Tag: New Year

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News & Updates 12th Jan 2020

Happy new year! Welcome back to Yee’s Hung Ga and a whole new decade of training with us. A new year begins and some new opportunities come with it! Classes in Inverness have returned to normal after the festive period. We also have some exciting news about classes beginning in Forres. The News section of our website has been organized to find articles a little easier. Our Chinese New Year Celebrations are only 2 weeks away and we have a bumper day planned!

Classes

Classes in Inverness have already returned to our normal schedule. New members are always welcome to attend our classes. Tuesday evenings at 7pm are the best classes to start off with. You can find out more information about joining on the, “How Do I Join?” page of this website.

Inverness Timetable

Private tuition classes, for the week commencing 12th-18th January, can be booked and paid for online via this website. We have full availability on Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th plus a few other evening timeslots. Use the following calendar to pick a day and see availability.

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In the North of Scotland, Yee’s Hung Ga has schools in the Highlands, Aberdeenshire and we are now excited to announce that we will be running classes in Morayshire too. From the 7th of February we will be be running two classes every Friday evening in Forres. There will be one class for kids aged between 8 and 12 at 7-8pm and also a class for ages 12 – adult from 8-9pm. All classes will be held in the boys gymnasium at Forres Swimming Pool. We have a page on this website just for Forres classes and we have also set up a Facebook page to share content. Please feel free to share either or both:

Forres Website Page

Forres Hung Ga Facebook Page

News Section

We have spent a bit of time over the festive holidays compiling all our news reports and featured articles. You can now find a list of them all at the top of the News section of this website. They have all been listed chronologically, with the most recent at the top of the list. We have also split the list into two sections. One for our informative articles and another for the news reports and school updates. Have a browse and let us know what you think. Some great reading to start off with is our “Horse Stance” article or if you’re looking for some motivation to get you going, try our article “Motivation: Hints, Tips and Good Practice.” If you are interested in our grading system and the levels you can expect to achieve at Yee’s Hung Ga, take a look at our article, “Do You Have Belts?”

Qigong

If you registered to receive our Winter Qigong Routine, this has been now been sent out. If you would still like to receive it, completely free, or it didn’t arrive in your inbox, you can still sign up to have it sent out to you with the link below:

The Winter Qigong Routine Workshop was also held on the 4th of January. Notes from this workshop will also be compiled and sent out shortly. This should aid practice and give you further information about the philosophy, theory and practice of our routine.

Winter Qigong Routine

We will release our Spring Qigong Routine, mid to late February, so keep an eye out for more information regarding this. If you have signed up for our Winter Qigong Routine, you will automatically be sent the Spring Routine too.

We have set up a Facebook page specifically for all our Qigong information and events. Feel free to ‘like’ this page. Any shares are also appreciated:

Highland School of Qigong

Inverness Chinese New Year Celebrations 2020

The Spring Festival, also know as Chinese New Year, is only two weeks away, literally just around the corner. Our celebrations for Inverness coincides with Yee’s Inverness’s 8th birthday. We have planned to celebrate this by performing lion dance and demonstrations across the city centre.

Dragon Dance inside the Eastgate Centre, Inverness

We start off at Jimmy Chungs Restaurant at 1pm, where we will perform a traditional blessing. We will also perform at the Eastgate Centre from 2pm and we will perform displays and blessings, starting in the food court and encompassing the entire shopping centre. Our next display is at The Victorian Market at 4.30pm where we will perform lion dance displays and blessings there too.

Check out our Facebook event page below. Please share it with your friends to help us spread the word:

Inverness Chinese New Year Celebrations Event Page

Hung Sale

Our sale continues

Despite all the Hints you dropped over Christmas, you STILL didn’t get the hoody that you really wanted. Don’t stress it! Our sale continues throughout January in our online shop. Pop in to see what bargains we still have available.

Coming Soon…

Coming soon….

