Training alone is often harder than training in class because we don’t have anyone with us from whom we can get real-time feedback, feel their energy, assess the effectiveness of our techniques, or keep us going when we’re flagging. Despite the advantages of being in a classroom environment solo training forms a huge part of the development of any martial artist: I’m sure you’ve all got images in your minds of the solo hermit monk training out on a mountainside!

Solo training is an excellent chance for you to engage with your Art in a deliberate, or mindful, way and to take ownership of the material you practice. In the coming weeks I’ll share a range of ideas for engaging with, and taking ownership of, your training in our System.

Today I’ll start by looking at ways we can structure our solo workouts and assess our progress. My first piece of advice is to keep a workout diary. Committing what you’re doing to paper is a fantastic way of tracking progress, remembering what you’ve done, and seeing how things are improving: you’re also creating some sort of accountability to yourself, which is surprisingly powerful. You can note your impressions on how easy/difficult it was, you can note any points you’d like to raise with your seniors at your next online meeting, and you can attempt to figure out what makes elements of your training easier or more difficult at different times of the day/week/month for you. You might want to share your workout diary with trusted friends too.

Secondly you need to be realistic in what you try to achieve in your workouts: you should aim to keep a realistic balance between achievability and challenge. For example I like many of my solo workouts to include 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups across the course of the session. This might mean doing a form ten times, with ten push-ups and ten sit-ups before each repetition of the form. Since ten push-ups/sit-ups is a bit easy for me, I sometimes group the form, push-ups and sit-ups to increase the challenge. For example I might do 40 push-ups, 40 sit-ups, then the form 4 times, then do 30 push-ups, 30 sit-ups, then the form 3 times, then 20/20/2, then finally 10/10/1. Noting the progress in your workout diary allows you to see how things are going, what correlates to a good day versus a bad day, and so on.
My final piece of advice for today relates to the composition of your solo workouts. All sessions should include a period of mental and physical preparation, some exercise of increasing challenge, vigour or complexity, then finally a period of recovery and centring. Provided you’re including these broad elements in each workout there is a fair amount of freedom in what you might include. Be sure to spread what you do out across the week; you’ll get bored or injure yourself if you do too much of any one thing. Typical solo sessions might include:

– Preparing the body by limbering and gentle stretching
– Chigung
– Conditioning (but be sure to follow with chigung for recovery and healing)
– Cardio fitness (e.g. going for a jog, jumping jacks, burpees, push-ups, sit-ups, …)
– External technique drilling (e.g. 1000 strikes)
– Precision technique drilling (e.g. syllabus hand and leg work, with variants)
– Forms
– Doing one side of your ee-pohs, sua chiews, etc etc
– Recovery stretching and mindfulness exercise for centring
– Meditation

Please share any tips of your own here.
Good luck, keep training and stay safe!

— Sifu Leppard