- You’re lazy Think about your daily movement patterns. How much variety is there? If you drive to work to sit at a desk and then relax by coming home and watching TV, you’re living your life essentially seated in front of a screen. You need to change up the patterns: stand, run, twist, bend and move, not just your body but your eyes and head too.
- You eat crap
People often ask why we do chi gung sets in certain numbers. Whenever I’ve heard Bruce Frantzis answer that question, he tells a story about these elaborate experiments they run in the Taoist monasteries, over generations, with control groups and varying repetitions, to see what the optimal number of repetitions for each exercise is. I always feel bad for the monks who spent their lives doing a few too many of each exercise.
It’s been on my mind a lot in the past month that Brookline Tai Chi is approaching its 20th anniversary. With a rough calculation, that also means that we are approaching having taught 10,000 students in that time span. I can’t decide which one of those milestones is going to look better on the big banner out front. How about “10,000 People Relaxed”? In light of reaching these major institutional marks, I’ve also been wondering about the underlying mechanisms that have given the school such an amazing run so far.
Check out this post from the Trainerfly blog. I talk to teachers and trainers all the time who want move beyond their live events, but the number of steps it takes, and the technology required to make it work seem overwhelming. Hopefully, I’ve made a little dent in that perception!
So far in this series we’ve been talking about adapting your teaching style and the structure of your teaching business to fit the needs of your students. Now I want to look at a trait that all of the best teachers I’ve studied with share, which is a work capacity they can turn on like a fire hose. If your work capacity only comes out like water from a dripping faucet, you won’t be able to be “
In the previous post in this series, we looked at how adhering to a particular rhythm, in that case running at 180bpm, can trigger the natural spring in the body and give you insight into “stuck spots” in your body that won’t move at the right pace. Now we want to explore the practice of changing rhythm deliberately as part of your movement practice. The value for sports or martial arts, where the ability to change speeds gives you a competitive advantage, should be pretty obvious.
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the social nature of wanting to belong to something bigger than yourself as one possible drive for learning tai chi. The social drive is a major aid teachers can rely on to build their base of students. Another one, that we’ll discuss here is our habitual drive, i.e. we are creatures of habit. That can be a good thing when it comes to maintaining a student base, but it is also the first major hurdle you have to clear as a teacher when it comes to getting new students.
It has been clear to me from years of Tai Chi practice that finding the right rhythm in a movement “unlocks” the body. When I stumbled on to this video though, I was fascinated to see a similar theory being discussed in running.
In the clip, he says that this particular rhythm, 180 beats per minute, helps you “tap into the body’s elastic mechanism.” After I watched the clip (the other ones in the series are great, by the way), I turned my metronome up to 180 bpm and hit the road.