We have a lot to look forward to this year and a lot of practice to crack on with. We have already kicked the year off on the right foot with our Winter Qigong Routine Workshop. We are planning to introduce our Spring routine around the middle to late February. Keep an eye out for updates on this exciting, and completely free, qigong routine. If you’ve already signed up to our emails then it will be sent out to you automatically. If not, it’s easy to do, just enter your details below.

We will also be hosting a kung fu workshop which will be open to the public as well as regular Yee’s students. If you are interested in martial arts and would like a taster of what the Hung style of kung fu is all about, be sure to subscribe to our emails to ensure that you don’t miss out.

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8th Dec. News & Updates

We continue our preparations for the Chinese New Year, Spring Festival. Our sale continues on our Fu-kit online store. Our latest article is still available for you to read. There are updates to our private tuition and class schedule for this week. We also have more info on our future articles and workshops coming soon.

2020 Spring Festival, Chinese New Year.

Our 2018 Display Team.

We are busy preparing and practicing for the Inverness Chinese New Year Celebrations next month on the 25th of January. You can see our Facebook Event here. This year we have the continued support from The Eastgate Centre and The Victorian Market as well as independent retailers across the city centre.

YHGInverness will be 8!

The Spring Festival coincides, roughly, with our birthday at Yee’s, Inverness. This will be the 8th year that YHGInverness has been open on Inverness High Street. In Chinese culture, the number 8 is regarded as the luckiest number. It’s pronunced ‘Ba’ in Chinese, similar to the word ‘Fa’, which means to be prosperous. It signifies prosperity, success and high social status. We hope that this means it will be a good year for us at Yee’s. 2020 is also the year of the rat. The rat is also particularly auspicious for businesses starting new ventures.

We celebrate our birthday and the Spring Festival together by performing displays to the public. We perform lion dance, dragon dance and kung fu displays. The lions and dragons are often confused with each other. Both dance traditions date back well over a thousand years. Although neither creature existed in ancient China, both are celebrated as mythical, powerful, and auspicious, especially during Chinese New Year and other important events. The main difference between the two is the number of performers. A lion only has two, a head and a tail performer. A dragon is very long and can have 10 performers operating it. Some of the larger dragon parades can have many many more performers. It also looks like a dragon flying in the air. It is raised up on poles and the performers move the dragon around in spirals, usually above the heads of the audience. The lion performers move around on the ground, using stances based around their style of kung fu.

You can keep up to date and find out more information about our Spring Festival display on our Facebook event page. Please feel free to like and share the event.

Hung Sale

‘Hung’ sale continues

Our sale continues in the Fu-kit section of our website. Everything is on sale including dresses, skirts, leggings, shorts, t-shirts, polo shirts, hats, caps, teaware, beanbags, mugs, hoodies and much more! (Excludes uniforms) If you are thinking of buying a gift for your training buddies or loved ones who have a passion for Hung Ga, now is the time! We can only keep prices this low for a short time, so get in there quick. Visit our Fu-kit shop for all sale items.

Classes

Our classes run right through December but we take a short break over the festive period. Our last class will be on Thursday 19th December 2019 we will then open our doors to a new decade on Monday the 6th of January.

Current class timetable

With a new year and start of a new decade on the horizon, many people start to look at what they would like to achieve. Physical health and fitness is usually high up on the agenda. Mental wellbeing is often not as high on the list but it is becoming more of a priority. At Yee’s you can combine training both your mind and your body together. Take a look at our Horse Stance article to see just one method that we use which incorporates your mind, body and spirit. Starting at Yee’s is really easy. Take a look at our “How Do I Start?” Page. In short, just come along to a Monday or Tuesday evening class at 7pm, it is that simple. No money needed. Just a bottle of water and some comfortable clothes to exercise in. If you need some inspiration to help you take that first step, read our “Motivation, Hints & Tips” article. Nobody can make that first move for you but once you do it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it years ago.

If you prefer a more personal touch, you can arrange for a 1-1 training session with Sifu Hepple. An hours session will cover the basic warm-up and stance training exercises. It includes a section of your first form and basic principles of our training methods. For this coming week there are a few private 1-1 tuition slots left. Use the timetable below to book an available slot. You can even pay for it all online, that way there’s no backing out. Just turn up at the right time and we’ll take it from there.

