Seeking Structure
It has been a rather long time for me now since I left the Metro Jackson area of Mississippi and my first kwoon, and since then I have practiced sporadically, saying that when this happens or that happens I will practice more. As often happens, good intentions have persisted; both in being good, and in remaining intentions only. My lack of success in keeping up with my practice is contrasted with my success in other areas of my fitness. I have been able to consistently get out and walk with a local group on a regular basis and I have started back on working toward a goal of one hundred consecutive (knuckle) push ups a la hundredpushups.com. (To be fair, I have only done 2 days on the hundred push ups challenge so far.)
Thinking on this today, I started to consider why it is that my kung fu practice is suffering so when I have no difficulty keeping up with these other things that aren’t, honestly, quite as interesting to me. I quickly determined that two things I am lacking in my kung fu practice are the structure of regular practice and the expectations that go along with that and the social aspect of being a part of a group activity. In the case of the push ups, the social aspect is largely ‘virtual’. Chatting here and there online with others, some who are also following the same program, others who just note my mention of it and chat with me about it a bit. In the case of the walking, the social aspect is much more evident as the walks tend to be an hour or more outdoors with several other people. In both cases, the structure of a schedule somehow makes it easier to allocate the time, and with the push ups schedule being more loose, I can easily see how it is much more likely to start skipping or get busy.
With this in mind, and even before I had started to recognize my desire for this sort of structure consciously, (Perhaps simply before I was willing to acknowledge it.) I decided to look into a nearby school, Clearwater Kung Fu, or Nick Scrima’s Traditional Chinese Martial Arts Center. I spent a good bit of time looking over the web site and was pleased to find that there is a good bit of similarity in some of the styles taught there to the style that I had been learning.
Wanting to know more about the school, I continued to poke around the internet. I know the best thing for me to do is to go to the school and find out more first hand, but I figured that would have to wait for another day as it was already past 10pm when I started thinking about it. I doubt that poking around a kung fu school in the middle of the night is wise. Looking around on google, a youtube video caught my eye and I followed the link to watch it. The sifu introduced himself, making mention of Clearwater Kung Fu Center and walked through a technique. From there I noted several videos by this same person and I spent some time watching a handful of them. I was not too certain what I thought of the technique, but I kept in mind that this may not be the school I am meaning to look at, that if it were I would still benefit from the structure and social aspect of joining, as well as the fitness.
After a good bit of clicking through from video to video, I did find a nice playlist of balance exercises that I will share here. After all, balance and structure are quite closely related. Of particular note, I liked the (repeated) mention of placing the weight on the inside of the foot in these exercises, something I do not recall noting from previous training. I know I will be watching these some more this weekend and working each of these as I continue to need work on my structure and balance. I hope others can also find value in them.