losing skill

[mixjourneyman]

Winter seems to be well and truly over here in Ontario and I started walking the circle outside again.
To my dismay my circle walking was horrendous and I lost a lot of skill over the winter.
Its weird, since I was training every day in the winter and circle walking at least 4 or 5 times a week.
Anyone have the same experience of losing skill even though you practiced a lot?
What do you think are the causes and remedies to this problem?

[Darthwing Teorist]

Well, since I train only once a week now, I notice how much I suck compared to those who train regularly. But it may also be that with time we become more critical of ourselves and/or we have a false sense of our advancement when we lose touch with the regular practice for extended periods of time.

What is the difference between your winter circle walking and spring circle walking? Why does it feel different now and it didn't during winter?

[mixjourneyman]

Well last spring and summer I had excellent circle walking. I put a lot of time into it every day (40 min - 1 hr/day) and it was coming along swimmingly. I walked outside in all kinds of different conditions everyday and I think that may have had something to do with the skill increase.
The other thing is I hardly ever missed a day.
This winter I walked most days for an average of about 20 minutes and my level went down, but it didn't go down so much that my walking outright sucked. Just enough to be noticeable.
I think I missed about two weeks of practice when I went to Japan. After that it was just hard to get back on track.
Oh well, at least now I have more or less assessed the problem. I can probably start fixing it

[johnwang]

Are you talking about "losing skill" or "losing ability" here? If you can bench press 200 lb 2 days ago but you can't do it today then you are losing ability (strength, endurance, speed, ...). If you can ride bicycle 2 days ago but you can't ride it today then you are losing skill. It's easier to image losing ability but it's very difficult to picture losing skill.

[mixjourneyman]

Maybe it is losing ability, since I can still walk

[Dmitri]

Those feelings come and go sort'a in waves, at least IME, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Sometimes if you don't train at all for a while, and then when you resume you may find out you actually got BETTER, not worse.

If one really has skill, IMO one can't "lose" it -- (decrease in) stamina or strength or flexibility is NOT the the same as "skill" IMHO

[Daniel]

Hey Mix. I´d say that it´s good to be aware of what training-plateaus are, too.

Continous training always being hungry to go forward is a very easy trap for us in the West. Often you hit plateaus in your practice where nothing in particular seems to happen, sometimes for a very long time, and then all of a sudden something major has shifted. Or there´s a small change or a big change in one´s system, skill-level or training. I agree with Dmitri there. To quote the Daoist story: it´s about keeping the strings of the Qin taught just right.

To me, that´s one of the many useful things with studying and working with the Yijing. It gives you a much higher appreciation of what it is like to rest in a state without necessarily being hungry to change it. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. But we are programmed with hunger in the West, so it´s an easy pattern to transfer into one´s training too.

For myself, I feel the change from going out of environments with threat and going back into them. You definitly lose some skills that you are pressed to have in that kind of environment. And there´s a certain amount of adjustment where your skill in adjusting can become critical to your well-being. But you also need to have the ability of the dimmer-switch in this as in everything else in the training.

Glad to hear that you still can walk. I heard that Ma Gui was forced to do the crab-walk, the poor man.



D.

Sarcasm. Oh yeah, like that´ll work.

[DeusTrismegistus]

My guess is you haven't lost anything, it just feels that way. Once you reach a certain point you will feel like you are doing worse when you are in the middle of breaking through a new point in training. This isn't you actually getting worse but your perceptions are changing as they go through a period of refinement for lack of a better word. What was once balanced, is now unbalanced, what was once centered is now uncentered, what was once powerful is now weak. Because you can feel the imperfections that were always there but you couldn't feel before.

[johnwang]

My guess is you haven't lost anything.

Sometime is not because you start to lose your "ability" but because you start to concern the safety of your own body. May be because you have just realized that you are no longer as young as you would like to think you are. One day I got on top of the roof to help a kid to get his basket ball. When I was young, I had no problem to jump down from 20 feet height roof top. That day I didn't want to take any chance to get myself injury, I claimed down as anybody else would do. I may not lose my jumping ability but I do lose my courage to take unnecessary risk.

[Wanderingdragon]

Journey, my brother, I know I'm being a true jerk here ... but how can you train form at lightning speed if your core basics aren't strong enough to carry you through a layoff. On the other side of that coin, we've all been there, this is simply an opportunity, as you have already realized, to check your self, get it right and recommit to honest training. Now that you feel how wrong it is, you will recognize it more readily when it's right.

[Kurt Robbins]

Soon your hair will fall out and you will become impitent
Just kidding - It might be as simple as your body/brain dealing with new environments.

[gretel]

there are all sorts of reasons why one day one's practice is terrible and a few days later it's pretty good. it's helpful to think of simple things like whether you are getting enough sleep, is your diet healthful? Are you coming down with a cold or the flu or getting over some sickness? if you are practicing outside in cold weather, have you warmed up your core before going into your forms?
and then there are what seem like setbacks but are really consolidations of learning something at a new level. you were doing it "good enough" and now you know you have to sharpen it up and do it better. maybe your teacher has challenged you in a new way. you have to go back to "thinking" too hard until you learn it in the body.
then there are the plateaus. George Leonard in Mastery said we have to learn to love the plateaus. very hard to do.

gretel

[JusticeZero]

Have to agree with JW here. I lost some skill this winter from that - I hadn't been able to move around enough to train much, then when I got some clear space, I tried to throw myself down and the instinctive hesitation from before I started was back.
I flung myself around a parking lot for an hour or so and it was gone. You may have lost your nervous system's credulity that you actually have the skills you have for the moment. That and being aggravated by your rustiness. Just push through it with a vengeance.

[lazyboxer]

Sometimes what one believes to be skill is just acclimatization and habituation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclimatization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation

The greater the acquired skill, the quicker the mean time to recovery. Look on this as no more than a golden opportunity for revision and renewal.

[johnrieber]

mix, it could just be that you're walking the circle outside (on maybe uneven ground?) instead of inside, and you've been spoiled by architecture. it could also be that it's still cold enough outside where you are to make you tense up a little (and rise and not be quite rooted), because you're used to walking in climate-controlled comfort.

or it could be something else.

don't worry. you'll be fine.