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Coming Soon

Coming soon…

We have a few plans that we are working on at the moment. As mentioned earlier, we are preparing for the Spring Festival next year on 25th of January. We also have some exciting workshops and a brand new Winter Qigong Routine that we are also preparing for. To avoid missing out on details of these exciting opportunities, make sure you enter your email below. If you would like to register your interest in any of these workshops, please email us directly.

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Motivation: Hints, Tips & Good Practice

Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a seasoned warrior, it can sometimes feel difficult to keep yourself motivated, especially with the cold weather, dark nights, the hectic partying over the festive period taking its toll on the body. It can be a bit of a slog getting yourself back into a routine and keeping that routine going. If one of your New Years Resolutions is to get fit and healthy, like many other people, you might be thinking about attending one of our classes. If you are serious about taking it past the thinking stage and really want to attend, (obviously we would highly recommend that you do and you would be most welcome.) what steps can you take to ensure that your first class isn’t also your last? What if even your best intentions aren’t good enough and you run out of steam before you even get up and running? Well we’re not going to lie to you, there’s no magic wand. You still have to actually make it to class (on time!) and you still have to do the work but here’s our top 10 hints & tips on keeping yourself keeping going.

  • #1. Patience is a virtue.

It takes time, don’t be put off if you don’t see results straight away. Looks can be deceiving. You may not see results for a while, especially if you are just starting out. It takes time to learn and to build muscle memory. You may hear claims that you can be a master in a short time, “Learn Kung Fu in 3 Months,” “Become a master in only 2 weeks.” There are some things that you can learn and use straight away but to be a master you first need to learn and that can take time, patience and lots of practice.

Just because you’re not seeing results it doesn’t mean that you are not getting any. You are better today than you were yesterday, try to remember that. Your brain will get better at sending messages to your body and your body will get better at receiving and understanding them. You will actually be able to activate a higher percentage of your muscle fibers, commonly referred to as neuromuscular efficiency. Your coordination will improve, reflexes start to become faster, your breathing and focus will increase. It is a slow process because you are bound by your body’s limitations, just be patient. Don’t look in the mirror after two weeks and wonder why you’re not looking like Bruce Lee or why you’re not managing to quite get the results that you are looking for. Be patient and put in the work, the results will come.

  • #2. Enjoy the journey.

Try not to think of your goals as the soul purpose for training, that’s just a destination. Enjoy the process and get excited about what you are learning. If you enjoy what you are doing you are more likely to keep it up. Get excited. You have to want to do it. If you force yourself, it could have negative results. Instead of looking negatively at things that you are not so good at or find difficult, try and turn your thinking around. Be positive about it and see if you can work at those things, bit by bit, to get better at them. Chip away a little bit every day and they will soon become less of a problem.

  • #3. Don’t rush!

Arrive early, give yourself time. If you leave things to the last minute it gives your mind one more excuse to back out of it. If you have plenty time and are well prepared then you are less likely to change your mind at the last minute. Make sure you have your kit ready the day before. Write a list of all the things that you need to take with you and make sure you check your list every time you get yourself ready. Plan your trip, where you’re going to park the car, how long will it take you to get there? Allow extra time in case of slow traffic or for events beyond your control. If you think ahead and plan in advance you will put yourself in the right frame of mind and it will give you less excuses to not go through with it.

  • #4. Are you keeping track?

Keeping records can help you to remember what you have learned. What did you get out of class today? Did you just go through the motions or did you pick something up? Were there any “light-bulb moments?” Keeping a training diary can help you to remember information and focus on learning. It can also help you to look back and see how far you have come in your training. You can also see what went wrong, should you get injured, and learn from any mistakes.

If you can only make it to the occasional class, it is down to you to make the effort to practice between those classes. Your Sifu will give you advice on what and how to practice. If you just practice bits of what you remember, it may be that you are not paying attention to the right things or worse, practicing them the wrong way. You should know it inside out and back to front.

