day 306: birds birds birds

concepts:

• timing
• parametric calibration
  

lessons:

• hsing-yi
• kyudo
  

ugh. so i should note that my attendance in both kung fu and kyudo has been a little spotty as of late. not entirely by choice, since i've had a conference paper i needed to prepare and present, and that took a number of weekends. as a result, i've missed couple of weekends.

i should also state this is going to continue. i'm going on vacation for a few weeks and so will not have anything to post during that time. as a result, there won't be much on this blog for a little while.

hsing-yi

we picked up with where the class left off. we have a number of people going through the summer season with schedules similar to mine, so we backtracked a bit and spent time reviewing all the Shanxi animals we've covered so far. after that, we continued on to the new animal for the day: swallow.

i'm including videos of Shanxi hawk and swallow. i didn't include the video of hawk last time and swallow is new.

hsing-yi Shanxi hawk: http://youtu.be/RwcF5Dtx8QI


hsing-yi Shanxi swallow: http://youtu.be/a-ySB557eTk


swallow resembles some piqua moves (particularly the 0:14 mark), and some of the baji students concurred, noting that the overall feel of Shanxi swallow is similar to piqua. Sifu noted that the timing of the movements is important, and so the pacing (from 0:10 to 0:15 marks) is not superficial, but is supposed to have a slight acceleration and hesitation, with an explosion coming off the stomping off the foot.

Sifu demonstrated some applications out of this, showing that the initial movements can operate as entries setting up the subsequent movements. he cautioned, however, that every movement within swallow has an application, and so it depends on the context of the situation and what the opponent does.

kyudo

kyudo this evening was a bit of an experiment. i've been working on trying to get more extension into zanshin before releasing, and so have been trying to expand outward from the center. i tried concentrating on just this tonight.

this ended up having some mixed results. pretty much consistent with past experience, any adjustment in one area causes changes in other areas, requiring everything having to be readjusted to get the arrow back onto target. consequently, i spent the better part of class trying to find some consistency in terms of having the arrow release.

Sensei commented that i was expanding, but not outwards. in particular, he observed that in trying to extend my spine i was ending up leaning backwards, which was throwing the aim of the arrow off. he said that i should visualize my neck lifting up, and that this would help me direct the expansion outwards rather than back.

i tried to work on this as best i could, but consistency was definitely an issue. there's an engineering term for this: parametric calibration. it's where all the adjustable items affect each other, so that calibration of one results in changes in everything else, and hence requires that calibration be done slowly in increments of each item relative to the other in a way that allows all items to gradually reach an successive stages of equilibrium relative to each other. the idea is that ultimately you'll reach the desired stage where the equilibrium coincides with a certain desired output. however, getting to that stage requires a lot of minute adjustments of every item in successive iterative passes to successive equilibrium stages, and so takes a fair amount of time.

which is what i'm finding out now. the key word is patience.