Panic Button

By Julius Anastasio
Julius Anastasio is a Green Belt at Wu Dao


<-I had a bit too much time on my hands this morning, can you tell?

So. There are only 3 days left until the tournament. I wish I could say that I’ve been feeling excited and fearless and rearing to go, but for the past week I’ve been feeling more restless and nervous than anything else.

Last Saturday Shi-Fu video-taped us doing our forms so we could see how we’ve progressed. Good GRIEF everything looked off. Video-taping yourself can certainly be a cruel, abrupt wake-up call for your ego. I made the mistake of watching myself on video a few too many times, mercilessly pausing the video and cringing at every mis-step, bad stance and flimsy arm position along the way.

For about 18 hours I went into crisis mode, stressed and worried about how my form would look at the competition. I picked apart every little mistake I was making, how high I was in my stances, how little intent and power I looked like I had, etc, etc. It didn’t help knowing that there was no real way that my form or technique could improve with less than a week before the tournament. As the expression goes, the hay’s in the barn.

Then I thought back about why I decided to start competing in the first place. The worry and self-conscious critique melted away. I had forgotten that the tournament was simply a useful goal to help inspire me into train harder and bring my training to a different level. The overall outcome, while hopefully good, wasn’t the reason I got started doing this. I didn’t go into training for this tournament thinking I would turn out to be a legendary Shaolin warrior in three months’ time. I went into it thinking that I would give it the best I had, train as hard as I could, and see what the result would be on me as a martial artist. The fact that I can so effectively critique faults and errors in my movements during and after I do them says something very positive about my current level of training.

I’m going into this Saturday with a clear and tranquil mind, with the knowledge that I will come out with a whole plethora of things to focus on in my training.

Montage

By David Mandeix
David is a Green Belt at Wu Dao

Scarcely a week remains before the big competition, and in any feel-good-overcome-all-odds-to-discover-yourself-and-get-the-girl kungfu movie it would be about time for a training montage. The montage is often the best part of the film; for some reason we enjoy watching people toil and suffer as the execute tasks only barely connected to their end goal of martial arts mastery (sanding floors, waxing cars, painting houses, etc). Maybe we enjoy the weird things they do, or the moment all those weird things suddenly make sense and are revealed to be kungfu moves. At the end of the montage though, our 98-lb weakling with a glass jaw has become an unstoppable kungfu machine.

We all know (or should know) that this scenario is so far fetched as to border on the ridiculous. However, I had an unexpectedly "montage-y" moment last night in kungfu- and I was absolutely as excited about it as I would have been watching a movie. Let me explain-

Preparing for the tournament has narrowed the focus of our martial arts training. We have spent a great deal of time doing forms, refining our movements and correcting flaws in our techniques. What we have not been doing with similar regularity is pound away at the heavy bags. Bag work is great- great fun, great exercise, and a great way to gauge how powerful your technique is without actually hitting someone. Hitting a heavy bag also tends to shift your focus towards generating power, rather than refining your technique.

Imagine my surprise when I stepped up to the heavy bag for the first time in months and unleashed a devastating kick that sent the bag flying! Where had this come from? I hadn't worked on kicking things as hard as I could for months. What's more, I was exhausted and struggling to make it through the second class. Out of practice and with out of gas, I almost wondered if maybe Sifu had dumped some sand out of the bags.

In the warm glow of (confused) accomplishment the past month spent correcting techniques, kicking air, repeating excruciatingly fine detail work played through my head- and I'll be damned if it didn't feel as though I were at the tail end of a montage! I am certain that the additional training we were doing contributed to my improved kicks, and yet we never actually focused on being able to kick the bags hard.

So aside from swelling with pride* at my new kicks, my experience made me reflect upon how we can always be training kungfu, even if it does not particularly feel like it. While it is true that you cannot get good at something you do not work hard at, sometimes you don’t even know you are doing the hard work. Doing "downward dog" or 10-elements fist does not feel like it would or should help my kicks- but maybe it does. Every time you practice, you extend your capabilities by a small degree and further refine your control, power, and precision. Naturally this will extend to the rest of the body as well- which can have some surprising results.


*(Pride which lasted maybe half an hour before being ground down under further merciless kungfu training)

Adaptation.

By Julius Anastasio
Julius Anastasio is a Green Belt at Wu Dao

Last year, a little over a week before I was competing I realized my form was too short for the advanced division (there was a 45 second minimum length). After tinkered around a bit and adding a few extra moves, I wound up adding enough time to avoid any time penalty.

One of the relatively silly rules that you will find in many tournaments is that you have to start and finish a form in the same "quadrant." This becomes a problem if the particular form you've decided to do isn't designed to actually start and finish in the same place. This year, we had to add a few extra moves to Zhen Shan Gun in order for it to start and finish in the same spot.

The form with the new variation looks a little like the video below, minus the look of total exhaustion and overall lack of intent in any of the movements.



The video is courtesy of my mom, who decided to tape me after I'd been training for an hour in slightly over-sized borrowed running shoes (we were at my parent's house and I forgot my martial arts shoes at home).

One of the major reasons behind learning a form is to develop the fluid transitions necessary to connect individual techniques into fighting application (you certainly wouldn't want to reset yourself after every technique you did). But this is only one stage of martial training. Besides what you see in Hollywood, fights are not made up of choreographed routines or sequential forms. Settling into predictable rhythms can be deadly in a confrontation. The world is unexpected, and you must learn to respond to this uncertainty. While it's caused me many a headache, improvisation and adaptation are fundamental components of martial arts training. While routines are comfortable and very helpful, change can be good, and very helpful. Now if only I can get these new moves memorized...

