way too many commas

I have been not where I want to be with my pushups for a while now. It's not that I haven't been reaching my goal everyday, I have, I just seem to always be doing them much later than I intend to. Ideally I like to spread them throughout my day so I can have multiple opportunities to think about my kung fu, and more practice taking said opportunities. Since they are so spread out I like to have a benchmark of thirds, roughly 1/3 in the morning, 2/3 in the afternoon, and the last third in the evening, however that looks day-to-day. I know lots of people like to get their numbers done in the morning, describing it as giving them a head start on their motivation, but I get that same sort of motivational boost by knowing I'm on track through the day.  The problem is, at some point I stopped being on track. Most days I've only done a handful in the morning and then I am scrambling once I realize the clock has struck 10pm and I'm nowhere near my goal. Last year I made mys...

 I've been meaning to write a blog about teaching for a while now, but as I'm sitting down to write this, I realize I never fleshed out the idea beyond "write teaching blog". Usually I go into a blog with a pretty good idea or a list of bullet points of what I'm going to write about, and it always ends up longer than I intended as I discover things through the process of forcing my ideas into written word, but in this case I really have no idea where to start , (so that's exactly where I'm going to start I guess,) Anytime I am given a group of students, whether it be a small handful or the whole class, I don't know how to go about instructing them, or where to start breaking things down. When I am given the gist of what the lesson should be, the concepts feel so large, and so complex, and each student is at a different stage, and there's so many important things I want to emphasize, but I don't want to overwhelm. Even if I manage to pick a fo...

This past weekend I was visiting some family for Easter. Usually these visits consist of small talk and plenty of silent pauses when I try to answer the infamous " what's new? " Nothing all that drastic has usually happened, except this time, I haven't seen any of them since I started my grading year and earned my blackbelt so I was very excited to relive the moments of my journey last year, and felt confident I would not run out of things to talk about when they asked me what has changed since my last visit. However I quickly realized that nobody was even remotely interested and when I brought it up it was quickly passed over by other questions or swift redirections of the conversation.  Now I'm not saying I expected everyone to spend the entire weekend talking about only me , eyes growing wide as I elaborated on different aspects of my training and journey, that's not it at all. What I did expect was maybe a sliver of interest from my family about this huge...

All the sparring we did in class this month definitely helped my numbers, but I know I still need to work on consistently integrating it into my own training instead of relying on what we do in class time. Also although I am behind in my Km's requirement I have been making consistent choices to go for walks more often so although I'm not quite where I want to be, I'm heading in the right direction.  Requirements  (where I am/where I should be/where I'm trying to go) Push-ups: 11590/10800/50000 Sit-ups: 11240/10800/50000 Hand Form: 213/200/1000 Double Broadsword: 167/200/1000 Sparring: 183/200/1000 AOK: 288/200/1000 km: 210/310/1609 Mastery: Last month I started focusing on one sentence each week and writing a short thing about how the sentiment of each line relates to my current training and so far it's been going well! I might need a new strategy in terms of memorizing the excerpt one-to-one, I'll have to check in next month about that. 4/5/21 Personal Requirem...

"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...