Category Archives: Fitness

The Show and The Training

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I did roughly 14 yrs of external martial arts before training in taiji.  This consisted of many years of Traditional Tae Kwon Do and Contemporary Wushu.  Was the instruction I received in these external martial arts beneficial to my practice of taiji? I think so.

Not only did external training help with my conditioning and flexibility, but it also provided me with a greater awareness of my own body.  Even now, I am able to pick up on gross form choreography pretty quickly and I attribute that to my training in Contemporary Wushu.

I recently came across the following:

In traditional martial art training, in Northern China at least, kids are usually taught basic Chang Quan (usually Tan Tui, Shao Lin) and Shuai Jiao first. This is not because they need to have basic mastery of external martial art first. But just to prepare them physically so they can do the very demanding physical movements in those internal martial art forms.

– Source: In Defense of Simplified Forms | Wuyizidi’s Martial Art Blog

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Falling Off the Stretching Wagon

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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 ;)

Burpee Workout

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Last night, the weather was a bit bad so I decided to stay home and find some alterative workouts.  I decided to give a modified version of the ‘burpee‘ a try.Basically, instead of jumping at the end of the burpee, I did a calf raise instead.  One thing I noticed right away is that while I could easily go for 20 mins on an elliptical machine in the gym, I was pretty torn up after about 30 seconds of burpee action!

I had spoken to my buddy about this and he did not find it strange at all since the burpee involved a lot more muscle groups working together resulting in a more intense experience. I have to agree with him as I was engaging all parts of my body in maintaining good posture and form throughout the burpee exercise. To mix things up a bit, I intermingled burpees with a wushu kick punch drill I used to do. Basically, this is like doing squats but during the rise, one foot kicks while the opposite hand punches and ends with going back down into a squat. Repeat, but switch sides.  My instructor used to have us do 100 of these things during our training session that we could split up into whatever segments we wished.  Last night, I did them in segments of 25.

Reaching back even more into my wushu training, when I wanted to rest or take a breather, I would do a wall-sit. This is basically leaning against the wall and pretending like you’re sitting in a chair, quite the leg workout if you’re not used to it. This was how we rested back in wushu days.  If you wanted to drink water, wall sit, if you wanted to take a breather, wall sit.  If you’re not moving, you’re wall sitting.

I actually pulled quite a bit of exercises from my wushu training days and have incorporated them into a small cross-training interval timed training regime. It’s was actually very fun and the idea of moving from one exercise to the next with little to no rest in between was very challenging.  I am actually planning on not continuing the gym subscription come this April, so hopefully I will have some exercises to fill the gap.

Sun Salutation

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Yesterday morning, I incorporated Yoga’s Sun Salutation (surya namaskar) into my morning routine. My goal is to do 2 sets of the sun salutation every morning as a way to increase overall flexibility and strength.

A couple of years back, I took some Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga classes at the local community college. Basically, it’s like Yoga except it incorporates flow with breath, almost qigong like.  Instead of holding fixed postures for long durations of time, postures are held for a certain number of breaths.

I have to admit, after doing a couple of sets in the morning, I felt very energized and ready to begin the day.

Here’s youtube video showing the Sun Salutation

Taiji, Meditation, Health and Fitness

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Just noting an interesting change in my own training regime. Basically, I now do VERY little form work, if anything, I might do the first section of the Yang long form, but other than that, I may train the first 5 movements of the form (up to single whip) and repeat, repeat.

However, most of my training has been focused on meditation and I have been doing a LOT more standing and sitting meditation. I never really did much sitting meditation in the past, but over time, I am starting to enjoy it. While I don’t do the whole lotus posture thing, I am quite content at sitting on the edge of my chair and sitting for a while before I proceed to standing postures. This is a nice happy medium as my hips and ankles are not very flexible to where I could hold the posture for more than say 5 minutes.

But one of the major changes in my overall training is hitting the local gym. So far, I have been hitting the gym 2-3 times a week.  While there, I usually do roughly 30 minutes of cardio work (elliptical and most recently a bit of treadmill) and then I lift weights. Yes, I lift weights.

Does lifting weights conflict with being an internal martial artist? I don’t think so, even if it does, I don’t really mind nor care as it makes me feel healthier.  I don’t consider myself a serious iron pumper, as I mostly do the nautical machine stuff and focus on tone, that is at least 10-12 reps of whatever weight I am working on as opposed to a grueling 4-5 repetitions.  Additionally, right now I only do 2 sets of each exercise.

With the change in my training and diet (cut out soda and snacking as much as possible, though I did slide a bit over the holiday), I have lost about 15 lbs from my heaviest weight last year. That’s pretty good and I would like to lose at least 15 more pounds.

Also, one of my other fitness goals is to be able to easily lift my own body weight. This means, more push ups, more pull ups and other type of exercises with my own body as the resistance. I think it’s quite shameful that I can’t do more than a couple of pull-ups, what if I was hanging on the edge of a cliff somewhere grasping on to dear life by 3 fingers. Would I be able to save myself? Probably not … but then again, the situation is highly unlikely in my lifestyle of modern comforts.  In fact, a couple of months back while doing a U-turn in a parking lot, I went a bit into the grass just so I could say I have been “off-road” in my SUV… yeah, I know…

Anyhoo, I have been looking more into exercises that involve the stability ball and dumb bells. Also, I have been thinking about picking up some kettle bells to tinker with, especially after the hat tip from Dave of Formosa Neijia regarding metcon/crossfit.  Currently, I am playing around with some exercises that start from the plank position, and yes, looks can be deceiving.