Block or Strike?

I have been focusing on my forms a lot this past week and a bit, not so much on the quantity, but trying to dive a bit deeper into my understanding on specific techniques and the movements that tie them together.

Part of this is due to it being the start of the new year, and having a new forms that I have not yet looked at with the level of detail I try to give my I Ho Chaun forms, but mainly this focus is coming from our discussions in recent classes. The “weight distribution” class we had a while ago paired with the “why why why?” class from last week has really opened my brain to a whole host of new questions and ways of looking at my forms and I feel like it’s generating a lot of good questions for myself! 

We have also been having really great Blackbelt classes that are inspiring me to try to better understand my vectors, and the intent behind them, and how my intent can influence my vectors and how that influences my skeleton! 

Through thinking about these ideas, and asking new sorts of questions for myself I have received some answers that I think this will be an interesting way to reframe how I’m thinking about and doing my forms. On two separate occasions I asked a question and the answers were “well you need to think about the strike as a block” and “you just need to think of this block as if it were a strike” 

Changing my intent allowed my skeleton to change to support what needed to happen and answered my question/solved my problem, but it also opening up a whole new line of thinking. Trying to challenge how I think out all the rest of my techniques in a form. Is this a strike? Is this a block? What if it weren’t? How would that change things? Does it change them for the better? 

I know that we are meant to have specific intents within our forms and I’m not looking to warp the original spirit of the form, but I do think this will be a useful tool for me (especially because I struggle with visualizing applications within a form) and eventually become a pattern of thinking to generate even more questions and through them, understanding! 

Current Total

Should Be At

Push-ups

5716

6171

Sit-Ups

4620

6171

Hand Form

43

114

Weapon Form

27

114

Blogs

4

6

Sparring

36

114

AOK

119

114

Steps

308

177

Repair Relationship

4

6

Mastery Blogs

0

3

Digital Journal

1980

Words

Jaw Exercises

1

35

1-on-1's

4

6

Comments

  1. YitzikMarch 9, 2025 at 9:22 PM

    It is interesting how the spirit of the form will lead to your intent. Wow - that is the first of the 6 internal harmonies. :-)
    Your insight for the forms is awesome. Most of us just do as we were taught and are not fully exploring the forms as you do.

    ReplyDelete

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