Winter trials

Bringing to mind my previous post, wherein I mention how I too often let my life interfere with my training, this past week finds me stubbornly pushing on with the bagua practice despite a particularly annoying patch of "life" recently. My car is in the shop, so getting that fixed, getting it paid for and dealing with the logistics of how I get to work have occupied more time that I'd like.

I'm still trying to work into a solid training groove, back up to the level I was at several months ago. Might take another few weeks, unless I up the pace, but I feel like I'm getting there. Today had a good amount of solid training. Didn't really get any time on the circle, but I made up for that by giving the sweeping strikes some attention, particularly the capturing sweeping strike, which I haven't worked with as much. In that regard, today might be a good model for days to come, at least for the time being. For the capturing strike I did five-minute sessions each for the stationary, one-step, two-step and three-step drills, for a total of 20 minutes of work with the capturing sweeping strike. Additionally, I spent 5 minutes a piece on stationary drills for the rising sweeping and inward sweeping strikes, which is rather cursory, but as I said, I've spent more time working with them in recent weeks and months. I may continue this through future training sessions, focusing on one strike while doing "maintenance work" on the others, at least until my strength and endurance are at sufficient levels to do justice to all three in a day, or even as far as being able to work on more than one palm in a given training session.

The most stimulating part of today's training was almost certainly the time I spent doing forms work. Up until recently I haven't really paid a great deal of attention to the forms, but in recent weeks I've spent a few minutes here and there doing the "moving with the force" sweeping form at the slow-paced learning speed. Today I decided to dedicate more time to it, and to start into the "practicing with power" stage. It's definitely more of a workout, but it's also a good deal of fun. A large part of the challenge (and the fun) of doing the forms is thinking of them in terms of combat applications, trying to visualize an opponent, trying to predict how an opponent would behave, and determining how you would utilize the basic tools of the forms to repond effectively. I have to say, it really makes the art come alive when you engage it like that. It's even more fun and effective if you have a training dummy sparring partner handy, but I am not so lucky at the moment.

Thus encouraged by today's training, I'll be making an effort to reproduce sessions like these every day for the rest of the week, paying particular attention to the forms work. I think that's just what I needed to reinvigorate my regimen.

Winter work

Wow, it's been almost half a year since I last posted. If it wasn't already apparent, I have an annoying habit of letting work and my own laziness interfere with my extra-curriculars. I used to be online all the time, but these days I'm rarely at my computer. My bagua practice tapered off a bit back in September, thanks to an extended period of time in which I worked a lot of overtime, which is a shame, since it seemed to be progressing pretty well at the time. I've tried to keep up with it over the last several months, but it's been intermittent at best. And, of course, I obviously practice more than I post on here. Perhaps I should figure out the "mobile posting" settings for this blog setup, so I can add posts from my phone while I'm at work with nothing else to do.

Happily, this return to my journal coincides with a renewed effort in my bagua practice. I've been trying to steadily increase my level of conditioning in recent weeks, that way I can more easily jump back into practice. On a side note, I've also been spending some time doing tai chi, mostly for stress-reduction purposes (I need to stop reading about politics).

So, I have something resembling a game plan for structuring the time I spend with my bagua practice every day. I'm implementing it in a small scale, which I'll gradually increase, but my initial mid-term goal is to eventually spend about three hours per day on bagua practice. Spend a few minutes doing standing postures, one hour on strike training, one hour for forms work and one hour of circle-turning. That's a tall order at the moment, since I'm out of shape in general and have not yet gotten to the point where I'm working with the bagua for extended periods of time. My bagua practice today lasted from about 10am to 1pm, though there were significant periods of rest interspersed throughout. But, as always, it's a work in progress.

Not quite good enough

The week continues, and still I have an unbroken (if rather short) string of training days. That sounds kinda pathetic right now, especially, I'm sure, to any hardcore bagua people who might be reading that are used to multi-hour training sessions every day of the week and who have survived seminars and intensives with He Jinbao. Fair enough. I haven't really earned the right not to be pathetic yet.

As far as  the training itself goes, there is definitely incremental progress. With every day of standing practice I end up being less easily fatigued while turning the circle. If I omitted the standing and the strikes, I might reasonably expect to make the 30min. mark. Amazing what a couple days of more-intense-than-usual training can do. Unfortunately, it's not quite enough, I don't think. I suspect that if I was going for a truly intense workout, I'd be a lot more sore than I am now. I have yet to test the upper limits of just how much I can do in a day without collapsing, but I am concerned about overtraining. If nothing else, it's a habit picked up from playing video game RPG's: defeat lots of little monsters until your experience level is high enough to comfortably fight the bigger monsters. I am fond of overkill, but it's a ponderous and subtle kind of overkill.

Perhaps in the near future, after maybe a week or two of continuing as I am now, I'll begin designating certain days as "focus" days, wherein I will devote significantly more time and effort to one of the bagua "pillars," such as doing the standing postures, or circle-turning.

On a random note, I've noticed that my left arm is noticeably weaker than my right. It's somewhat annoying.

