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ZMQ player? You need The Hot Zone

Last year I released a ZMQ form tutorial, a Vimeo 1+ hour duration thing. YAWN! Zero Fox Given, I know. I understand. After all, how many zillions of Tai Chi form tutorials are there (for free I might add) on YouTube? Including even my own contribution on the Ben Lo precision teachings of this form, with a modest-but-respectable 86K views. So yeah, I get it. You don't need no steeking Hot Zone!

But actually you do. You just haven't realized it yet. How can I say that? Oh. You know why I'm saying that. You have total clarity. The thing is that, despite the extreme niceness of almost all my reader and viewer and seminar attendee populations, there's always (in response to a post like this) some dumbass who has to bleat his thing: "This asshole is just pure SEO sales scam top to bottom." Meaning me. Listen up dipshits: I was an early BTC buyer, never seller lol. I've worked a total of over three decades for IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, and now a billionaire funded valley mini-startup. Do you really think I need your fucking 12 bucks or whatever my Hot Zone film is (I don't even remember the price). Do you?

It's not about the sale. I charge because I must, because I believed my teacher (Ben Lo) when he told me that a condition of his granting me teaching authority was that I gotta charge for all teaching in any form. He was right, people don't value and won't practice what they haven't sunk at least a token chunk of themselves into. 

Now, impossible as it may be for those assholes to conceptualize, there are in fact things in human life beyond money! And those two things are: Time and Mind. And that's where the Hot Zone method comes in. Think about it, you've put a lot of work into learning, remembering and practicing your ZMQ37 Tai Chi. But you aren't getting the most from the practice. That's because the form as normally taught and practiced is only a teaser. It's only the skin and hair. The experiences and internal conditioning you can harvest from this style, this method, are totally out of this world inter-galactically amazing, but only if you sink your fangs deeper into it. Suppose somebody gave you a perfectly fresh-plucked, gorgeous giant watermelon, just off the vine, peak of the August watermelon season, one of those food-of-the-gods seedless melons - and you said thanks and then ... you just licked it. That's all! Without cutting it open, you just licked it. Even licked it a few times a day, morning and night, LMAO!

You wouldn't be accessing the Full Melon Experience. And that's what almost everybody is doing with our genius ZMQ37 form. You need to go deeper. There are two ways to go deeper with this form:

(1) Train under Benjamin Lo on daily basis for an extended period. Yes, with him right there near you, for some reason you will feel motivated to do the basic holding of poses, any and every pose, and even every transition, that Ben's regimen required. That'll work for you! But notice one thing: I used the past tense just now. This was the best way but it's also no longer possible in this vale of tears. The Teacher has moved on to greener pastures. 

(2) Acquire, learn and follow The Hot Zone, which presents a slightly modified and extended version of the ZMQ37 form. 

Now you're like fuck that 2! You don't need no steeking Hot Zone! You know perfectly well that Ben emphasized holding poses, No Burn No Earn right! You shore don't need me to tell or sell you that. But actually you do. 

See the thing is, you might know how Ben taught and you may think you are replicating that on your own, but you aren't. It's just not practical or even possible. You'd need him back with you to simulate it. And The Hot Zone is no substitute for the full Lo Experience either. But it's absolutely the next best thing, far superior to just LARPing yourself with some half assed self paced occasional holding a Single Whip a beat or two longer than usual, til you get bored, distracted, or stressed and flow conveniently into the next pose as you do your daily form. You need explicit, programmed, invariant control of two dimensions: Time and Mind. The Hot Zone provides that essential root matrix. 

In the Hot Zone, I present a version of the ZMQ form wherein certain poses and processes are extended in one or more dimensions:

• duration
• repetition
• symmetry

I know what you are thinking. Tons of people have done or could do that mucking around with the form! 易如反掌！After all, to take just one element there, symmetry, tons of people in Taiwan and elsewhere have spun up a 'mirror image' version of the form to compensate for its supposed imbalance in poses that only occur on one side, such as Single Whip, so they just do the mirror image version of the whole form. That's incredibly shallow and simple-minded, attempting corneoretinal surgery with a meat cleaver. That's just licking the watermelon on both sides. 

And as for duration, no it isn't just a matter of 'trying to hold longer' now and then on any pose you feel like doing it for. You need a method that reins in your monkey mind and time-aligns your practice of strategically selected key poses/movements for maximum intensity energy with minimum time and mental load. 

The Hot Zone is that regimen for ZMQ Tai Chi. Only certain key poses/movements are selected out for the 'depth work' in those 3 dimensions about, not the entire form. For most of the form you just do your normal practice. It's only when you hit the seminal Hot Zone poses/movements that you shift briefly, for a constrained by intense, naturally time bounded, and symmetric Hot Zone mode. This is how you can at least approach Ben Lo intensity and results without him there to press you. The method also does not require external devices like iPhone timers or anything, nor does it interrupt your one single daily start-to-finish enactment of your form practice. It massively intensifies your same practice. 

The Hot Zone practices are fully and naturally embedded within the ZMQ form, and are 100% aligned to the Ben Lo practice principles. But the Hot Zone practice principles, combined with the form modifications/extensions (all 100% Ben Lo compliant) are the knife that will open up the ZMQ melon to your amazed eyes and tongue. 

The Hot Zones in this method are based on fully exploiting the Single Leg Operation principles upon which all of Tai Chi is founded anyway. Anyway I'm not going to explain all the details here. It's all in the movie. (Actually not all, I go still go even way deeper on any of the Hot Zone extended poses/moves but the movie was long enough as is).

Understand: some people have gotten the Hot Zone and just focused on the pose/movement extensions and modifications. Purely physical orientation. No! That's only half the Hot Zone story. The other half is the practice method that applies to those extended poses and movements. The Hot Zone practice method facilitates your application of time and mind, in a practical way, onto your outer practice. The Hot Zone is a big advance in the practice of ZMQ. Check it out if interested.