Last night, through no one's fault, I got smacked in the hand in line during fanyao. I never really think of fanyao as a strike, yet I can recall more than one occasion where I or someone else has suffered a rather painful injury from a fanyao collision. Don't underestimate the power of whipping arms! Anyway, the accident left my thumb throbbing and before the stretch break it had swollen too, if not enormous proportions, at least big enough to look funny next to my other thumb. And just when I unjammed my finger accident from last week. Of course that one, I hit myself....... As a result I once more have a hand hampered by a jammed finger. Only this time I've lost the benefits of my opposable thumb, the result of eons of hard evolving.
My pre-simian abilities got me pondering backwards evolution and that feeling you get sometimes that, through no fault of your own, your kung fu seems to be de-evolving. (Devolving we'll call it, hyphens are awkward.) I'm not talking about when something is rusty because you haven't practiced it in awhile or struggling with something you're still trying to learn. This is when you're rolling merrily along only to suddenly discover you can no longer do a fanyao properly on your right side, you can no longer do a yangshen yunshou on EITHER side, or you for no reason whatsoever regress in your forms. This seems to be happening to me a lot since I began L2. Sometimes it's just choking. Sometimes.... I don't know.
There does exist the theory that you are actually getting better. The more you learn the more you see that you are doing incorrectly so you are more and more aware of even the tiniest flaws in your movements. So even though it feels bad/different, the move is improving.
I think this is sometimes the case for me, but certainly not always. I guess, sometimes something just gets off and, like my new found appreciation for how much I need my thumb, when it starts working once more, you get the pleasure of success all over again.
My pre-simian abilities got me pondering backwards evolution and that feeling you get sometimes that, through no fault of your own, your kung fu seems to be de-evolving. (Devolving we'll call it, hyphens are awkward.) I'm not talking about when something is rusty because you haven't practiced it in awhile or struggling with something you're still trying to learn. This is when you're rolling merrily along only to suddenly discover you can no longer do a fanyao properly on your right side, you can no longer do a yangshen yunshou on EITHER side, or you for no reason whatsoever regress in your forms. This seems to be happening to me a lot since I began L2. Sometimes it's just choking. Sometimes.... I don't know.
There does exist the theory that you are actually getting better. The more you learn the more you see that you are doing incorrectly so you are more and more aware of even the tiniest flaws in your movements. So even though it feels bad/different, the move is improving.
I think this is sometimes the case for me, but certainly not always. I guess, sometimes something just gets off and, like my new found appreciation for how much I need my thumb, when it starts working once more, you get the pleasure of success all over again.
It's strange that you mentioned this. I feel the same way this past weekend when I last trained. I felt all my movements were awkward and I'm not doing it right. And it wasn't just in my head, Heng Xu called me out on a whole bunch of stuff. Things that I should definitely know by now. I have a theory. And that is, because of the cold, my muscles aren't used to moving the same way as they did over the summer. So it feels like what I should know, I don't know. Or maybe I just need to focus on each technique that much more.
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