Beginnings

It's been quite some time since I've been in the journal-writing habit. I managed to keep up with a LiveJournal account for about 5 years, but most of my other friends abandoned it for Facebook, so I haven't bothered with it in a while. My primary motivation for creating this blog is to keep a record of my martial arts training, mostly as a way to keep me motivated in the training itself.

For some time now I've been interested in a style of Chinese martial arts called Baguazhang. I first heard about it back in 2001, when I was 18 and a freshman in college, through watching Jet Li's movie, "The One." About a year later I bought, on a whim, a book on bagua by Park Bok Nam. After perusing the book, I started practicing...from time to time. Though martial arts have always fascinated me, I've never really had the diligence required to practice it on a regular basis. Most of the stuff in Park's book didn't make much sense to me at the time, though I discovered that when I actually did spend some time practicing things started to make sense almost of their own volition. The more I practiced, the more I understood. Over the course of the following two years I continued to gather more books related to bagua, and I befriended several like-minded people at college with whom I participated in the campus martial arts club.

Something of a breakthrough came at the very beginning of 2005, while I made my first trip to Bellingham, WA to visit my then best friend (now wife), Diana. For some reason, during that visit I was intensely interested in bagua, and read everything I could about it online. It was during this time that I first heard of Yin Style Baguazhang. The lineage-holder of the style, Dr. Xie Pei-qi, and his successor, He Jin-bao, decided to document as much of their martial system as they could on dvd, primarily because it was becoming scarce and they didn't want it to die out. The style itself is named for the 2nd-generation master in the lineage, Yin Fu, student of the founder of Baguazhang, dating back to the late-1800's in Beijing. When I saw the sheer number and quality of the dvd's they produced (and the comprehensiveness of the style) I was impressed, and decided to test it out for myself. So I bought the first two dvd's of the Dragon system (one of eight "animal" systems in Yin style).

The first dvd is mostly about strengthening postures--standing in place while maintaining static upper body postures held with isometric force--and the type of exercise most unique to bagua: circle-walking. Circle-walking is basically just holding the static strengthening postures while walking in a circle, rather than standing, with occasional changes of direction. This practice serves a number of functions, chiefly qigong, meditation, or training for combat.

The second dvd covers the eight striking methods of the animal system, each with three variations. Additionally, there are four stages of practice to the strike training: stationary (to develop power), single-step (performing strikes while stepping in a line or zig-zag, to practice emitting force while moving), two-step (to practice emitting force while moving and changing direction) and three-step (all of the above, though practiced balancing on a straight line).

Each animal system has a set of ten dvd's; the first two are devoted to foundation practices such as the ones outlined above, and the remaining eight are devoted to the forms. Each of the eight forms dvd's correspond to one of the animal system's striking methods (such as the Pushing strike, in the Dragon system), and each striking method has seven forms (one for each of the other 7 animal systems, and reminiscent of their particular "flavor").

In any case, after I got these dvd's (and continued to get more) I set about trying to learn the style. Looking back on how I was attempting to practice it back then, I shudder. It was pretty awful at first, since I have virtually no background in martial arts whatsoever, but over time I began to get a feel for it and learn the proper mechanics. From the very beginning I didn't want to be the kind of person who tries to do every technique at a superficial level and call it good. Rather, I wanted to practice as few things as possible, practicing each until I was certain that my understanding of it was solid before moving on to the next thing. With this in mind I began training in the Dragon system, starting with the very first technique presented: the Inside Pushing strike.

It's been said that to learn a technique you must perform it 1,000 times, and to gain an understanding of it you must do it 2,000 times. I determined that, since I didn't have a teacher, I should make some attempt to compensate by spending more time than necessary mastering the basics. Therefore, I decided that I would do 10,000 repetitions of the Inside Pushing strike (performed stationary) before moving on to the next step. And now for the awful truth: I'm still working on the Inside Pushing strike. After moving to Bellingham and finding work I continued to work at my goal off-and-on, doing a few sets of strikes here and there when the interest found me. But after four years of intermittent practice I had gotten barely 80% of the way there. Admittedly, somewhere between 2- and 3,000 strikes I was beginning to feel that I was getting the hang of it, but by the end of the fourth year I was thoroughly disgusted with the small amount of progress I'd made.

So, starting last year I set a new goal for myself. I would start over. I would do a full 10,000 repetitions of the Inside Pushing strike. And I would do them all within a month. To be honest, I still haven't accomplished this feat, despite having restarted it four times. By now I've probably done a grand total of 20-30,000 reps over the last five years, but I'm sticking by my arbitrary goal. I figure if I can't manage to do 10,000 strikes in a month's time then I obviously don't have the diligence for serious practice. Now, as always, it's a test of motivation. After 10 years I'm still interested in bagua. Maybe now, after all this time, I have enough interest to get serious about it.

So. First thing on the agenda: complete 10,000 strikes. As of the creation of this blog, I've already amassed over a quarter of that, and I can usually manage somewhere between 500 and 1,000 strikes per day. After I finish these, I have several possible options. And what are those? That will have to wait until next time.