While I've been very quiet over lockdown (there's really no excuse not to post when I'm stuck at home, anyway) I am, at least, managing to practice every dfay at the moment. This is despite a shoulder injury and my usual, lazy nature. My biggest motivation though, is perhaps that I'm trying in vain to counteract my working from home weight gain.
My weigh ins recently have been pretty shocking. Most of the weight seems to come from my torso/gut, so I've been concentrating on that. In myself, though, I feel pretty good and healthy-ish. Just need to trim myself down before all that inevitable rich Yule-feast food.
Wednesday, 2 December 2020
Tuesday, 17 November 2020
Written notes addendum & Tips on motivation
So, I am now keeping semi-regular notes regarding my baguazhang training. Although, over time, these have evolved a little. Now they are less about codifying my knowledge and more about keeping a log of when I've been able to practice, what exercises were harder/easier/effective and other such things. This helps me a little as I struggle with motivation at times.
However, having researched a little on the subject of motivation - especially as it pertains to fitness - I think I have come up with a few tips and/or exercise related motivational hacks.
First of all, I need to do all I can to prevent my subconscious from being able to justify giving up. What I mean by this is, whenever I set myself goals, I always seem to unwittingly include clauses that allow my lazier side to throw in the towel fairly early on.
For example, a common goal I've set myself for more new year's resolutions than I care to mention is:
"Practice bagua at least five times a week"
The problem with this is, it already contains the seeds of its own demise. What happens when, for whatever reason, I'm only able to practice three times in a particular week? Well, that is an opportunity for my lazy subconscious to say, "Well, you've screwed up your goal now, might as well jack it all in!". Putting a time factor in like that is a bad idea. When we see stuff on TV or in health-based media about "Training every day" or "Hitting the gym at least five times a week", it's usually just intended to set you up to fail. When you fail, you start feeling bad about yourself. When you feel bad, you want to buy things to make you feel better about yourself - whether this is a new set of weights, £200 running shoes, a gym membership, or whatever. A happy person doesn't consume as much, so they don't feel as compelled to buy the product that is being offered.
These time-based goals are usually promoted by either fitness coaches or celebrities. What they're not telling you is that those kinds of goals are perfect - for them. They don't have a 9-5 job which takes precedence over their lives every single day. Once they've done a few errands, they pretty much have the rest of the day to themselves. So they have at least a couple of hours in which to comfortably fit some exercise. Most of the rest of us don't have that luxury.
Rather than setting time-based goals, how about removing any time factor from the goals all together?
1). Run a total of 100km 2). Practice martial arts over ten different days 3). Complete a total of 1,000 reps of any one exercise
This way, if my goal is to train over 10 different days, failing to train one or more days doesn't impact my goal - it only means it will take a little longer to achieve. Maybe I am enthusiastic to start and manage three days running? Great! But then, real life does what it often does and throws a spanner in the works. Maybe I get flu? Or family issues take my attention away? I can't train for two days because of this. No problem. When I come back to training, I'm still 30% of the way toward my goal, just as I was before.
Once I achieve the goal, then I set myself another one. Maybe bigger this time. Train over 25 different days or Run a total of 200km. Or, maybe, I just want to keep it simple and keep resetting that goal to the same thin. Train over ten days. Then another ten. Then another.
We're all gonna fail at some time. Real life gets in the way sometimes. That's just the way of things. But there's no need to make it a deal-breaker.
However, having researched a little on the subject of motivation - especially as it pertains to fitness - I think I have come up with a few tips and/or exercise related motivational hacks.
First of all, I need to do all I can to prevent my subconscious from being able to justify giving up. What I mean by this is, whenever I set myself goals, I always seem to unwittingly include clauses that allow my lazier side to throw in the towel fairly early on.
For example, a common goal I've set myself for more new year's resolutions than I care to mention is:
"Practice bagua at least five times a week"
The problem with this is, it already contains the seeds of its own demise. What happens when, for whatever reason, I'm only able to practice three times in a particular week? Well, that is an opportunity for my lazy subconscious to say, "Well, you've screwed up your goal now, might as well jack it all in!". Putting a time factor in like that is a bad idea. When we see stuff on TV or in health-based media about "Training every day" or "Hitting the gym at least five times a week", it's usually just intended to set you up to fail. When you fail, you start feeling bad about yourself. When you feel bad, you want to buy things to make you feel better about yourself - whether this is a new set of weights, £200 running shoes, a gym membership, or whatever. A happy person doesn't consume as much, so they don't feel as compelled to buy the product that is being offered.
These time-based goals are usually promoted by either fitness coaches or celebrities. What they're not telling you is that those kinds of goals are perfect - for them. They don't have a 9-5 job which takes precedence over their lives every single day. Once they've done a few errands, they pretty much have the rest of the day to themselves. So they have at least a couple of hours in which to comfortably fit some exercise. Most of the rest of us don't have that luxury.
Rather than setting time-based goals, how about removing any time factor from the goals all together?
