Every January more people enrol than in any month except September. Every March there are fewer people in the hall than there were the previous December. This does not happen because people are weak - it happens because a January decision is almost always set up in a way that cannot survive.
Here are four things that, in practice, separate the people still training in March.
One: pick the slot that survives your bad week
The mistake nearly everyone makes is choosing the slot that suits their good week. Tuesday at six sounds excellent, right up until the week with three meetings, a sick child and the car in for repair.
The question is not when it suits you when everything runs smoothly. The question is which slot would survive the worst week of the month. For many people that is the 6 a.m. class - not because it is pleasant, but because at six in the morning nobody has a meeting and nobody calls. For someone else it is Saturday morning. It is rarely the slot that looks most logical when you sign up.
Two: twice a week, not four times
The January decision is almost always too ambitious. Someone who has done nothing for six months signs up for four sessions a week. Three weeks go fine. In the fourth they miss one, in the fifth two, in the sixth they stop, because it feels like it has already failed.
Twice a week is the floor below which it is not worth it, and the ceiling you should not break through at the start. Two sessions a week is eight a month, enough for the body to progress and few enough to survive a week where everything goes wrong. If in three months you want more, you will know. Nobody has ever quit because twice a week was too little.
Three: decide once, not every month
Monthly training carries a hidden cost. Every month you decide again whether to pay for the next one - and every decision is an opportunity to say no. At the end of February, with grey weather outside and pressure at work, that decision goes the wrong way very easily.
A three-month block removes it. This is not really about money, though the block costs less than three separate months. It is that in February you are no longer choosing. The decision was made in January and holds until April, when the weather outside is different and you are a different practitioner.
Four: build a threshold lower than an hour
Everyone who trains long-term has something they do when the class is not possible. With us it is usually one of three things: a few minutes standing in a stance, one Qi Gong exercise, or five minutes of breathing.
This is not a substitute for training and we do not claim it is. It is something else: a bridge that stops a missed class becoming a missed week. The difference between the person who missed Tuesday and came on Thursday and the person who missed Tuesday and never returned is often only that the first one did ten minutes of something at home on Wednesday, and kept the sense that they were still training.
What happens in March
If you make it to March you are through the hardest part. Not because training gets easier, but because you stop deciding. Tuesday evening is Tuesday evening, the way Thursday is the day you collect the child - you do not weigh it up, you simply go.
That is roughly ten weeks away. Everything written above exists only to get you through them.