13 days until the tournament.

The Week in Review

By David Mandeix
David Mandeix is a Green Belt at Wu Dao

This week has been an interesting mix for me, a veritable potpourri of training experience. Some of it was good, most of it was painful, but at the end of the week I'm still here and wanting more.

Monday
Monday was an excellent class, a real pick-me-up at the end of a long day. Having spent all Sunday resting, my motions felt very crisp and snappy. Encouraged by this, I pushed myself very hard that class. Exhaustion coupled with an overall feeling of well-being is a rare, but enjoyable sensation.

Tuesday
Coming off a strong Monday class, I may have pushed this class a little too hard. I was encouraged by signs of progress- oddly enough being able to feel when a motion is wrong or when a limb is out of place is sometimes more satisfying than getting the motion right. At the end of the first class I had to call it quits. I really dislike doing this sort of thing, because I feel that the sign of a good martial artist is endurance and the ability to perform at peak ability for an extended period of time. After all, it is easy to knock a person out accidentally. The hallmark of skill would be being able to knock people out consistently. Good technique should not be an accident.
Anyway, I gassed out and went home to try to rest and refuel.

Wednesday
I woke up exhausted. Or rather, still exhausted. On days like this Wednesday it is great to read other blogs and know that I'm not the only one feeling like this. Even better is getting to class and seeing my classmates and looking at them and knowing that the share the exhaustion. Nevertheless, it says something that we showed up.
Wednesday class ended up being great- I like to think of it as Kungfu for the soul. With the tournament looming there has been endless form repetitions, and a steadily rising physical demand on our bodies. We have been focusing on one side of kungfu exclusively for a while, and it was refreshing to get into the theoretical/ metaphysical side. A brief meditation session left me feeling recharged, and a detailed examination of the transition of circular to linear motion helped me to understand (if not yet preform) certain kungfu movements better.
While not physically taxing, it was good to approach Kungfu from the other side. The addition of some serious yoga stretches also helped us climb out of the exhausted rut we'd been in.

Thursday
Sometimes, the form just clicks together and my intent and motions align perfectly to create smooth, powerful technique. When this happens, the form becomes much less taxing to preform and seems to resonate within me. This occurs only once in a great while, but it usually gives me enough to keep me going until the next time it happens. I felt a few seconds of that harmony Thursday night. Clearly, Wednesday did me worlds of good- far more than I expected, as I was able to stick through both classes. Although they were tiring, I was happy to discover that my body was not at the point of failure at the end of the evening. I even had enough energy to preform a form in front of the class (completely different from doing it without anyone watching!).

Additional observation: Exercises we were once proficient in (Tan Tui-s, push ups, etc.) get rusty very fast, regardless of muscle growth in the area or how good we were last time. By extrapolation, the same must go for forms. Endless repetitions- justified.

Quality over quantity?

By Julius Anastasio
Julius Anastasio is a Green Belt at Wu Dao

As I've whined about in my last training-related posts, my body has been disagreeing (and sometimes SCREAMING) with me for training so much. My body felt like it was a hundred years old and my mind was on autopilot. You could say it was from the humidity, not enough calorie intake, not training intelligently, whatever. Bottom line was that I desperately needed to recharge my batteries.

I wound up not going to any classes until Thursday and Saturday. These 4 days off really did wonders for me. For one, it made me focus to make sure I got some really good training in during the couple of days I had to do it. It also got my body rested enough to the point where I felt great. Most importantly, I was getting more out of class than if had been trudging through it like a zombie in a fog of tired indifference.

Obviously, if I want to be fully prepared for this tournament, I won't be able to train anywhere as infrequently as last week. However, this experience did give me a little more insight about sustainable training levels. Occasionally pushing training frequency aside to make sure you're doing quality training can be rejuvenating and very rewarding.

"Tiger's head, snake's tail"

By Julius Anastasio
Julius Anastasio is a Green Belt at Wu Dao

(hŭ tóu shé wĕi)

It's an old Chinese proverb that captures how too many of us approach new ideas, activities and assignments. We start out doing many things with the gung-ho enthusiastic abandon that's usually reserved for soccer fanatics (i.e. the tiger's head). Inevitably, time whittles away at that initial ferocity, until our involvement looks as flimsy and inconsequential as, you guessed it, the proverbial snake's tail.

I'm currently fighting to avoid this proverb's lackluster results, as my training has wained a bit in this past week. I still go out almost every day and train for a good hour to an hour and a half, but what I accomplish during that time is decreasing. I didn't THINK the sheer repetition of practicing forms over and over would get to me, but maybe it is. Either that, or my body is having a hard time waking up in early mornings I've been training (6:15am is early). When I think about it, my body hasn't really felt fresh in weeks. Trying to adjust to such a heavy training load in such humid weather is probably contributing to this constant struggle for momentum.

Despite all the aforementioned whining, I've been feeling an marked difference in how my forms feel, as well as my overall comfort while training. Sure, my legs might feel like they're trudging through molasses while I'm practicing kung fu, but they're trudging more naturally through that molasses than they were a month ago.

Days until tournament: 25