Why Does it Look Weird?

I’ve recently been focusing on a particular idea in my hand form and that’s what I’ve mainly been practicing… in other forms. 

Yesterday other than my warm up rep of my chimaera form, I didn’t do it a single time after that (despite it being the focus of my practice). Instead I almost exclusively practiced the same idea, as it manifests in Lau Gar. I figured since I didn’t really know what I was trying to do, if I worked on it within a school form I may find more answers that I could then apply to my own form.

I’m trying to work on the moment when I switch my feet under me (the jump that’s not a jump, the hop that’s not a hop). I took a video of my form the other day while working on something completely different and I noticed the jumps-that-are-not-jumps were looking really sloppy, so cue the aforementioned practice.

It was a strange problem to tackle because unlike the majority of my practice it didn’t come from outside feedback, it did not it come from my eye for detail setting off warning bells, and it did not come from an application context where I’m trying to maximize power. All I had to go off of was “it looks weird??”

I feel like over the years I’ve developed many tools for refining my forms and finding truths about the way I move, but for trying to make it look less weird, I really only had one idea: make the circles bigger? It did not work (in fact it may have looked even weirder doing it that way!) So after that I resorted to throwing pasta at the wall, the following is a rough translation of my inner monologue:

Try to fall (fall? Or shift, or fall and end with a recovery?), fall (?) with more control, try to fall (?) with less control, try changing how I shift my weight in transition, try exaggerating the expansion and contraction, try internalizing the expansion and contraction, try accelerating during the transition (OOO THIS ONE IS COOL COME BACK TO THIS LATER!!), try taking a million videos of trying all these things because apparently I can’t feel what I want it to look like. WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LEG??? Ohhhhh I have too much intent in my foot, still trying to draw a bigger circle from earlier, but I’m only focusing on the bottom half of my circle, well the top half would need to be my knee, OH MY GOD THE KNEE DUHHH oh WOW that helped a bunch!

So now it looks a bit better, and the idea translates really well into my own form, so problem mostly solved, except now I have a million questions about that move in Lau Gar! 

(Also I’ve been making small steps with my online engagement, not quite where I want it to be yet, but I can feel myself forming the new habits so that’s a good start!)

Current Total

Push-ups

22290

Sit-Ups

22417

AOK

387

Km

1588

Blogs

21

Sparring

31

Hand Form

139

Weapon Form

210

Repair Relationship

0

Online Engagement

4

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

6 Harmonies V4.7

Last Tuesday’s class Sifu Rybak described the 6 Harmonies in a context I’ve never thought of them in before and I wanted to start to explore it in a blog to try to solidify my idea of it.  When I think of the 6 Harmonies I usually think about them in terms of the end of a move, how I can sync up my wrists, ankles, knees, elbows, shoulders and hips to generate maximum power, how they may all move at different speeds along different vector lines but then all come together to support one idea/motion.  What she described was how each piece  influences all the other pieces.  Depending on how I move my shoulder, dictates the potential/possibilities of my ankles, depending on how I move my wrist allows me to utilize my hip differently, ect. I used to think about the Harmonies as 6 pieces serving the whole. Later in my training I started thinking that hips and shoulders, the pieces closest to my center, had more influence over the final outcome of a technique than the others...
Read more

Lion Dancing//Sparring

The other night we were working on our lion dancing and Sifu Brinker said something that I had never really thought of before, he said that lion dancing is a great way to develop our sparring and application skills. At first this made sense, then it didn’t, and then it did again.  Initially I thought about the usual ways lion dance can supplement and strengthen my kung fu in general, it improves my stamina, and my stances. But then I realized he specifically mentioned sparring and applications which confused me, but thinking about it more tonight I think I see one facet of what he was talking about and it all clicked because of what he added at the end of class, that sparring relies heavily on empathy, and the lion dance specifically can be a tool to develop this. He was talking about how we perform the lion dance, how we need to adopt the personality of the emotions we want our lions to portray, and how this same idea happens in sparring where you are “performing” what you want yo...
Read more

Mastery 1/20

For one of my requirements this year I wanted to try something I did very unofficially a few years ago but instead formalize it as one of my personal requirements and officially write and post it this time around. I want to write a blog for each line in Stuart Emery’s Mastery, breaking it down into my personal understanding, and how it retains to my training at the time of writing it. And I’m finally getting around to doing the first one.  Mastery in one’s career and consciousness growth simply requires that we constantly produce results beyond and out if the ordinary Begin - March 23 I think what I’m struggling with is the word “constantly”. I’ll have long stretches of time where things are going smoothly, I’m making good progress, asking good questions, keeping on top of things, and then inevitably I will have a few off days which will be detrimental to my momentum which makes it so much harder to get back to that good place.  In thinking about this sentence from Mastery, I’...
Read more