Year-End Review: Training Involution #137

From Christmas Eve through New Years Day I don’t do much training.  Just my forms (Star of Ishtar, Fool’s Journey and my old Korean Karate forms) and my health maintenance stuff (grip health, therapy rollers and bands, etc.).

You don’t have to take the holidays off like me.  Push through if you want.  But I highly recommend you take at least two weeks off training per year — preferably in two, one-week chunks.   I usually take off 12/24 – 1/1 and then a second week in the late summer for my annual beach trip to OBX.

But, whether you’re on a break this week or not,  you should take some time to complete a Year-End Review.

If you don’t review your year, how are you going to do better in the next?

I just finished my new Action Plan for 2019 — you can look at it here.  What I do is print this thing out once per month and paste it into my training journal.  Any unrealized goals from the prior month get moved the new sheet, and all month long I put the hash marks in the “(     )” slots to keep track of how I’m doing on the daily/weekly/monthly tasks.  Here’s a pretty thorough rundown of my organizational method over on my Patreon page.

Year-End Review: Training Involution #137

Most people set New Year’s resolutions that are largely arbitrary and then fail to establish any performance metrics.  Don’t do that.  Set meaningful goals with valuable payoffs and then monitor your performance to insure progress.

1. Get out your training log and spend some time reviewing your entries.  You do keep a training journal, right?  Training journals are not optional in Cabal Fang martial arts.  Look, we don’t have very many rules, but keeping a training journal is one of them.  So if you aren’t journaling, go get a spiral note book or something and start writing stuff down so you can do a year-end review next December.
2. Take as much time with your review as you feel is sufficient, necessary and/or available.  Might be fifteen minutes or three hours — whatever is necessary and sufficient to make sensible conclusions and set meaningful goals.
3. What did you well in 2018?  What did you do poorly?
4. What are you going to do better in 2019?  
5. How are you going to do better in 2019? 
6. What are your performance metrics going to be?

If you’re going to make 2019 your best year ever, the future is now.