Winter trials

Bringing to mind my previous post, wherein I mention how I too often let my life interfere with my training, this past week finds me stubbornly pushing on with the bagua practice despite a particularly annoying patch of "life" recently. My car is in the shop, so getting that fixed, getting it paid for and dealing with the logistics of how I get to work have occupied more time that I'd like.

I'm still trying to work into a solid training groove, back up to the level I was at several months ago. Might take another few weeks, unless I up the pace, but I feel like I'm getting there. Today had a good amount of solid training. Didn't really get any time on the circle, but I made up for that by giving the sweeping strikes some attention, particularly the capturing sweeping strike, which I haven't worked with as much. In that regard, today might be a good model for days to come, at least for the time being. For the capturing strike I did five-minute sessions each for the stationary, one-step, two-step and three-step drills, for a total of 20 minutes of work with the capturing sweeping strike. Additionally, I spent 5 minutes a piece on stationary drills for the rising sweeping and inward sweeping strikes, which is rather cursory, but as I said, I've spent more time working with them in recent weeks and months. I may continue this through future training sessions, focusing on one strike while doing "maintenance work" on the others, at least until my strength and endurance are at sufficient levels to do justice to all three in a day, or even as far as being able to work on more than one palm in a given training session.

The most stimulating part of today's training was almost certainly the time I spent doing forms work. Up until recently I haven't really paid a great deal of attention to the forms, but in recent weeks I've spent a few minutes here and there doing the "moving with the force" sweeping form at the slow-paced learning speed. Today I decided to dedicate more time to it, and to start into the "practicing with power" stage. It's definitely more of a workout, but it's also a good deal of fun. A large part of the challenge (and the fun) of doing the forms is thinking of them in terms of combat applications, trying to visualize an opponent, trying to predict how an opponent would behave, and determining how you would utilize the basic tools of the forms to repond effectively. I have to say, it really makes the art come alive when you engage it like that. It's even more fun and effective if you have a training dummy sparring partner handy, but I am not so lucky at the moment.

Thus encouraged by today's training, I'll be making an effort to reproduce sessions like these every day for the rest of the week, paying particular attention to the forms work. I think that's just what I needed to reinvigorate my regimen.