At this time of year, you hear a lot about New Year’s resolutions. This year, I was happy to see a lot of people saying “New Year’s resolutions don’t work.” We all know that’s true from personal experience, but these folks were referencing a growing understanding about how learning and skill-building take place. Most of what we now know about how the nervous system works flies in the face of changing through the strength of your willpower alone.
I got an email the other day that was a little bit different than the usual requests for lessons. It read: “I learned the Short Form at Brookline Tai Chi under the tutelage of Bill Ryan back about 1996-1997. For seven years, I continued to do the short form three times every morning. Then for the past eight years or so, I have done the short form four times every morning.
The next time you go to class, watch out for these 4 practice partners. While they all start out with good intentions, if you hang out with them too much, you’ll get sucked into their quirky habits and slow down your own progress. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
- Checklist Charlie Checklist Charlie is the tai chi student who is forever stuck in his own head. Every time he practices, instead of feeling his body, he recites a list of stuff he is supposed to be doing.
Z-Health Master Trainer Jen Waak is a self-described “recovering management consultant”. These days, she helps other “Keyboard Athletes” improve and maintain their bodies and stay healthy even when they’re stuck behind a desk all day. What surprised me about reading Jen’s advice on “what you should do at your desk”, was that it sounded a lot like what she did last year to get ready for a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro.
Recently, I’ve been talking a lot about two things, improving your breathing to give you a major energy/relaxation boost and developing tools that help you follow-through on your home practice. I’ve even created an online course with all the information you need to cultivate better breathing habits: Better Breathing. The biggest lesson we learned as we talked to BTC students was that the best time to use reminders to trigger your practice was when you were invested in learning a new skill.
By training the principles of body-alignment and movement as described in the Tai Chi Classics, you can move with much more grace, fluidity, and power. Instead of wasting energy holding excess tension, relaxation can lead the way to more powerful movement. Here’s what Yang Cheng-fu said about it a hundred years ago (the following is adapted from YANG’S TEN IMPORTANT POINTS by Yang Cheng-fu (1883 — 1936) as researched by Lee N.
From the recent practice survey we conducted at Brookline Tai Chi and experiments I’ve been running in online learning, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that most people need some external motivation when they are learning a new skill. That’s not a judgment about willpower and motivation, it actually says more about the way we are wired for survival. In Z Health, we always talk about the way that the nervous system is at once the most plastic system – it can adapt to lots of different changes – and also the most stable.
What the heck does Donkey Kong have to do with the practice habits of tai chi students? It turns out the ladders and platforms in the video game are a perfect model for understanding the ecosystem of students practice habits. Let me explain the survey design and then I’ll share some really fascinating results about how people engage Brookline Tai Chi to develop their tai chi practice. Survey Design Last week we conducted a small practice survey to try to get a more accurate picture of what students do outside of class.
