Last night in L2 Mo, Sucheela, Fu and I finished xiao hong quan! Excitement! Celebration! Now we have 2 1/2 weeks to try and clean it up for testing; sort of frightening, but definitely better than finishing it up the Friday before. Time to pound pound pound away at it.
Not minimizing the awesomeness of finishing my first L2 form, but in so doing, it brought to light how bad my mabu has gotten. (The end stance of the form is a mabu.) Now I'm the first to admit that my mabu has never been super low or very flexible; and it is not exactly my favorite move so I don't go out of my way to give it extra work. But I hadn't realized the extent of the damage. The thing is, I'm building up a lot of strength in L2, but that means the muscles around my hips are reducing my flexibility. And while I have been working on stretching my hips, (which has worked wonders for the recurring hip pain, incidentally!) I guess I'm not getting at the right muscles, because I have felt my mabu getting higher and higher. There aren't a lot of mabus in L2. You get gongbus by the truckload. Fair amount of pubus, but not a lot of ye olde horse stance.Seeing it in the mirror last night, for the first time in awhile, I was appalled. It looked even more grotesquely off because with my unfortunate long legs everything is exaggerated. (Also, it didn't help that at this point I was next to Han who can hit the floor in mabu without breaking a sweat.) So the sum of it is, the stance needs work. Lots of it. Time to overcome my hatred of mabu and focus on ways to get lower and open my hips more. I'm going to do it untill I love it. Untill when Sifu calls out mabu, I smile instead of inwardly groan. Until when I go "Huoy!" (hui, hoy, huay, how, hue, hu-ee?) at the end of xiao hong quan, it's my celebratory shout for how good my mabu has gotten.
