strikes: try to get some thousands of each one every year. I did a lot of poorly executed strikes and got in pretty good shape. I also got a bunch of injuries and didn't get a hell of a lot better at the techniques I was working on.
4. Turn for at least 30 minutes a day (on average) for a year (~180 hours or ~10,000 minutes). This was good for getting on the circle more, but it turned the practice into a serious chore that I started to dread. It's also really easy to get behind when work gets busy, and then it gets really easy to beat yourself up over it.
5. Run 4000 miles in a year. I didn't do this. F*** that! I have a friend that did it, and I can't imagine anything good coming out of it. This didn't have much to do with anything in the post actually; I just really like telling people that I know someone that ran 4000 miles in 2009 (on purpose).
   

Build the group
Most training in Yin Style Bagua is individual, and that's fine. A lot of good stuff comes out of training together: obvious need for curriculum, bringing new people to the art, comeraderie, partner practice, help and corrections, motivation to keep working, group accountability and encouragement, a sense of family and group unity. For us in Knoxville in particular, I really hope to see 2010 as a year in which we really build up the group aspect of our training: more frequent and regular meetings, more folks, more curriculum, a good location, etc. This is our group's roughest challenge, I think, and a big goal for us this year is to make our group a little more solid.

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!

Armchair Training

Training in an armchair? What the hee-haw? Before anyone salivates like I'm about to throw out some crazy awesome secret tip for how you can achieve development without having to get out of your comfy lazy-boy recliner (such tips do not exist in real martial arts or development practices of any sort), let me point out to you my predicament and the reality of this. I'm injured in a way where standing and walking are kind of out for the moment, except for bare-minimum requirements. It's absolutely amazing how much pain and impediment a toe can cause you, let me just say that.

So I have this rule: never zero that I've talked about before. How can I hold myself to "never zero" if I can't really even move around? Standing postures? Nope, not with this injury, at least not in full. Standing with wide legs or toes digging into the earth (especially that second one) is blinding pain right now. That's out until I'm healed up.

Well, while development is considerably lower, there are modifications of lots of the exercises that can be done while sitting. I even trained the saber! Several of the isometric postures with the saber can be trained without having to get up if your feet, knees, or legs are in no shape to let you train properly. Please note: this is not a substitute for proper training, you hee-haw, this is making the most of a crappy situation. While holding your body in an active, upright posture, the saber can be held out in a variety of ways to strengthen various parts of the arm and hands. Here are a few examples:

• Hold the saber overhead as in "green dragon shoots to the sea;"
• Hold the saber out in front, as in "black bear carries the mountain on its back" or "rooster stomps into battle;"
• Hold the saber out in front or directly out to one side as if completing a chop or stab;
• Hold the saber in front vertically, as in "monkey king offers incense;"
• Slowly move the tip of the saber from horizontal to vertical by flexing only the wrist, usually done out in front;
• Slowly rotate the saber from pointing left to pointing right, and vice-versa, using primarily the forearm;
• Hold the saber extended and turn the blade over without moving the saber much, as if working a screwdriver, as far as it will go one way and then back the other, trying to keep the tip stationary.

Other things you can do don't require the saber if you can't get on your feet but are otherwise healthy and able. For instances:

• Focus on other activities like strength training (using weights) or stretching (preferably both);
• Watch some YSB instructional videos and make notes. If you're training properly, this is an activity that is usually hard to make time for (if you're like me, you're more time-limited than anything else in terms of what limits your total training);
• Review your notes from previous training sessions, video viewings, seminars, or intensives. Reviewing them can mean compiling them as well, which is harder but very useful;
• Train your mind. Try to do techniques, particularly combos, forms, and applications vividly in your mind. Research shows that this kind of training is nearly essential for greatness in a skill. The mind should be central in your training anyway, so if your body is telling you that you can't train any other way, train this way;
• Do modified versions of exercises that accommodate your injury. For instance, standing normally isn't too bad for me now that I'm on the mend (but not fixed), so I can do isometric standing strengthening postures without putting any hard effort into my legs, and this practice isn't causing me pain. It is, however, giving me some development in my upper body and building skill in doing the exercises correctly on that half.

