Conditioning

Busy kids classes on Saturday. T has decided to recruit a couple of the early teens from the second class to help out in the little ones class earlier on. This seems like a good move as it allows us to delegate stuff like holding the kick pads to them so that we can circulate and help the little ones work on technique. It also seems to have fostered a more responsible attitude in the two older kids which then paid off in their class when they're with their peers.

After the class T was keen to go through the new stuff he'd picked up the day before at the headquarters, so we spent a good hour-and-a-half going through bits and pieces - some corrections to the choy li fut 2-person set (which is called "Crane teases Tiger" apparently) and then a host of new wing chun drills including some arm toughening / conditioning ones. Some of the 2-person stuff was quite tough to do for me with a bigger and heavier opponent, which was making me focus really hard on my chi sao and using whole body technique rather than just using my arms - it was the only way to prevent being completely overwhelmed. Most of my body is aching today, so I must have been working hard. I feel like I have made something of an improvement in my wing chun technique of late, and I'd really like to do the conditioning drills with someone every day to really build on my improvements... chance would be a fine thing. Maybe I'll have to build myself a mook jong?

Spent some time with D today discussing the Derby classes, what my longer-term teaching ambitions are and picking up the leaflets and posters for me to distribute - mostly around work to start with. Unfortunately I won't have a lot of time for advertising because I'm off on a 4 day work trip overseas this week which promises to be fairly hostile and unpleasant. (And it means missing 4 classes!)

Last Thursday

Neck felt good enough to go to training last night, and since it was the last opportunity I'll have to go to a Thursday kung fu/tai chi combo for a while, I decided to strap up my fingers to protect my painful knuckle and go along to see how I felt.

Last residues of stiffness in my neck disappeared once I'd warmed up and I had a good class, other than the fact that we focussed quite a bit on mantis, where it's quite tricky to get the requisite "hook" hand shape when your fingers are taped together. After kung fu first D came up from tai chi to get my help with a section of char chuan he'd forgotten, then I had a good chat with one of the intermediate guys about plateauing in training and having to work through it to start seeing more improvement.

In Tai chi we worked on the Yang Long form, then some chen and some mi cheong, which I haven't done for ages, but D helped me revise the opening few moves which I've always found particularly tricky. D wanted to talk about me becoming a proper instructor, he wants us plan out my "development", start applying for my CRB checks, getting my first aid qualifications and so on....

Off to the pub afterwards with a couple of the guys because it will be a while before I get the opportunity again, given that I'm going to have to (at least temporarily) give up Thursday's for a while to concentrate on the Wednesday night classes we're starting up in Derby. I'll particularly miss the tai chi guys, since I get to see most of the kung fu lot on either Monday or Saturday at the other classes.

Totaliser

Just 3 miles run this week before being struck down with my neck injury which means it could be a couple of weeks before I get out again....no martial arts for a bit either I suspect. Slightly spaced out on painkillers and muscle relaxants/sleeping pills, so fighting would probably be a bad idea. Still, the anti-inflammatories seem to be doing my finger some good.

Oops!...I did it again

Typing this with one hand 'cos I've probably re-broken my finger. Should have known better, it was still not fully recovered from last time but I got a bit too into my sparring tonight and managed to suffer almost exactly the same injury as last time. Currently it's wrapped in an ice pack to try to reduce the swelling a bit, who knows what it will be like in the morning.

Year of the Tiger

Resisting the obvious Survivor link, a different Tiger song to celebrate the Chinese New Year

Catch Up

For some reason I don't seem to have got around to blogging much this week - must be overwork I guess, lots of unusual distractions in addition to the usual day job.Training as usual Monday, Thursday and Saturday.

Highlights include my sparring on Thursday, which was pretty good for once, and practice with T after the kids classes today, where we went through quite a bit of stuff and had a good discussion about how things might shape up when I start to branch out on my own in Derby.

Low light was Wu-style pushing hands in Tai Chi on Thursday, which made me have a minor freak-out, as I'm never very comfortable with that particular routine - it seems to involve far to much intrusion into my personal space before taking any kind of defensive action, and for some

reason this week it was just more than I could allow and so I couldn't let it happen properly. Very relieved when D spotted my discomfort and gave me something else to do instead.

Acrobatics

Kids Kung Fu on Saturday and T was concentrating on gymnastics/acrobatic stuff, which most of the kids really enjoy. Fun with forward and backward rolls, working up to some diving forward rolls over a stick for the better ones. But I was surprised at how few of them can do handstands against a wall or bridges ("crabs" as we would have called them). When I was eight or nine most of my playtimes at school were spent practising handstands and walk-overs. Maybe we'll work on some cartwheels next week, in preparation for one of the adult forms we do that involves cartwheeling out of a throw?

Looking for a piccie to go with this I came across this sculpture, which I rather like - it captures something of the joy of being upside down....

Apparently this is Handstanding by Martin Heron somewhere in Ipswich. I might look it up next time I'm over in Suffolk.

Dizzy

I read on the BBC earlier this week that the first week of February is the top week in the year for people to be off work ill - either genuinely or spuriously. And this Thursday's Kung Fu was certainly the smallest for a while. Not that that's a bad thing from my point of view, as I tend to get to work on the intermediate and advanced stuff a bit more when it's quiet - choy li fut and some bokken work.

We also worked on some more difficult kicks, particularly the jumping spinning inward crescent kick. I can actually do it reasonably well now, but when we have to do repeated ones down the length of the hall (about 5 or 6 kicks in a row, which amounts to a dozen high speed spins without pausing) I get so incredibly dizzy it's as if I've done that thing you see on "hilarious" home videos where people put their forehead on a broom and run round in circles, then stagger about a lot and fall over....I didn't actually fall down, but I was having distinct trouble walking in a straight line when going back to the other end of the hall.

Tai chi was yang style to the left, Hsing-I drills and living pole. D said we were nearly at the end of it but in my recollection we're less than a quarter of the way through it - so he must be planning on teaching it in discrete chunks. More photos at the end for the publicity - damn paparazzi!

Slight Change

Since I can't think of anything at all interesting, profound or amusing to say about my running I've decided just to post once a week a tally of miles clocked up, purely so I can total it up at the end of the year

So this week, two runs, one 3-miler and one 2.5miles

Lacking the Killer Instinct

Two big classes again on Monday night, with all our newbies back for more.

Sat out the sparring because I was feeling a bit light headed (I think because I managed to miss lunch due to over-running meetings, and I don't have dinner 'til after the classes, so a bit short on calories after 2 back-to-back sessions).

Also sitting it out was one of the women who has been coming for about 6 months now and still has something of a mental block about sparring. We had quite a good discussion about why she finds it difficult. It comes down to being so imprinted with nice middle-class values that it seems awfully impolite to try to hit someone and thus it has to be done in a lighthearted manner...but if you don't take it seriously, you'll get soundly trounced by your opponent, which can be quite unpleasant. I've had to work through the same "issues" myself and I've probably still got some way to go. My problem now is finding the balance between taking it too lightly and taking it way too seriously. Still searching for that just seriously enough...