Falling Off the Stretching Wagon

All this thought about my floating right hip, I decided to take a look at some of my own training and conditioning routines. First off, I need to stretch more. I used to start the day off with a couple rounds of Ashtanga Yoga’s Sun Salutation, but that has been slipping. A couple of nights ago I did both the sun salutation and warrior’s pose sequence with my son following along behind me. It was fun for all and my wife got a kick out of watching the little guy try to crawl under me as I was doing “downward dog” :)  After all, I don’t want to end up with “Yang Disease” ;)

I am also a techie gadget guy with a phone holstered onto my right hip. This probably does not help as I am sure it’s putting some pressure and strain on the right hip. I am going to bite the bullet and go back to phone-in-pocket mode even though I may end up with lint all over my phone. I can’t help but notice the hip thing creeping back into my body when I started wearing my phone on the belt again.

Since most of my taiji practice consists of either doing standing zhan zhuang meditation or the first section of a form, I don’t really get into some of the sequences that train kicks of drop stances. I used to have a pretty mean drop stance from my wushu background, but not sure if I can do it well anymore. I am thinking of just picking the “snake creeps down” move out of the form to train.  I am sure this will open up the hips/kua a bit! Hmm.. I may even mix things up and do the Gao Style Bagua Golden Chicken exercises! 

Maybe through some stretching, conditioning and habit changes, I can knock out this floating right hip thing. Perhaps it really is all about the elusive hip hinge ;)