41. explorer

 I am an explorer.


Hello! And welcome back to Expedition: Kung fu, I am your host Kayley Burke and today we will be exploring further into the cavernous depths of the Temple of Rotational Tarsal Strikes. What new secrets will we discover today, and what treasures will we take back with us from this palace of discovery?


That's what it feels like every time I'm working on my spinning back kicks and I find out something new. At the beginning of the year my spinning back kick was incredibly high up on my "kicks that I suck at and hate doing and would be very content never doing or thinking about again" list and I knew that I needed to get better at them. For the most part I feel like my main repertoire of kicks have steadily increased in quality as I have moved up the ranks in Kung fu, but this is not true in the case of the spinning back kick (I think I was thinking along the lines of "oh well it's basically the same as a side-heel but you just spin at the beginning so I'll just work on my side-heel instead and it'll eventually get better"). 

Since it got left in the dust in terms of practice I felt like when I finally did start to work on them, I was staring from square one in terms of technique. So I tried to approach it the same way I first tried to learn all the other kicks, (break it way down, get each point of the technique as solid as possible, then start to speed it up until it becomes one solid technique rather than a series of small movements). 

However there are a few major differences in trying to work on this technique now compared to if I had done it at the beginning like all my other kicks. My eye for detail has gotten to be more developed, and I have the knowledge from my other kicks, as well as a more complex vocabulary of motion I can draw from. The latter helped my polish off the rust on this technique fairly quickly, but once it got partially decent, the former immediately started drawing red circles all over my technique: What's happening here? Where is the exact pivot point? When is the exact pivot point? Where are the vectors, and how do they change through the rotation? On and on the stream of questions never stopped and even when I think I have answered them all, 10 more pop up just from one observation! Or add in all the things we talked about just last class about what happens when you start to consider the differences between a true spinning back kick and a spinning side-heel thrust! 

I don't think a single technique has given me so many questions and insight or taught me so much about kung fu as this one has. Like I mentioned in the beginning this kick feels like a huge sanctuary, teeming with secrets, and treasures, and knowledge, and also its fair share of booby-traps, dead-ends, and hidden passages that become obvious once you know where to look. I've got my Indiana Jones hat, khaki shorts, and compass, and I'm excited to keep exploring. 

(seriously, why do explorers always wear so much khaki?)



5/30


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