Yesterday was such a nice day that I could not resist welcoming the warmer weather with a session of taiji in the park over lunch! IT WAS GREAT! I drove to a nearby park about 5 mins away from work. At first I walked around the park to scope things out to check out potential areas to train. I decided on a little corner in the tennis courts. However, over time, ppl started coming into the adjacent basketball courts and I figured the tennis courts would be next.

I decided to to head to this little area off to the side that is surrounded by trees. It was very nice and pretty private. The space wasn’t too big, but enough for me to do the form. My first teacher used to tell me that you have real skill when you can do your form in the space of a cow laying down! I guess this is to teach angles and footwork and not to become fixated on the direction of the form. I’ve often kept this in mind when training in small spaces.

I did a bit of standing zhan zhuang meditation and then proceeded to do the chen laojia yilu. This felt pretty good. Afterwards, I did the first two sections f the traditional yang long form. This was also good and I would’ve did more but I forgot the sequence!!

My legs are a bit sore, but it’s all good.

Got a seminar coming up this year that I’m planning to attend. It’s with Chen Zhenglei (CZL) and I believe the topics will be some silk reeling, laojia yilu and potential some push hand patterns. I’m actually looking quite forward to this since I’ve never been to one of his seminars before and I’m quite fond of his form.

To prepare for the seminar, I’ve been trying to really get as much training in as I can. I’m quite happy b/c for the last 2 weeks, I’ve actually been able to get in some decent zhanzhuang sessions! While they weren’t fully “zhan zhuang” as the tv was on in the background, but it’s definitely better than not doing anything.

I can’t say I’ve done too much form training as I’ve been focusing on the standing Anyhoo, I’ve got some time before the seminar.. but I’m still really wondering if …. umm.. nadda….. just so hard to really focus when a buddy of mine tells me that from now on, he’s gonna stop training in the chen village forms and focus on the Hong Junsheng set b/c it’s very practical. In fact, you get instantaneous feedback if your structure is off b/c then the application won’t work.

He’s also noted the form has really helped to develop peng and the correct usage of his body, more importantly, the correct usage of the gua. Kinda hard to beat that when I could go and learn some forms…

Wow.. Ran across a del.icio.us entry for the Taijiquan Journal archives! What a great resource to read some taiji articles!

Had a chance to check out clips of a recent taiji competition and whoa.. I can’t believe how nutty things have gotten! They were doing all sorts of nutty stuff like sticking a leg out and going all the way down with the foot out. Another crazy thing was to do a jumping front slap kick and then go immediately into a jumping, spinning, outside crescent with an added twist before landing on the ground in a hurdler’s stretch!!!

While I personally don’t believe this is “taiji”, it is very difficult and I do commend the practitioners for their athletic abilities. It’s definitely not easy to do some of these things as I painfully felt this weekend when I tried the whole squating up/down thing with a leg out. I wasn’t even about to attempt the jump slap twist combo thing as last time I did that without stretching and such, I pulled my groin muscle was out of commission for at least 2 weeks.

Anyhoo, after viewing some of the clips, I was the most impressed by a clip of this dude doing a mixture of chen and some of the new competition sets at the 2005 East Asian Games.  He moved quite well and I was very impressed with his control and alignment. If you want to check out the whole set, go to the following page and download to your hearts content: Wushu One Family – 10 All China Games Taiji