There’s an old joke, “Hey, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice,” and to an extent that’s true but how and when we practice can vary a lot and not all practice makes perfect. In looking at how The Greats actually got great, I found that the answer for many was that they did a lot of BORING work outside of the dojo. By all accounts OSensei was practicing all the time, even if it looked like farming. In the translation of “Transparent Power” Sagawa sensei (as told by his student Kimura) recounts doing thousands of repetitions of shiko (sumo leg lifts) every day. Actually the Cliff’s Notes version of Transparent Power boils down to, “You’re all stupid and lazy and that’s why you’ll never be any good.” Helpful… But is he wrong? I think a lot of us went through periods where we trained at the dojo 6-7 days a week. I certainly haven’t done that in a long time. In some ways I miss the lifestyle that allowed me to have that kind of focus, but that’s just not how my life is anymore and hasn’t been for a long time. In today’s work environment, I’m not sure how many people could even train five nights a week.
Currently I only offer one two-hour class a week. That’s nothing, but I still want to improve and I want to offer the opportunity for real improvement to my training partners and students. To that end, I’ve started posting what I call “The Daily Grind” to our private Slack. The Daily Grind is about 30 minutes of solo exercises that everyone training with me should know and can do at home in about the space of a yoga mat. Over the years I’ve really struggled with knowing what to practice at home not to mention the motivation to do so. It’s easy to WANT to practice something, but solo work at home is never going to give you the same buzz and energy of partner training in the dojo. And what am I going to do, dance around my living room pretending I’m doing waza? Am I going to learn anything doing that? Just thinking of what you CAN do at home can be a serious impediment to DOING anything.
Over the last couple of years, I really committed to playing and learning music again and have been shocked at the improvements I’ve made due mostly to a very simple thing: I do a 40 minute set of timed exercises every single day. Each month the specifics change and the bpm (speed) changes over the course of the month as I improve at the exercises, but I do them every single day. I do them to a metronome and I time them. Most exercises I only do for five minutes. Five minutes is nothing, so how can doing an exercise for five minutes make any difference? Well 5 minutes a day, every single day for a month is about 2.5 hours of practice on ONE single thing. Just doing my 30 minutes of exercises each day adds up to 15 hours of dedicated, focused practice a month. I play a lot more than that, usually several hours a day, but at the very least, I have 30 minutes of active, focused, BORING practice every day.
I started thinking of how I could bring some of that into my budo training, especially given the extremely limited time we have at the dojo, only about 8 hours a MONTH. ☹ With that in mind, I came up with The Daily Grind. Each month I post a sequence of exercises and times, typically only 2 minutes per exercise that adds up to 30-40 minutes. I don’t need to go anywhere, I often don’t even need to change into workout clothes (although this month’s DG has been kind of sweaty!) and it’s only 30 minutes of my day. I don’t have to think about what I SHOULD be doing. I basically have reduced the barrier to training to “do I have 30 minutes to spare?” Since introducing the Grind, I’ve managed to train 5-7 days a week and more importantly, I know I’m making progress again in my training. Doing a basic solo exercise for just 2 minutes gives me a chance to find new lessons within the exercise, keeps me from overdoing it, and lets me focus just on ME and not a partner that I’m trying to throw. One of the consistent exercises from Grind to Grind has been the Yi Jin Jing which I’ve found to be so incredibly beneficial that it’s worth its own post at some point.
So what are some ways you find to train outside the dojo? Do you? Do you mean to? Does your school discourage it (I have trained at some that did)? Would you like the list of exercises I’m doing? Let me know!
Finally, if you’re interested in creating your own version of the Daily Grind (and I hope you do) here’s what I recommend:
- Keep it around 30 minutes in length total
- Set times for each exercise where possible and use a timer
- Use exercises that are simple and repeatable
- Use exercises that you KNOW so that you can use your DOING brain and not your LEARNING brain
- Change it up every 2-4 weeks, but do the same sequence enough times you can really spend some time with each exercise