Thursday evening

The next phase of my martial growth would involve turning the large into the small. My understanding of this process is to touch the essence (for example, highly refined and deeply internalized body mechanics or FEELING) of a technique, and then to incrementally condense the external manifestation of the technique while keeping true to its essence. Over time, expansiveness decreases while potency increases. I call this method “Making smaller circles”. - Josh Waitzkin, “The Art Of Learning”



Thursday evening kung fu. Small class- no JM, no Nemesis.

Hand strike drills. We only did one round of these, and they didn't seem to hurt much. We'll see what I feel like in the morning. A round of kick drills.

Then we repped the first few moves of the Five Animals form, and worked apps with partners. Although my technique needed a little tweaking, it is interesting to watch the new people trying to do it, and realizing that as clueless as I still feel at times, *that* level of newbie cluelessness is far in my rearview mirror. In particular, the general sqeamishness of a newbie when it comes to getting right up against your opponent and becoming one.

Instead of sparring tonight, we paired up each newbie with a more senior student and did a one-step strike to be parried or blocked. I attacked RM and then got attacked by Marcy. A couple of people on the forums and blogs this week have mentioned fighting new people and how it can be tricker than fighting experienced people, just because the new people do things you don't expect. I got a lot of that from Marcy. Once again I do poorly against multi-level combo attacks, and I was also doing pretty poorly against her kicking attacks. I kept advancing on her so that I could quickly move inside the range of her kicks, and she kept backing away (there's that newbie don't-get-too-close thing again).