“The Coach is Crazy” (12/30)

“The coach is crazy”

Those were the words out of Xiao Yu’s mouth this morning while we were doing our preparatory stretching and warm ups at the wushu guan.

I was inclined to agree with her as he had just finished telling us what our workout would be for the day.  80 kicks.  20 stances.  40 combinations. 8 sections.  4 half-sets.  It sounded pretty brutal, but as the athletes started playing some strange variation on dodgeball, soccer and rugby while I jogged around the carpet I realized that it wasn’t necessarily as bad as it sounded.

80 kicks meant 20 of each type; front stretch, side stretch, inside and outside.  That was essentially 2 lines of 10 kicks each.  Nothing terribly unusual, but it did sound much worse when you actually place a number on them.

20 stances was 20 of each type of transition.  For chang quan folks they did some mabu-gongbu and some pubu-gongbu-high.  There were a few others in there too but I was with the nanquan folks doing gua gai’s, upper cut swings and tiger claw qi lin bu’s.  We did about 10 lines of stances, which again wasn’t totally panic inducing.

The 40 combinations was also not as bad as it sounded.  As you go down the carpet you do a combination twice.  And if you go down and back, that is 4 combinations per lap.  So, 10 laps around the carpet of combinations from your form.  Also not super terrible.

The one thing that WAS a little tricky was the 8 single sections.  I was suprised though because by my count we only did 6 of them, not 8.  And for the half-sets I was only able to do a 1-2 punch with my sections one time through.  But even by my count most of the athletes just did 3 and not 4 half-sets.

So, although it did sound terrible at the beginning of class, by the end of class I found that the workout had actually been rather pleasant.  Well, okay — in a somewhat tiring and painful way.  A full out half-set for me is still a little bit on the harsh side.  But I like working on forms so I don’t mind.

After class I spent some time teaching Xiao Yu how to do some poppping with a simple body wave and moon walk, and then caught a little bit of footage of a young girl practicing/learning taijij quan. She is the youngest girl in the taiji group but she is already not too shabby.  The wushu boys were playing some soccer.  Because apparently 2 hours of wushu is not tiring at all to them.  It is also probably because they know there is no training for them in the afternoon so they don’t mind wearing themselves out a little bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaZo4AWVNhU

Next practice for me is on Friday which just so happens to be my birthday.  My present to myself?  another day of wushu training.  A great way to celebrate my 40th year on this planet.  Err .. I mean the 11th anniversary of my 29th year …

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*I Was Scouted By The PLA Wushu Team! (12/16)

*Lungs Don’t Fail Me Now! (12/28)