Kickin' It With Heng De

(Awesome Heng De has offered to share his recent thoughts via a guest entry. Amituofo!)

I was thinking last night about how jumps taking off of my right leg are much better than off of my left. Especially in danfeijiao, a kick where you jump off your right leg, tuck your left, slap your right like caijiao and land on your right. I do it great on my right - I feel like I can get some serious air, more than any other kick (which is another issue, why jumping off my right leg alone gets me higher usually than off both), like Shifu said to me when you jump higher, you have more time to express yourself.

So being the scientific and analytical type guy I am, I asked myself why I feel better with my right leg kicks and jumps than with my left. In the form I just finished, there's a tornado kick with the right leg, and two erqijiao or danfeijiao like kicks off the right leg. So I wondered in our forms, how many kicks on each leg are there? You'd think it should be even to develop both sides of the body. But my results are surprising and astounding!

Form	Right leg kicks	Left leg kicks
xiaohongquan	4	3
dahongquan	6	3
tongbeiquan	6	2
xiao luohanquan	5	2

and the most astounding result...erluquan...which we all do over and over again for like a year, has 11 kicks with the right leg and just 3 with the left!

Add all of this with how many people don't do kicks like erqijiao or lunbicaijiao on both sides, and that's a lot more kicking with the right than the left. Over the years it really adds up.

I started doing staff form with the staff in my left arm because I could feel the strengthening in my right arm and it would be really sore. I didn't want to have all that extra power and coordination in my already dominant arm only. So far I can do the whole form, but it's not as smooth as my right side of course.

I'm thinking about starting to do forms on the opposite side now. At least tongbeiquan which is short and would be easier to figure out, and erluquan because there's so many more kicks on one side. So if you see me doing 5 kicks backwards, now you know why. And knowing is half the battle G.I. JOOOOOEEEEEEEE!

(In case you were wondering, the other half is sounding like you know what you're talking about, thanks Mo and Cheng.)

Oh yea speaking of 5 kicks my left side waibaitui sucks...my hip just doesn't open and my right shoulder hurts when i do it. Could it be all those times doing 5 kicks over the years was what made that side more open? Maybe I should do erluquan only on the left for the next four years...

Diversion Tactics

I thought last night's class would be all about my thumb; it's still fat and pained and kind of purple. Turns out, it was all about my hamstring. After overextending a caijiao last week my right leg has pretty much been out of commission. I've been training through it, but it's come to the point that I think this one needs rest, not training. (The last couple of classes have been, frankly, painful.) What it did serve to do though, was distract me from my thumb. The distraction allowed me to discover that, while I can't bend it, I can still do a ceshoufan or two without too much pain.

Funny how one pain minimizes another. A foot injury distracted me from my shinsplints, a sore neck distracted me from my foot. A sore butt distracted me from my neck. The flu distracted me from everything. Just goes to show, if you don't focus on the pain it will in fact go away.

This is something I've noticed in how I approach class as well. I used to get caught up in how many people were in class, where I was in line, how many minutes left until a water break, the temperature and who knows what else. I realized lately that these things have gone away. I don't know if it's from training a lot more or being stronger, or being more chan, but now class is just class. I don't worry about how much water I'm drinking or where my sweat is flying: I just train. I don't know how or when it happened, but it's a really satisfying realization.

I also spend less time trying to distract myself in line. It used to be that I would try to think on something, sing a song in my head, or anticipate some other move to distract me from the pain/exhaustion of the move I was on. Now, I am much more focused on what I am doing and how well I'm executing it. And the pain has gone away not through distraction but through strengthening my movements by focusing on technique. It's not that I don't still get tired, (hahah if only). It's not that I don't still fall victim to pain - see my lackluster training in light of current barrel of injuries. Only now I feel like, I'm going in with the same mindset no matter what variables are varying.

I must say though, I'd still like something to divert me from the pain in my leg. It's so unsatisfying not to be able to whip out five kicks at full chi.

Devolving

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.