the way of wujimon

Below is the Formosa Fitness Challenge: 100 Squats:

So here's the challenge: do 100 squats with your butt touching a basketball or medicine ball. Can you do it? … Many people have trouble squatting properly because they don't move from the hips. Sitting BACK into the hips takes the pressure off of the knee and allows for a deeper squat, giving better fitness results. … Many people claim that squats hurt their knees but not going low enough actually contributes to that problem. If you don't squat with the hip BELOW the knee (an actual parallel squat) the hamstrings don't fire, meaning the squat will only work the quads. You end up with a muscle imbalance from doing the exercise improperly

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOGD0ZF39jY]

URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOGD0ZF39jY

While I didn’t count the exact number of squats in the video, I’m pretty sure Dave did a 100. Dave is a former taiji blogger (formosa neijia) turn personal fitness coach.  As such, he has quite a bit of insight into biomechanics and movement. I’ve gotten a lot of great tips from Dave over the years and would highly recommend everyone check out his website, Formosa Fitness, and blog! For more on the challenge and discussions on imbalances between the quads and hamstrings, read the full article on the Formosa Fitness Challenge: 100 Squats.

The following is a comment on the blog from Dave Chesser of Formosa Fitness:

Regarding isolation, master physical trainer Paul Chek said it best, "Isolate, then integrate." This isn't something you will ever hear from the IMA community unfortunately. The idea is that you isolate the weak parts of the chain until they're stronger THEN incorporate that new found strength back into the whole body movement …

I have been thinking a lot about the above idea of isolate, then integrate.  In the techie world, there is a similar saying: “A system is only as fast as it’s slowest component”.  In my research about knee pains,  I've reading that pains can be a result of an imbalance of strength between the hamstrings and quads.  Did I work on my hamstrings to try and correct this imbalance?  No.  Instead, I focused on the alignment of my knee over the toe.  While focusing on the alignment is not a bad thing, I think I was just too lazy to try and work on my hamstrings. Dave just wrote a new post that specifically addresses the role of shoulders in Internal Martial Arts (IMA).  His post brings up some topics I mentioned in The Position of Shoulders in Opening the Chest.  Dave describes the situation and offers some exercise videos to address the problems.  I tried doing the shoulder dislocate exercise, and it's pretty good at increasing the range of motion of the shoudlers.  At first, I was unable to do it holding onto a belt, but after I switched to using an exercise band, things are coming along nicely.  Check out Dave's post at Opening the shoulders, generating power, improving posture | Formosa Fitness. For me, P90X is bringing to light a lot of my own weaknesses.  I could definitely lose a few pounds.  Additionally, I know some parts of my body are physically weak and could be kicked up a notch. I don't have aspirations of becoming a body builder, but I would like to know that I could easily lift my own body weight if need be. So, what have I been doing with my own time? I am proud to say that I’ve been sticking with the P90X program. In fact, I did the shoulders, triceps and biceps routine on a late Friday evening, because I’m hardcore like that ;)  Note, I normally don’t workout on a Friday eve, as that’s generally dedicated to “chill time” that consists of having a beer while watching a movie with my wife. However, Saturday was a different story and I didn’t do the Yoga-X workout. The weekend was just too busy with family activities of going to the library, rollerblading, going to a corn maze, etc. I don’t feel so bad as rollerblading gave me a good sweat. I had forgotten how tiring blading can be, especially when you’ve got a 40 lb little dude leaning on you because it was his first time rollerskating! Has P90X affected my taiji training time? Yes, it has.  I actually haven’t really been doing much of taiji or meditation lately. Previously, taiji and meditation were more of a stress reliever for me.  The P90X physical workouts are pretty good at relieving stress while making me healthier at the same time. I am not giving up on taiji/meditation, they are just taking a back burner for now while I focus on my physical health and well-being. Whenever I think about physical health and well-being in relation to martial arts, I often think of the following quote:

... Additionally, I would consider the ability to personally maintain a healthy body weight, an excellent state of overall physical fitness, and the ability to apply the Form Postures to self-defense as a soft style internal kung-fu art. In the end, whatever is expressed outwardly….our personal demonstration…is a reflection of what we think and feel inwardly. -- Personal Demonstration of Skill

