Bruce Lee's Biography
I'm currently reading Bruce Lee's biography by Bruce Thomas. The fact that Bruce is so famous and that he is linked to Ip Man and Wing Chun make his story fascinating for me. What I particularly like is his single minded focus on improving himself.
Reading this book in bed last night, I reached the point where the author was describing Bruce's life in the early 1960s in Seattle. At that time, Bruce was training more than 40 hours a week! I had to read that bit again. 40 hours a week. That kind of time investment equates to more than the average job. At this point in his life, Bruce was a student at University, and so could afford this kind of time investment but that doesn't take anything away from how big a commitment this was.
If I could dedicate 40 hours a week to Wing Chun myself, I think I would struggle to fill the time. At the moment, I'm spending a lot of time on Chum Kiu, but even an hour of that is mind numbing. I would certainly have to get creative with the exercises I currently perform and devise variations of them. This way I could get the core benefit of the principle being practised, and the variation would make it more interesting.
From what I gather about Bruce Lee's martial arts history, he spent 6 years training Wing Chun with Ip Man and then spent some time intensively studying other styles of kung fu, including praying mantis. During his teenage years he had almost daily fights, and these too would have contributed to his martial arts experience. When he started his own training school, I'm not sure that he was still seeing a teacher of his own. I know that he would travel around and look at other kung fu masters, see what they did, question them and then take from them what was useful, or refine it himself until it was. This knowledge and also the knowledge that Bruce Lee created his own art (Jeet Kune Do) implies that he must have done his own experimentation with martial arts and developed his skill independently of a teacher. Through trial and error with the students he trained one to one, he was constantly refining his technique.
It wasn't long before Bruce became keenly interested in building mucle for speed, power and endurance, so I'm sure that many of those 40 hours would have been devoted to working out for functional fitness.
To maximise my training, the first thing I must do is identify 'wasted' time in my daily routine, with a view to replacing it with training time. For me this is difficult because nearly everything I do has a specific purpose. I. Am. A. Robot. There are some areas I can address though.
Sleepless Nights
Often I go through periods where I find it hard to drop off to sleep at night. I go to bed and I just lie there, restlessly becoming more awake with every minute, even though I was tired when I first went to bed. This is wasted time! One option is to put back my bedtime by one hour and in the extra time do some Wing Chun practice. I don't think this would make me too tired because some nights I've lain there awake for a few hours and I coped the following day. Going to bed later would probably have the benefit of making me so tired that I did sleep properly.
The Curse Of The Internet
I love the internet. I spend loads of time researching things and contributing to a few forums. While this is not wasted time, I could certainly cut back on the amount of time I spend on the internet without causing any serious detriment to my life. For instance, when I get home from work tonight at 6:45 I'll switch my pc on and check my mail, write some posts on assorted forums and then get ready to go to my Wing Chun Class at 7:45. That's an hour right there! I don't necessarily need to do what I do in that hour. I could actually rationalise my time and maybe just do that in work time (naughty, I know) and the nights when I don't go to class.
I finish work at 17:30 but stay until 18:00 so that I miss the rush hour traffic. In that half hour I use the internet. I could, instead, use that time for Wing Chun. There's hardly anybody around, so I can find a quiet place to practise without feeling self conscious. That's 2.5 hours extra a week.
As with many things, though, it's a balancing act. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights are free and I could train then, but I would have to sacrifice other things like working on my websites, cleaning the house etc. I can't just give up everything else and devote myself to Wing Chun. Unless I get married 
Get To My Wing Chun Class Early
My Wing Chun class starts at around 20:15 and I get there at 20:00. Invariably there is a spare pair of hands lying around that I can chi sau with and I always make good use of them. Instead of taking this haphazard approach to getting extra chi sau practice, I'm going to ask my kung fu brothers (ha ha, that term makes me laugh!) if they want to regularly arrive 30 minutes early to practise. That's another hour a week extra (the Saturday class goers are a little more erratic with their attendance - I shall address this in another post!).
