way too many commas

"Does a strike always have to have the intent of an expansion?" This was one of the questions I asked in my one-on-one at the beginning of this week, and it came about because I was practicing Lao Gar with the intent of trying to feel the contractions and expansions in each move. Right away during that first panther fist I felt like my energy was squeezing/shrinking/tightening. The passive eye-for-detail warning lights started going off in my brain so I stopped to try to think some things through. a) Until this moment I had always assumed a strike should align with an expansion, pushing your energy and force into something else, but maybe some techniques work better if they are done as a contraction? If so, this could be an exciting new way to think about my intent during a strike? b) I was doing it wrong and it shouldn't feel like a contraction at all, and my internal intent would need to be adjusted.  Sifu Brinker explained to me that an expansion should be defined by t...

 I don't want to write this blog. Which is exactly the reason I'm forcing myself to write it. It's only the second month and I've already started to fall behind on my monthly goals (which is one of my personal) requirements for this year. I thought I would have made it a bit farther into the year before something like this happened, but lo and behold all it took was the switch from one month to another and it started to crumble. For the whole first week of March I didn't even have it on my radar until I went to input my numbers for the week and realized I made zero progress. Swallowing my disappointment, I resolved to do better next week. Still no change and another bout of shock when I put in my numbers for the week. On the 12th I wrote in my spreadsheet where the hours should have gone "doing absolute terrible with this one need to address it in a blog ASAP" next week, no hours logged, no blog and just like that mediocrity swiftly snapped it's jaws c...

 Last Wednesday I went to my first Tai Chi class! I had done a tiny bit of Tai Chi back at the beginning of the lockdown when the virtual classes were available but other than that I had never touched it. I had a couple of thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head so I figured I'd write a quick blog to document them. 1) Sifu Dennis was demonstrating a handful of techniques and I was doing my best to follow along and mirror her movements. As I was shadowing her I realized that I have never applied my eye for detail like this before. Sometimes we hear phrases like "think about how your instructor is moving, do you feel the way they look?" Having the opportunity to do the techniques simultaneously was very interesting because normally I am running through a checklist of what my own body is doing, where are my hips pointing, how are my feet aligned, where is the starting point for my wrist rotations? But since I was so focused on watching I didn't even feel lik...

This blog ended up being one of those "figure it out as you write it" so forewarning my thoughts are a bit disjointed in this one. This year while I am building my weapons form I am noticing that I'm focusing more on the flow within a move compared to the flow between moves like I was last year. Having a single sword last year gave me a focal point for my energy and I would try to move the rest of my body in a way to support that. But now that I have two swords the energy and flow isn't as obvious to me. It could also be that each individual technique has a lot more going on, trying to use both arms simultaneously so that a single move almost becomes a mini form in and of itself? Where as before I would do a slash, or a block, now slashes, blocks, spins, sweeps and strikes sometimes all happen in a single move. Which is why the flow within a single technique feels more obvious this time around? It could also be that both my swords are fairly light. Last year my heavy ...

During one of our discussions in the second degree brown belt class last Saturday my brain threw a question completely out of left field at me. Sifu Brinker was describing how flow and power does not come from executing a technique with overly specific instructions (i.e. "ok I'm going to move my arm 98 degrees to the left then extend my elbow in 3.5 seconds then...") and my brain grabbed that idea and ran with it, almost immediately asking "COULD YOU TEACH A ROBOT KUNG FU?????" I made a note of it then left the idea alone because I knew as soon as I started to think about it there is no way I would be able to refocus on the actual discussion (which I very much wanted to hear). Once I allowed myself to think about it my first answer was:  probably , and it would most likely be better than us at it because you could measure out the timing and distancing, all things we have to constantly adjust and practice, to a microscopic level, and the robot would be able to ex...

Between it floating around in the back of my mind for almost a week, reading sifu Brinker's blog post about it today, and sifu Rybek encouraging us to write a blog after tonight's meeting, I think all three created the mental conditions that were just right for me to have a lightbulb moment about the knifehand-long punch-open roundhouse/(dragons whip)-spinning back kick section in da mu hsing II, and I'm very excited about it, I mean, jumping up and down punching the air excited.  My initial question about this sequence that kind of kickstarted this whole thing was that I was having trouble feeling any flow or power from that spinning back kick at the end of the sequence. When sifu Brinker explained that the energy flows just like it does in the knifehand-punch 1) it blew my mind that the spinning back kick was meant to be connected like that!! and 2) I thought I had an answer to my question and all it would take would be to practice with that intent in mind.  However as I ...

Two of my personal requirements this year are completed on a month to month basis and I want to detail my progress but it's ending up as a separate blog because my numbers update turned out to be quite a bit longer than I intended.  1) focusing on different non-I Ho Chuan forms per month For this month I was working on Stick I. It was really nice to force myself to carve out time to work on a form besides my hand and weapon for this year and I am really liking having this as one of my requirements. We always tell ourselves "ok now take this lesson and apply it to everything else you know" but sometimes it's hard to evenly apply those lessons across the board, inevitably something is going to get left behind so I want to use this requirement to try to at least cover my bases with my forms. I have been trying to integrate the specifics of what we've been taught and practice them while I'm doing Stick. I have come up with some questions I would have never thought...

February has been my first full month of testing out my new way of recording my numbers and it has been going way better than my previous process. I got a small separate calendar booklet that I have been recording my daily/weekly numbers in (I was recording things daily before but on my big calendar so things got jumbled and it was difficult to transfer the data to my big spreadsheet.) I have also made a change to add my numbers to my big spreadsheet on a weekly basis (before I was aiming for monthly, but in actuality it was closer to every quarter  of the whole year which was terrible). Not only does this make the transfer not as big of an even because I wasn't adding up everything from the past couple months, but it also lets me be aware of missing numbers before they start to feel overwhelming, instead of trying to rehaul all my daily/weekly goals to try to account for huge chunks of missing things I can just sneak in a few extras around my established routine which is feeling ...