Top 3 things that encouraged/discouraged my training YSB

I could not agree more on the subject of turning. While Jack Schafer was training the Boulder group, we would almost always spend an hour of class turning. The first 20 minutes would be warming up with direction changes, then we would train forms. Also when I was training with Andrew Nugent-Head, he always said an hour a day of turning is good.
I am really grateful to those guys and feel really lucky to have trained with them.
Point is, I do try to turn an hour a day, but I feel like I have become so involved with turning that I have let other practices fall to the background. How do we find the time to turn for an hour, do our strikes, strengthening postures and any Daoyin practices every day?

Thankfully this forum has got me doing the standing strengthening practices regularly again and I find it to be an amazing addition to my daily practice. Guess I have to get off my as and work it all in.
Thanks for sharing your insights!

Myles,

This is an awesome topic!

Sak,

It is extremely difficult to train hard at everything and even harder to do so in a single day.
In Beijing, group training is generally 90% strikes & striking combinations, 5% aps and 5% forms. A strengthening posture or two is often thrown in to start sessions off or end them. Serious turning & standing sessions are left to practitioners to accomplish on their own time outside of the group. I don't mean to say this is the best or only manner of training, but importantly, it does fit our purposes. Generally, when we study with HJB throughout the year, we focus on striking combinations; so we prepare, drill and try to understand such combinations throughout the week so that we have something presentable to show him when we meet.

From the perspective of development, it's often easier to attain results by hitting one thing (or a few related things) hard in a session rather than jumping around and trying to cover a large number of various things. Still, motivation is extremely important. You want to train things that you enjoy training. As it is can be hard to enjoy extremely painful & exhausting activities, individuals need to be creative and observant, determining how best to get results in their own practices. If turning an hour every day gets it done for you, that's awesome. Alternatively, you could turn two hours every other day. That would seriously increase the difficulty, but you'd have a day in between to focus on other things and to recover, then you'd return to turning fresh the next day. HJB personally believes turning 3 hours is the way to go, but following this logic, the same could be said for any of the practices: the harder the practice, the greater the potential for development. This would apply to standing and striking too. He Jinbao tends to favor individual strikes and turning. The Doctor did a lot of forms and standing. Even within the same pillars, it requires no wild leap of the imagination to assume the favorite turning postures, strikes or standing methods of each would likely differ from the other. What matters is that you understand the type of development you are trying to attain and that you then develop it; the exact manner in which you go about getting this development is up to you.

Ultimately, you need to find a method that works for you. You want development, but you also want to stay interested, because being interested will help you to attain more development. It is also worth noting that often good methods do not work incessantly. You may find a really productive manner of training and hit it hard, but 3-6 months later, you might feel a loss of steam or your results may begin to slow. If this is the case, do not be afraid to devise a new method or to shake up your training schedule and focus. You can always return to an old method in the future when your new method loses steam.

Anyhow, just a few thoughts,

- Eric

Myles,

Certainly, sir!

My comments above are more addressing the idea that one's training should be designed to achieve one's developmental goals.

I imagine each group of YSB practitioners is probably unique and practitioners may require different things from instructors or from group training.

My thought is that group training should help practitioners to study and train things that individuals would have trouble learning or achieving on their own.

But I am just an individual practitioner, not a group leader, and the YSB Beijing group's circumstances are probably quite different from the groups in the States (we have more training time but also a smaller group), so you might want to talk to other group leaders in the States & Europe about their thoughts on this.

- Eric