The second most common question before joining - right after the one about clothes - is about time. People imagine a martial art demands daily training, and because they know they cannot manage that, they never start at all.
So here is the number, plainly. Twice a week for ninety minutes is enough for real, steady progress. That is under three hours a week - less than many people spend on a single television series.
Why twice
Once a week is not enough for the body to build a habit. Eight days pass between sessions and each time you start roughly where you left off. Progress is possible, but so slow that most people give up.
Twice a week is the threshold where things change: a gap of three or four days is short enough for the body to keep what it learned and long enough to recover. From a third session onward progress is faster, but the difference between once and twice is far greater than the difference between twice and three times.
Training you can sustain for three years beats training you can sustain for three months - even if the second looks more intense on paper.
What about at home
Home practice is not compulsory and nobody will check on it. But it is the cheapest way to get more out of the same two hours in the hall. Ten minutes between sessions - a few Qi Gong breathing exercises, one stance, some joint mobility - keeps the body in contact with the movement.
Ten minutes every other day does more than an hour once a fortnight. That is not a slogan; it is what every teacher observes who watches the same people for long enough.
How it fits into a week
Three things that work for our students:
- A fixed slot, not “whenever there is time”. Training with no place in the week never gets one. Put it in the calendar like a meeting.
- A morning slot if your evenings are unpredictable. At six in the morning nobody extends your meeting or moves dinner. The most reliable students are often the morning ones.
- Come back after breaks without a reckoning. Everyone misses a week or two - illness, holidays, a deadline. The only real mistake is not returning afterwards.
What to expect from two hours a week
In the first month you get used to the warm-up and begin to understand the basic stances. Within three months balance and mobility change noticeably, and most people report better sleep and less tension in the shoulders. In the first year you learn your first forms and get a feel for the system - not as a finished product, but as a path you could walk for decades.
None of this asks you to put training ahead of family, work or rest. It asks only that you give it a place - twice a week, at Ziherlova 44 in Ljubljana.
