Wow.. doing zhan zhuang for the past couple of days after not doing ANYTHING for about 2 weeks has really taken it’s toll on my body. Just standing in wuji, I could really feel the tension in my right wrist, the same wrist that has been giving me pain during work. From the advice of a fellow coworker, I went out and bought myself a heavy duty stress ball to squeeze during the day. It seems to help as it allows blood to circulate, but I still feel some pain. Just hope I’m not getting carpal tunnel!
I also felt quite a bit of tension in my upper back around my lower shoulder blades. I tried to visualize a “melting” effect in conjunction with a sinking thought in that area, which seemed to help. In addition, I felt some slight tension in the knees which leads me to believe the energy is getting locked and not going to the ground. I was in a very high stance too, nothing too low, just a slight bend in the knees.
As I moved from wuji to the universal post posture in which the hands are in front of you like you’re hugging a tree, I could really feel the tension in the triceps area. I lowered my hands down to about abdomen level and things felt better.
I’m a bit shocked at how much tension I’ve built up just over two weeks! This is not a long time, but I guess enough to really take my training back a bit. This time, I want to try and do it relaxed and without tension intead of through force and fight the pain like I did last time.
reminds me of the 100 days lent challenge at http://www.tomabey.com
yup yup.. I almost took part in that. There have been a lot of challenges, but we’ll see what I can do with this one.
A similar wrist problem nearly ended my career. As it turned out, I really only needed to adjust the height of my mouse, keyboard, and chair!