1). Run a total of 100km 2). Practice martial arts over ten different days 3). Complete a total of 1,000 reps of any one exercise
This way, if my goal is to train over 10 different days, failing to train one or more days doesn't impact my goal - it only means it will take a little longer to achieve. Maybe I am enthusiastic to start and manage three days running? Great! But then, real life does what it often does and throws a spanner in the works. Maybe I get flu? Or family issues take my attention away? I can't train for two days because of this. No problem. When I come back to training, I'm still 30% of the way toward my goal, just as I was before.
Once I achieve the goal, then I set myself another one. Maybe bigger this time. Train over 25 different days or Run a total of 200km. Or, maybe, I just want to keep it simple and keep resetting that goal to the same thin. Train over ten days. Then another ten. Then another.
We're all gonna fail at some time. Real life gets in the way sometimes. That's just the way of things. But there's no need to make it a deal-breaker.
Tuesday, 14 July 2020
Are written notes any use in martial arts?
While I'm stuck in lockdown and public classes are closed, I've been thinking about "codifying" my baguazhang knowledge (for want of a better word).
All those techniques, principles, drills and such are sometimes hard to call to mind and I wondered if writing a series of annotated lists would help me to organise my knowledge better?
All this knowledge in my head, would it be better recorded or more use carefully scribed into a nice little, thematically-appropriate notebook?
Would having those lists to refer to actually improve my practice to any meaningful degree?
Would they make me a better and/or more knowledgeable martial artist? More so than a reading a book written by someone else?
Well, looks like this weekend (i.e. the next opportunity for free time) we may find out!
All those techniques, principles, drills and such are sometimes hard to call to mind and I wondered if writing a series of annotated lists would help me to organise my knowledge better?
All this knowledge in my head, would it be better recorded or more use carefully scribed into a nice little, thematically-appropriate notebook?
Would having those lists to refer to actually improve my practice to any meaningful degree?
Would they make me a better and/or more knowledgeable martial artist? More so than a reading a book written by someone else?
Well, looks like this weekend (i.e. the next opportunity for free time) we may find out!
Friday, 10 July 2020
What's important to me?
Its kind of a weird feeling when you're doing some impromptu jiben shou fa (basic hand movements) at 11:45pm of an evening, cos you just realised you haven't done any baguazhang so far that day.
That was me last night before retiring to bed. It's weird when I try to understand what it was that motivated me to do that. Is doing bagua every day so important to me now? Is it more about self-knowledge - knowing that missing one day by accident will give me more of an excuse to miss other days by design later on?
Maybe even I am getting some kind of perverse delight in selected parts of my body aching throughout the day?
That was me last night before retiring to bed. It's weird when I try to understand what it was that motivated me to do that. Is doing bagua every day so important to me now? Is it more about self-knowledge - knowing that missing one day by accident will give me more of an excuse to miss other days by design later on?
Maybe even I am getting some kind of perverse delight in selected parts of my body aching throughout the day?
Tuesday, 7 July 2020
Recording it makes it seem more real...
I've set up an impromptu training log on Twitter to record my practice. The twitter account is called "Eating Bitter" (see what I did there?) Hopefully, this will motivate me and give me something to refer back to when I need to feel that I'm actually achieving something. You know how you train and train and train yet don't seem to be getting any better? Well, this is meant to remind me of the hours(!?) I'm putting in.
Additionally, it will free this blog up to be more of a place for commentary about the martial arts world and/or my musings about how hard it is to get motivated/fit training into a busy, modern lifestyle.
Additionally, it will free this blog up to be more of a place for commentary about the martial arts world and/or my musings about how hard it is to get motivated/fit training into a busy, modern lifestyle.
The new normal
My "new normal" for training is in my living room, dodging my cat and referring to videos from my teacher in a class Whatsapp group.
What's your new normal?
What's your new normal?
Wednesday, 1 April 2020
Running out of excuses
Stuck at home, working from home every day, it's becoming a lot harder to make excuses why I'm not training more.
I manage a little here and there, but really with 2.5 - 3 hours less commuting each day, surely at least an hour of that could be spent training?
On the positive side, I am slowly losing weight, mostly I assume because I'm not stuck at work with only a snack machine for company. But this time really should be capitalised upon to help improve my bagua.
With things being so uncertain, though, it is easy to lose interest in things that, while loved, don't seem quite as important as finding supplies and looking after my family.
Anyhow, hopefully this blog will be somewhere I can record my victories in the training department (however minor) and that might then serve as the motivation I currently find myself lacking.
I manage a little here and there, but really with 2.5 - 3 hours less commuting each day, surely at least an hour of that could be spent training?
On the positive side, I am slowly losing weight, mostly I assume because I'm not stuck at work with only a snack machine for company. But this time really should be capitalised upon to help improve my bagua.
With things being so uncertain, though, it is easy to lose interest in things that, while loved, don't seem quite as important as finding supplies and looking after my family.
Anyhow, hopefully this blog will be somewhere I can record my victories in the training department (however minor) and that might then serve as the motivation I currently find myself lacking.
Tuesday, 10 March 2020
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