YMAA Retreat Center and Crossfit

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YMAA Retreat Center and Crossfit

Postby Gh0st1 » Fri Oct 05, 2007 9:58 am

Hi!

It's been a long time since I posted. But I had some thoughts running in my head and I wouldn't feel right not to share them in a form of a humble suggestion to try and do my part making the Retreat center a success.

Worrying about the physical fitness aspect of the training in the YMAA Retreat Center, I tried to think how it could be optimized in that environnment. My concerns about the physical fitness in the Reatrea Center is that although essential it can be time consuming. More time in physical fitness training means less time practicing the martials arts, qigong, meditation, and all the other parts of the Reatreat Center training program. Going on with the thought process, I think from what I read in different interview done with Master Yang, that his main focus is teaching and passing his martial art culture knowledge rather than his physical fitness knowledge.

With that in mind, I went to look for the best optimised way to train the body physicaly to gain muscle mass, strenght, speed, power and balance in a functionnal way. It means I was looking for the best option that give the best results out of the time and energy put in, with as less equipment as possible to keep it simple so people can train mostly everywhere.

The two most common option when it comes to physical fitness are as follow :

1) Basic simple exercices, like push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, jumps, holding stances, along with performing high intensity martial art sequences.

This first option is great for a basic general level of fitness, to keep someone healthy and functional. It does not require any equipment or very little which is good when you train in a remote area. The downside with these exercices is that at some point there is quickly less progression into the fitness level and you kinda stagnate. Because doing 300 push-ups doesn't mean you get more muscles and power, it means your muscles get more endurance. Endurance is great, but it's only one part or aspect of physical fitness. Also all these exercices even though they are simple, they are time consumming when you have to do a whole lot of them. At the Retreat Center, time with the instructors or with the Master is precious and limited.

2) Gym training, with machines and free weights like barbells, dumbbells doing exercices like Squat, Deadlift, Benchpress, Curls and running on a bicycle or treadmill.

This second option is great for building muscle mass or strenght and even endurance. Although those exercices are not real functionnal movements, which mean even if you bench press a really heavy weight, you might have difficulty pushing something out of the way in front of you in a day to day situation. Most of the time exercices with machines and barbells/dumbbells isolate muscles group to work them better. What you get is the muscle quickly develop himself and get stronger. But the muscles don't get to work together, meaning you don't get as much stronger in functionnal movement as you would in your isolated exercise. Because in day to day tasks we naturaly try to move and use all the muscles possible to make our life easier. Also gym training take some space and alot of specialised equipment which is difficult to manage in remote area. Not to say that a gym workout is really time consuming, about an hour in average.

Each have its Pros and Cons but I'm pretty sure the plan as of right now at the Retreat Center is to go with option one and rely on basic exercises that require no equipment.

But! Some people thought of this already with a similar thought process that I did (I'm assuming) and they studied fitness, experienced things to come up with the way to train the physical body that gives the best results. Because at the end of the day, results is the reason of physical fitness training (or at least for most people). They came up with a way to train physical fitness that takes the best out of both earlier training options (basic exercises vs gym training) and gives tremendous result. It's called "CrossFit".

CrossFit is a way to train that require some equipment but minimal ones, easily accessible and a takes a minimal amount of time to produces"face melting results". Work outs involves high intensity functionnal exercises training of 20-30 minutes a day. Many law enforcement, military, fire fighters, mixed martial artists, train CrossFit because it's simple and fantasticly efficient.

Exercises always vary and always change, but some typical exercises include medicine ball squat to wall throw, trusters, gymnastic rings push-ups / pulls-ups, rope climbing, rowing, running, lunge, back extention, etc...

I'm getting to where it meets YMAA Retreat Center project. CrossFit is more like an "Open Source" training philosophy to borrow a computer expression. The CrossFit community freely share all the knowledge and publish lots and lots of different workouts on the internet. They have an online Workout Of the Day, so people can visit the website, take not of the daily workout and take 20-30 of their time to do it. They even don't have to make their workout up. Experts do it for them. The most interesting parts is that they offer seminars to teach people so they can train and coach other people in CrossFit training. Just like YMAA, CrossFit wants to spread the knowledge so that people can train in a more effective way and enjoy a better life. Because of that they share something with YMAA, and that's where both of them have somthing in common.

My suggestion would be to try and talk to the CrossFit officials and see if there could be a collaboration for the YMAA Retreat Center where CrossFit expert trainers would take care of the physical fitness of the students with something tailored to Chinese Martial Arts, and all the YMAA instructors could focus their energy on the YMAA training curriculum program. From what I read CrossFit community are willing to experience new things and put there "way of training physical fitness" to any challenge possible to make sure that only the best methods and exercises survives. There is definitly a possibility of a Win - Win situation without really involving money or business relationship.

I honestly feel that CrossFit would be the most efficient and beneficial way to train physical fitness at the YMAA Retreat Center to optimize every one's time, especialy the instructors and the Master.

Here is the link to the official Website of the CrossFit community with daily update and alot of interesting information :

http://www.crossfit.com/


I would appreciate an open discussion on the subject as well as David thoughts along with other people involved in the YMAA Retreat Center. Please feel free to throw your thoughts/opinion or experience in.

Max
Gh0st1
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