day 286: spear and cannon

concepts:

• movement
• circles
  

lessons:

• spear (chaang)
• chen tai chi pao quan
  

this Sunday i made a request to review pao quan (cannon fist), since i've been struggling to get through it. we ended up devoting a little time around the spear lesson, since Arnold (a student from Sifu's CSULB class who's been coming to Sunday class to learn spear) is not learning tai chi.

spear (chaang)

spear today was focused on combining footwork with the spear-tip drills. we began by reviewing the spear-tip drills (i.e., moving the tip in a circle, semi-circle, and crescent) with static footwork. Sifu had us visualize 9 imaginary points on a vertical plane facing us arranged in a 3x3 matrix, so that we would move the spear-tips around each of the points, working our way in a random order from one point to another.

we then reviewed the footwork with the spear being fixed. Sifu reminded us that on the step-over pattern, we cross-over on the front when moving forward by could choose to cross-over either front or rear when moving backward. we also did the skip step and shuffle step, going both forward and backward.

after this, we united the two and started doing the spear-tip drills while moving backwards and forwards, again visualizing the 3x3 matrix of 9 imaginary points and moving the spear-tip around each as we stepped.

chen tai chi pao quan

while Arnold was gone, Sifu and Phunsak worked with me on the chen pao quan form. i'm having trouble with the end portion of it, since we hurried through it before Cheng-chieh left. i managed to get a little bit more comfortable--at least to the extent that i can remember the movements, but i'm pretty sure it's going to take a lot of practice to polish things up and get things looking the way they should.