what would you say the optimal training time, per day, would be?
i usually wind up training about 90 min per day, sometimes more. a lot of the time,
i feel this isn’t enough.
in all reality, we only have so much time per day.
how do we know when our training is enough?
It’s hard to know. You cannot compare yourself to anyone else, and it’s easy to over do it.
You just have to trust yourself. If you get to practice and you just can’t stand to be there, go home. If you are home and feel like you should be training, go train.
It’s your life. Live it.
Once you get a skill, you have it. You’re timing may be off, and you may get rusty, but you still have it. Work as many skills as you can into 90 minutes, develop the skill, then train something else.
MY ideal time of day is about 7:30pm or around 8:30/9am.
Unfortunately my classes are at 8:30pm, and they last past 11pm and I’m dead tired by the end of it. I get up about 5:45am so I dread those mornings.
But the classes I teach are all on Saturdays and they start at 9:30am. And I really like that time.
I practice for about 2 hours when I’m by myself, and that really wears my a$$ out. It’s defiantely shower time at the end. (Well, to be honest, I stretch big time at the end of my session and I almost always fall asleep on the floor after I finish the “plough”.)
I don’t think enough is ever enough. If you train 3 hours a day really hard I don’t think you will be as good as if you train 6 hours a day really hard. Train as much as your schedule and your body will let you.
JWT
Train at least 1,5 hour 4 times in week.
But the best time is 24 hour, if you can do it (nobody can).
Well…
I recently had a revelation regarding my training. If you want to read on, let me fill you in.
I work 5 days a week, 7 hours a day.
3 of those days, I work an additional 3 hours in the evenings. So training on those days is extremely tough, ie. I have about quarter of an hour. So I go through some basic technique. Then I do about 10mins qigong when I got home and then pass out.
On the two weekdays when I’m not working, I could (should?) spend the whole evening training, but i don’t. I spend about an hour doing exercise (quality circuit type training) and the rest of the time with my girlfriend. Oh, and 10 mins qigong before bed.
On the weekend I’ll do a run, some bagwork and some weights.
I also try and get to a lesson once a week.
Recently I had a bit of a **** day, when I was thinking “Oh my god I’m not training enough etc.” I was worried, actually WORRIED, that I was not training all day every day. My head was spinning because I wasn’t as conditioned as a UFC competitor, and I saw this as my failure. And then I read something on Wong Kiew Kits website -
‘Kung Fu is meant to enrich your life, not enslave it.’
That one phrase has liberated me from the self imposed pressure of thinking I’m not training enough. My girlfriend said to me, “its like your cramming every night for an exam you don’t have to take”, and she is so right.
So now I realise that I have a life outside of Kung Fu, and my Kung Fu practise helps me to enjoy it. Rather than Kung Fu practice being my life and me not enjoying my life because I’m not training enough.
Neptunesfall - 90 minutes a day is plenty. Do you need to work? Because if you do and you’re doing more than 90mins when you get home, then where is the rest of your life?
But then again, it depends whther you want to become a master, compete in professional tourneys or just have a fulfilling life and be able to defend your family. I’m the latter. 
thanks for the replies, guys. eventually, i want to attain sifu status and be able to teach.
so, the more and harder i train, the better teacher i will be. i know how to teach people,
i just need to learn (master) the material. there is always a sense of urgency about it too.
as with everything i do, i want to learn it yesterday.
it keeps me going.
kung fu does enrich my life, but it is my responsibility to learn it.
i have an obligation to myself to learn it to the best of my abilities.
I also have that nagging conscious(sp) of not training enough. I train 2 hours a day 4 days a week and 2 days a week for 1 hour. An error I made in my training is mistaking intensity for quality. I am now slowing down and concentrating on each movement in the technique, applying as much power as possible.
Train as much as you can, but pace yourself too
Train many long hours and let it consume you during the times of your life when you are able to do that, and train just enough to maintain it during the other times of your life when you can’t. Modern life gets in the way of being able to train like a temple monk all the time. If you are training for a tournament or focused on some event that you really need to push hard to super polished and ready for, or, if you can just afford to do this at this time, then go full out, train as much as you can physically and mentally stand. There have been years that I focused way too much of my time on training kung fu, and I am now glad I did that and feel like I made good progress while I could. I cannot keep up that pace now, because of long work hours, family, etc…I usually now train enough to maintain a well-balanced and enjoyable life, unless I’m getting ready for a tournament. Sometimes its okay to ‘coast’ for awhile don’t beat yourself up over it. I’ve seen too many people burn themselves out and stop enjoying it and then quit, because they wanted too much too fast and tryed to force themselves into an unbalanced and unrewarding lifestyle, then it just becomes a chore like a sh!tty job and the enthusiasm is gone. And then the dream is gone too. If you want to stay in it for the long run, you’ve got to pace yourself, this is a marathon, not a 50 yard dash.
Good luck with your training, keep up a good healthy pace an hopefully your goals will be achieved!
my sifu says that 15 minutes everyday is better than a couple hours a couple times a week.
(this doesn not include any physcial work (including bag time) or chikung though.)
his reasoning is that you can only stay focused for so long. after that the benifit you get out of training drops off significantly. but if you take full advantage of that focused time every single day … even if it’s just for 15 minutes .. . you will make allot of progress.
of course he doesn’t say to limit your training to 15 minutes … just however long you are fully there. not thinking about all the other bullsh!t we have to deal with in life. for me this is usually a half hour to fourty five minutes.
im usually in the basement about 2 - 3 hours every day, but if i don’t have that amount of time to work out because i had to do something else i cut out most of the physical work and just train and do breathing sets.
my normal routine is around 5 mins free flow to warm up, 10 - 15 mins streatching, 5 mins basic weapons, 5 mins speed drills, 10 mins bag work, 30 mins technique work (only a couple techniques or just stances/kicks/blocks/etc though, i don’t just run through 150 things i learned just to say i did them), 15 mins chi kung, 15 mins free flow, 45 mins weights (if it’s my day to lift).
if i dont have time that day i just do pushups and situps, a little bag work, a little technique work, chikung, and free flow.
if strenght training or conditioning isn’t your thing anyway i think you could make excellent progress in any are just by not missing class and devoting 15 mins to an hour to it every single day. i really think you get more out of training a little every day than training allot a couple times a week.
of course my sifu has always trained like a madman, so maybe it’s just another example of the man tryin to keep a brotha down.
From experience, you often get more value from quality than quantity.
During my late teens I often trained anything up to 5 hours every day: what I realise now is that all I was doing was getting sloppy by the second hour, overtraining, overloading my joints, … Nothing of which is very productive.
By practicing 1 hour per session now I find that I maintain maximum intensity, perfect form, I recover properly and I go easier on my ageing 
joints. Also as you get older it’s good to have days off from stretching/kicking/stances work as it is quite strenuous on the joints. So I usually do the following (everything at 100% intensity):
Monday - 1h, MA basics (kicks,punches, stances) + stretching
Tuesday - 1h, weights (lower body + abs) + stretching
Wednesday - 1h, MA forms and acrobatics + stretching
Thursday - 1h, weights (upper body)
Friday - 1h, MA bag work + sparring + stretching
Saturday - rest
Sunday - rest
Before each workout I usually do a 20 minutes aerobics warmup consisting of rope skipping, jumping drills, jogging, etc.
So adding for a few drink breaks etc it all adds up to 1.5h per day, 5 days per week. In my opinion this is ideal to avoid sloppy technique, damaged joints, overtraining, etc. As a bonus, it also fits much more easily in a modern lifestyle with jobs/school, family/girlfriends, etc.
Wall