day 272: legging it

concepts:

• centers

lessons:

• bagua leg form
• kyudo
  

once again, i am very delinquent in posting. my apologies. this spring has been inordinately busy, and i am constantly struggling to stay up to speed. as a result, this post will be short. this post relates to Saturday, April 3.

bagua leg form

this was a continuation of the leg form. however, i also took some time to experiment with some things Sifu had talked about before regarding the center, particularly finding and taking the center of the system created by the bodies of you and your opponent. as a test, i partnered with Martin, who is significantly larger than i am (about 2x as heavy) and hence skews the center of mass towards him. this proved a major challenge, as my sense of distance and spacing was thrown off and i found myself having to feel out the center again--something which i can't do with any level of instinct at this point in time. it's going to take some practice.

kyudo

part of kyudo tonight was spent working on the nocking area of the string on my bow (the arrow shaft has a nock where the string fits, and the place on the string where the arrow fits is in a very specific section by the bow handle). this took a little time, as this involves gluing and wrapping string thread around the nocking area on the string, and then adjusting it so that it fits the arrow nock. this involves a little work, since the nocking area is deemed to fit the arrow when you can nock the arrow, hold the string horizontal, and still have the arrow remain on the string.

i'd done this the prior week, but had found that i'd applied too little glue and thread. tonight was an effort to refine the previous week and apply the requisite glue and thread so that it fit the arrow.

i did manage to get in a few rounds of shooting. Sensei asked me to focus on expanding into the bow--he later observed that things are getting better, but that i'm still not reaching full expansion. it's something i know i need to work on, and will be something i'm going to have to consciously focus on for the next classes.