day 193: packed full!

concepts:

• posts
• intent

lessons:

• bagua
• chang quan
  

this was a bit of a different weekend. because of Sifu's involvement with the Pau Hana celebration at UCLA, we rescheduled my private lesson chang quan to Saturday afternoon following regular class. in addition, because it was the end of the UCLA quarter, i scheduled an end-of-quarter dinner with my TAs & readers to reward them for their hard work, which unfortunately conflicted with kyudo and meant i had to skip it Saturday evening.

bagua

the Saturday class today focused on post training. obviously, we don't have posts in the park, nor anything of the appropriate dimensions and distance apart, so we substituted humans. Sifu said this is fine, since that what the posts were meant to represent anyway.

Sifu had us start by practicing the forest palm first. after a little time, during which he started the baji students, he came back and then had me and Feng serve as fake posts, with Phunsak then demonstrating post training.

essentially, post training involves doing forest palm--or any other bagua form--in between posts, with the posts serving as targets against which the practitioner can then apply the form techniques. any number of posts are useful, although traditionally there are supposed to be 3 or more. they're arranged around each other, and close enough that the practitioner can move from one to the other pretty quickly in the same way the practitioner would be facing multiple opponents.

the goal of post training is to help get a feel for how techniques are supposed to work in terms of spacing, orientation, and force, and how the techniques are supposed to be integrated with the footwork. in addition, it's supposed to help inculcate the primacy of constant movement and changes in direction and location when facing multiple attackers.

for today, Sifu said we should just get an idea of how to do post training, and try to work on it gradually. he said it takes time, and not something easily mastered. he also noted that in post training, you eventually get to a point where you don't just do forms against the posts, but actually engage in a free-form exercise applying any technique of your choice at any time in any combination against any post, thereby training you to learn how to work in a continuous, fluid manner--much the way you need to in a real fight.

chang quan

chang quan today was spent finishing chao quan. there wasn't that much more to add, and we managed to get through the last of the form pretty quickly. however, there was one technique near the end that proved somewhat elusive, and it ended up taking me the better part of the session trying to get it down--the hitching point seemed to be that it involved the arms moving in 1 direction but the waist in hips moving in another, with everything synchronized in a slightly off-beat rhythm.

once i managed to get the problems somewhat sorted out, Sifu had me practice the entire form, ironing out some of the major issues as we went along. things are still a little rough, but i notice that my form seems to be better when i focus my yi (intent) on the purposes of the techniques. this appears to help adjust my movements, and get me on track to doing them the correct way.

we finished around 6, taking a few minutes to discuss plans for January. we also talked about next week, which would be the last weekend before Sifu goes back to Hawaii for Winter Break. he said we'd continue refining the form next week, and try to get me set up to a point where i can work out things on my own while he goes away for Winter Break.