As I'm learning, letting yourself heal from an injury before pressing foward is critical or you'll lose more training time than you would by doing a bunch of halfed training sessions. I learned the hard way, when this injury was initially on the mend and got to "mostly feeling better but still injured" that doing a hard session too soon on an injury makes the injury worse. Instead of having to take another day of careful, controlled stuff like I mentioned above, I made things way worse and have lost nearly a week of good training time. One workout isn't worth losing six or seven (or more, depending on the injury)!

Overtraining

This is a martial art that I'm training. Martial arts bring up the idea of boot camp, as do the seminars that we go to in Yin Style Baguazhang. Boot camp is a popular notion these days (see over a million pages on Google about "weight loss boot camp," probably the latest craze in the fad-driven weight-loss program industry), and I think folks training in the martial arts like to envision themselves in a boot-camp like situation in which they come out highly trained, skillful, and chiseled. This mentality, unfortunately enough, leads to the easy potential for overtraining, which I think I'm suffering from to some degree right now despite a relatively low number of total (physical) training hours in the last month (about 35 since Nov. 1). You can check out some of the signs and symptoms of overtraining syndrome here.

My problem comes directly from deciding to focus almost exclusively on one or two things, which rapidly builds the potential for overdoing it in those one or two things. In particular, I've been overcooking myself with the large saber, committing myself to hundreds of repetitions of tracing the saber each day (nearly 7000 in each hand since Nov. 1 actually... I kept track) in addition to a fair sampling of the other basic drills that I know whenever the weather permits. Here are some of the symptoms I've noticed:

• I can do way more tracing of the saber per day now than I could at the beginning of the month (400 in each hand each day isn't a ridiculous request on myself now), but the first few sets are literally painful until I'm "warmed up" and the number I can do in any given set has actually decreased over the month. Near the beginning of the month, I'd do mostly sets of 50 with an occasional 60, 75, or 80 thrown in there (and 100 straight once!). Now, a set of 50 is very hard, but I can do 6 consecutive sets of 40 or 30 with relative ease. I'm not sure that's how I want things to be going. To my mind, both of these numbers should be going up over time.
• Turning with the saber, particularly in bear posture (one that's relatively easy to do regardless of working a lot or bad weather because it fits in a relatively small space with no special ceiling needs) went from being hard to easier to really hard. After an initial increase in both total number of go-arounds I could do without having to stop/switch hands and an increase in total number of go-arounds I could do in a workout, switching hands as needed, I've seen a marked decrease in both of those numbers over the past few days (I've only been doing this one daily for about a week now). That can't be good. I'm seeing similar results with turning in the dragon posture (from the form) because I'm doing it kind of maniacally and daily right now too.
• Other drills with the saber are kind of similar. I've had tendinitis in one of my wrists for a while, so a good many of them have been kind of on the back-burner, but as I've gone back into doing them, I'm seeing similar results with the ones I do essentially every day. I'm getting cooked by them so that each subsequent day is worse than the day before it.
• I'm showing a number of the "stagnation" kind of symptoms given on that list of overtraining symptoms from above plus some compulsion to do tracing and to do it a lot.
  

I keep pushing myself thinking that I'll train through this, or more specifically, that if this was real military "saber camp," I'd be picking that thing up for hours a day and sucking this up big-time or else. The thing is, while I'm feeling stronger in lots of ways from the workouts, I'm blatantly less able to do them now than before. Boot camp mentality or no, that's simply not how this thing works. Days off aren't just important, they're critical, at least for my physique.

I'm thinking that taking days off of using the saber completely isn't actually necessary, but a more complementary set of exercises should be arranged so that the same kinds of things aren't being done day after day after day. Besides the dangers to the tendons in some of those exercises (chops and stabs, in particular, for us little-wrist people), overtraining syndrome can eventually actually cut into baseline performance so that we could end up worse at what we're doing for having done a lot of it, basic skills improvements aside. The two things I've seen suggested to help deal with overtraining issues that aren't "put it down," which is the main advice, are to intentionally do "light days" as well as to shake things up by doing things that are completely different on different days. That's the plan, I think.

