This is the week people take stock, and I have watched the taking of stock talk a lot of perfectly good practices out of existence.
The wrong measures
Whether you can do a position you could not do last January. Whether you are more flexible. Whether you went as often as you meant to.
All three are unreliable. Ranges move slowly and unevenly, some of what limits you is bone and was never going to change, and the frequency you meant to hit was invented in a January mood by somebody with an unrealistic view of their own calendar.
Score yourself against those and most honest people conclude they failed. Then some of them stop.
The right one
How many times did you turn up.
That is it. Not the quality of the sessions, not what you achieved in them, not whether they were the class you had planned. The count.
Forty is a real year. Twenty is a real year. Both are enormously more than zero, and the difference between twenty and zero is much larger than the difference between forty and eighty.
What a year of practice actually looks like from inside
Long stretches where nothing appears to change, punctuated by a week where something you have been unable to do becomes ordinary and you do not notice the transition.
That is the normal shape. If you were expecting steady visible progress, the problem is the expectation.
The studio has been here since 2017
Which is a useful thing to hold on to at the end of a year. I will be here in January and in September, in the busy weeks and the empty ones.
There is no version of this that you have to catch. Come back in March and I will still be here.
The only resolution worth making
Pick the day. Not the number of sessions, the day. Tuesday, or Saturday morning, or whatever survives contact with your actual week.
Then go this week, before you have decided anything, because the year you are about to plan starts better from a class than from a notebook.