Sometimes zero!

If you've followed this training journal much at all, then you know of my golden rule of training: "Never Zero." To quickly summarize this rule, there is never a day where there is no training performed, even if it's brief or only in the mind. Well... for the first time in a few years, despite doing some mighty difficult things, I had a day with zero.

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!

Ask Dr. Jimberly -- "Humongous Godzilla Sword" -- What's with the dadao anyway?

Here's another edition of Ask Dr. Jimberly, where I share questions and answers that I get about Yin Style Baguazhang with a wider audience: What's the deal with that "Humongous Godzilla Sword" (read: the Yin Style bagua dadao)?

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.

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.

Ask Dr. Jimberly -- Yin Style Bagua questions and answers -- About turning and breathing

Since I get questions in my email from time to time about training in Yin Style, and since people tend to be happy enough with my answers, I've decided a nice thing to do would be to put some of these questions and answers up on the blog, maintaining anonymity, so that others can hear them as well, just in case they happen to have the same questions. Now, to be fair, I have to point out that I'm not always going to be 100% correct with my answers and am responding to the best of my knowledge, and so you can try these things out for yourself, see if they work or not, and always feel encouraged to pass your questions along to higher authorities in the art.

Today's question is about turning and breathing, particularly what kind of breathing is appropriate for turning practice in Yin Style Baguazhang. The exact wording of the question is

I have a question about breathing. Do we use lower abdominal breathing or reverse breathing. Hope that you can help... Thank you

Here was my response to this worthy inquiry:

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.

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.

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.