  • #5. Stick to a plan

Remove the randomness from your training. This is the best way to improve your speed, strength, focus, body weight…. any of your goals in fact. For a beginner it can be tempting to try out all the different classes that are available to you at Yee’s but it is better to pick one or two which you can definitely, regularly make, every week. Stick to them and make them part of your routine. When you feel more confident in what you have learned and you have time available to try out the other classes, then give them a go. Too much, too soon is a recipe for failure.

  • #6. Do it for yourself.

Do it for yourself, not because of anyone else. Come with friends but don’t stay at home just because they decided that they couldn’t be bothered. Their excuses will turn into your excuses. You must do it because you want to do it for yourself. Similarly, try not to compare yourself to others. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses so whilst you might not be as good as the one you are comparing yourself to, they might not be as good as you at other things. They may also be further ahead in their training or have practiced more or many other reasons. If you practice, you will become better. If you practice a lot, you will become a lot better. Sometimes it takes longer for some people so just relax and enjoy the ride.

  • #7. Prevention is better than cure.

Be sensible about how you train. An injury can set you back months, perhaps even years. It may stop you training altogether. It is important in the beginning to take things slowly until your body gets used to it. If you push too hard, you can injure yourself. Ensure that your body is warmed up gently and muscles are stretched before you do your main practice. You will have to do this every time and you will have to factor the time it takes into your practice. Similarly, a cool down routine can help to bring your body back to normal. Again gentle stretching can be useful. After your training your muscle fibers will be warmed up and loose. The sudden shock from the cold outside, especially in the North of Scotland, can cause them to constrict. Problems may result from over tension such as muscular cramps and pain, twisting and knotting of the muscle fibers. Be sensible and have an extra layer of clothing to put on before you head out into the cold. Our training hoodies are perfect for this purpose.

  • #8. If you don’t make time, you’ll never have time.

You need to factor time into your daily routine or weekly schedule. If you don’t have one, make one! Fit it into your lifestyle. It is difficult juggling everything in your life but the bottom line is that if you don’t do it, then you won’t do it. Spare time can seem to be a rarity in modern life and if you really want to do something, you will have to make the effort to make it happen. With kung fu this means making time to practice. In the same way though, if you do nothing but practice then you will not have time for anything or anyone else so you need to find a balance. Make it happen!!

  • #9. Rise to the challenge!

Treat it like a test. Everything that you find hard is an obstacle to you becoming better and achieving your goals. If you clear the obstacle then you are one step closer. If you don’t quite make it then it’s no big deal, just try again. It may take you many attempts. Many, many, many attempts in fact. This is the challenge that you face. Give up, find an easier way or just keep chipping away until you get it. The nature of kung fu means that you kind of do all 3. You try until you get it, you understand the movement. You then find an economy in the movement, simplify it, make it easy. Then, when you get it, you leave it. It’s there now until you need it. You just need to maintain it. Great skill obtained through hard practice.

  • #10. Don’t beat yourself up

You’ve all seen the motivational memes on social media, “Failure is not an option!” “Winners never quit!” ” You haven’t failed until you quit trying!”

Jeezzz….. Give yourself a break, we are only human. Circumstances might mean that you have to put things aside for a while. You might have to give yourself some time to focus on other areas of your life. Family, work, friends, commitments. You know what that is? That’s life! (That’s what people say, You’re riding high in April, Shot down in May) It doesn’t mean that you’ve failed. If you falter or can’t remember or didn’t practice or took the day off, it doesn’t matter. Everyone needs a break. In fact it is advisable to take a break every once in a while. “All work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy!” Have you never seen ‘The Shining’ before?!? It only becomes a problem if you let it. You gave it a shot, you turned up for class and you trained really hard. That’s more than a lot of people ever do. A lot of people never get further than giving it a whimsical thought. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to move like that?” “I wish I was as strong or graceful as that?” But you actually made the effort. That is amazing in itself. (a round of applause please!) If you need a breather, that’s not failing, that’s being realistic. Just don’t let it get to you. Get back in the saddle again and own it!! Take your training to the next level and achieve what you set out to do.

See you in class…

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