My wife and I have decided to become healthier TOGETHER.  This entails some type of physical exercise activity EVERY DAY.  She is doing the P90 program, while I have decided to try out the P90X program, because I’m X-TREME like that ;) lol.. Last night, was my first night into the program. The P90X program consists of 12 different workouts. On day 1, the following workouts are done: Chest & Back, Ab Ripper X.  The Chest and Back workout is roughly 1 hour long with a 5 minute warm-up and a couple minute cool down at the end. The exercises are done either with your own body weight or with dumb bells or a resistance band. The exercises alternate focus between chest and back. The chest workouts are variations on the push-up and the back workouts are variations on chin-ups. I was barely able to complete the first workout of 12 different chest/back exercises. If I wasn’t able to continue doing the push-ups, I would do a modified push-up with knees on the ground or just hold myself in the plank position.  The Ab Ripper X workout was no cake walk. I could barely do some of the exercises.  This workout consisted mostly of me watching them do the exercise while I was doing crunches or holding ab style planks. At the end of the session, I felt a bit dizzy, nauseous and totally beat.  For a bit, I felt like I was going to blackout. After telling my wife this, she suggested that maybe I work my way up to P90X.  I then started thinking of maybe doing some yoga or Tae Bo or something to work my way up, but I’ve decided to keep going on the P90X system. Tonight’s workout is called Plyometrics which looks like a jumping cardio routine. This morning, I woke up feeling sore, but good. My chest and back are a bit sore, but overall I feel like a much healthier person.  I will stick with the P90X for a couple more days as some people at my work are also on the program. So far, I haven’t seen anything in the P90X program that conflicts with my thoughts on the role of physical conditioning in taiji, except for the fact that some of the exercises consists of isolating muscle groups … hmm…

… I next started training Taijiquan. The Taiji folks leave me scratching my head the most on the subject of conditioning. They seem to be the most set against physical conditioning, out side of doing their basics, and forms. via Conditioning and Resistance Training | Murphy Martial Arts

The above snippet caught my attention and made me think about my own training. Mike Murphy goes into more details on the reasoning and some potential pitfalls for weight lifting and/or resistance training, see the above link for more. Like Mike, and everyone else in the world, I am getting older.  As I get older, I think more and more about my overall health and well-being.

Muscle reaches its maximum size by about the age of 25 in most people. There is then about a 10% decrease between the age of 25 and 45 with a 45% shrinkage over the next 30 years. But why does so much muscle tissue disappear, and why does the degeneration accelerate after the age of 50? -- Source: The loss of muscle mass and bone density with age – and how to stop it!

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I just wanted to extend a gracious hat tip to blog reader, Richard Johnson (aka twocircles). Richard is a disciple of Chen Zhonghua and is an instructor in the Chen Style Taijiquan Practical Method.  Richard was kind enough to provide some feedback on the issue with my Floating Right Hip.

After a couple of email exchanges and answers to  some posed tests, Richard was able to identify the that muscles on the left side of the hip between the top of my hip bone and thigh bone are holding tension.  This tension pulls my hips to the right.  Richard is currently pursuing higher education in Exercise Science.

Richard proposed a couple of adductor type exercises (like the inner/outer thigh Jane Fonda exercises) to get things back in line. I have been doing the exercises for a couple of weeks and I can already feel and notice a difference!

One of the exercises I do is: Standing straight up and down, while keeping my left leg straight, I slowly raise it to the side. I do the same for the right leg. For a visual, check out the NetFit resistance band abductor muscle exercise, however note that I do mine without resistance. I will repeat the same type of exercise, but this time lying down.

I think I really need to get off my arse and not lead such a sedentary lifestyle! I basically sit down in front of a computer for 8 hours a day at work. Then I come home and have very minimal physical activity (vacuuming, mowing lawn, basic cleaning).  I am planning to check out the local wushu school for my 5 yr old son this weekend. Perhaps it might not be a bad idea to start doing my kicks, stretches and wushu basics again.  I used to have a pretty mean double slap crescent kick.  The key word is "used to"...

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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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 ;)

For the past couple of weeks, I have noticed a massive increase of tension held in my body. For example, I feel a lot of tension in my shoulders and lower back.  I guess the strain of being a computer worker is finally starting to take its toll on me.

More recently, I have been feeling some nerve like tension/pain in my right elbow. My right hand is my “mouse hand”, so I am assuming there is some relation there.  I try to be ergonomically correct in my posture, but something just isn’t right.  I’m getting more and more of these weird nerve-like pains in my body. I’m still pretty young, yet my wife makes fun of me calling me an “old man” due to all my pains and cracking joints.

What’s different in my routine? Since the workshop in March, I have cut back dramatically on doing my evening zhan zhuang sessions.  At first, it was because I was tired and sore from the workshop, but over time, I just became tired and chose to do other things with my time.  Additionally, some of my training emphasis has shifted and I’m not as relaxed (mentally and physically) as I used to be.

Last night, I went back to my old routine of doing sitting meditation and then some standing zhan zhuang while listening to my Liquid Mind channel on Pandora.  After the 30 min session, I felt great!  One of the craziest thing was during the universal post posture, I felt a surge of tingling in my right elbow.  The surge was like a weird alternating current of pain and openness. I am assuming it’s just my energy trying to break through some of the blockage.  The same was true for the tension in my shoulders, I could feel something tingling in those main tension spots.

After the zhan zhuang, I did the first 5 or so movements of the Yang long form as slowly as I could muster. While doing the form, my goal was to be effortless, move without tension.

Over time, I am realizing the benefits of relaxation. I know, this sounds completely strange and should be obvious, but how many of us can truly say we are relaxed?  When I was younger, I did not really value the benefit of relaxation, but as I grow older with more things weighing on my mind and body, I can feel the benefits.  After all, isn’t the goal of martial arts to maximize one’s energy? How can this be done with a weak body?