The funny thing is that with an art like Yin Style is that the drive to really get good at things through heavy repetition and single-purposed focus creates the compulsion to overtrain so strongly that it can put you in the problematic situation where it somehow feels inappropriate to train something different to "shake things up." Ironically, this occurs in an art in which there is certainly enough material in it so that many practitioners mention at one point or another that there's "too much stuff" in the art to give full attention to. Doing something else, some of that other "too much stuff," is just what's needed, though. I think this is probably how it has to be: Train a few things very dilligently and primarily, but incorporate other things for variety, interest, and to give your body something to work on while you recover from your primary training goal(s) (which should, of course, change over time and with changing interests). You must respect that your body will need time to recover fully from each exercise you do, anywhere from 12 to 72 hours depending on your fitness, your genetics, the muscle group in question, your diet, your level of hydration, the amount of sleep you get, and a multitude of other factors. Yeah, it's that complicated (actually more complicated than that!), and it can be different for each muscle group or system in your body!

The basic truth of how your body reacts to exercise as an adaptable organism is as follows: You have a starting level of fitness that I'll refer to as your "starting point." When you exercise or train, you stress your tissues, which takes away from their full capacity for a time for a variety of not-fully-understood reasons. This time is called the "recovery" phase and takes an amount of time that is very difficult to determine from the list of above factors. Following the recovery phase, your body adapts to the stress by elevating the particular tissues involved in whatever you did to a level that exceeds their original level of fitness. This is called the "supercompensation" phase. The supercompensation period decays exponentially back to your original "starting point" over a time period that is influenced by all of the above factors (including the myriad that I didn't mention).

The thing is, to sound smart and technical, that your tissues kind of deal with this sitaution in a Markovian way, in other words, when you workout again is something like your new "starting point." You enter a recovery phase that drops your level of fitness temporarily based on the intensity of your workout (harder workout; bigger drop). That, in turn, causes an overcompensating swing into a supercompensation phase (bigger drop swings to bigger peak, it appears). Thus, this is all about timing. If you work out again before you get "out of the woods" of your previous recovery phase, then you're starting from a lower point on the curve than if you would have waited a little while longer. If you work out again during your supercompensation phase (particularly near its peak), then you reap maximal benefits. If you wait too long, then it's essentially, in terms of your tissues (not your developed skills), essentially like you never worked out the first time. The tough part is that these time periods are very difficult to determine and variable on about a bajillion variables. Thus... be pragmatic: If you feel overtraining symptoms setting in, back off, slow down, and cross-train; otherwise, keep on keepin' on.

Some ideas for shaking things up include:

• Putting the saber down for empty-hand practice, if you're overdoing the saber;
• Picking the saber up if you're not doing so much of that;
• Turning more (always good?) and/or in different postures (try the various strengthening postures or what you know of different animal postures);
• Changing palms if you're focusing on a certain palm or small number of them;
• Picking up a new form (from the videos) and drilling it;
• Hit the gym or go running (worked for me yesterday... shook me up out of my normal mentality of how I "have to train" and had me moving at the same time -- plus made be suck wind like I ran an f-ing marathon even though I only did a rather slow 800m);
• Trying something out from another animal system (if you have the videos) for a couple of days to vary things up;
• Training the same stuff with intentionally and markedly lower intensity, focusing on some different requirement(s) of that technique or mentally "using it" more than just drilling it in the body;
  
• Something else that you've thought of that I'm not right now (leave a comment!).

To put things plainly, I suppose, the science says that if you're exhibiting symptoms of overtraining, more training will not make you better. If you're really lucky and really determined, you might improve in skills while you deteriorate your physical ability to improve, but more than likely, the built-up fatigue (unfinished recovery) will cause you to be sloppy and less precise than taking some time off and coming back to it another day. If you're less fortunate, you could actually end up simultaneously developing bad habits, getting weaker, and even possibly seriously injuring yourself (tendinitis, tweaked joints, repetitive movement/stress injuries, etc.).