Mauled by a jaguar

Or not.

This week's achievements:

- Got an 8-year-old to pay attention & stay engaged in class for 85.56 minutes. He zoned for the last 5 but compared to past weeks the improvement is tremendous.

- Did not get beaten too badly in sparring class. My si hing was clearly holding back though. A lot.

- Did not gas out by the second round.

Saturday was a pretty lousy day with an ocean storm spinning over (the weathermen studiously avoided saying "nor'easter" but c'mon, it had all the elements). Sunday & Monday were still quite windy so I forgot about jogging and just did some calisthenics & stance work. This morning I got my jog in. Slow improvement.

King of the hill

Like I said below, my morning jogs are pretty short, but they always end on top of the hill above my house. It's a nice place to stop because there's a little park surrounding a Revolutionary War memorial, with a view down into Cambridge. A little paved area tucks around behind the war memorial and against an old tree, and there's enough space to do forms and be partially hidden from the houses surrounding the park.

I got up there about an hour earlier than usual -- it's tough to drag myself out of bed, especially when the weather is getting cold and it's still dark out -- so the sun was just climbing into the sky. And in the spot where I usually do my stance work -- next to the big tree, looking down into Cambridge, right where the sun shines and warms you up -- was an old man doing chi gong.

He was finishing up his workout, doing deep knee bends and stretching up. So I hung back and stretched out on a park bench a little ways away and caught my breath from the run. He did his last breathing set and walked back to the sidewalk, and nodded hello, and I nodded hello back.

It was crisp this morning and my hands got cold as soon as I stopped running, but doing bai fut sow beside the tree warmed them up again. The wind is not so bad from this side of the memorial, either. The view is great. I think I've found the right spot.

Peak performance

Here's the thing.

I warm up, do some jogging, jump rope, do some stances, stretch a little bit, and after a half hour finally I'm ready to practice some kung fu. So I pick a form, or just a couple techniques out of a form. I'm all ready to work just that selection for an hour. Thing is, I usually peak in about 15 minutes -- meaning, the form or technique I'm practicing looks and flows best after about 15 minutes of practice, I get the most information out of it within that time. Then it just degrades from there until within about 30 minutes it looks just like it did when I started practicing.

If I go to another form or technique, I get nothing from it and no noticeable improvement.

Now I read magazine articles all the time where tai chi masters and professional wushu players alike talk about practicing nonstop from dawn till dusk, the majority of that being forms work. But the more experience I get, the more those articles sound like BS. "Oh, we practice 26 hours a day! Americans are too lazy to do that!"

Nah, not hardly. We have full-time jobs and often families. And if our kids do martial arts, no matter how good they are at it, school takes priority.

So I pay more attention these days to "quality vs. quantity," in magazine articles and in my own practice. I progress better in skill if I don't wear myself out doing hours of repetitive work. (If I were 10 years younger that might be different.) I read training articles from several different disciplines -- running, boxing, gymnastics -- and updates from sports medicine journals.

Past 30, an athlete of any skill level needs to pay attention to a few things. Don't push through pain. Know the difference between isometric and isotonic conditioning. Know the difference between aerobic and anaerobic conditioning. Become familiar with the term "core." Understand how all these things intertwine with kung fu practice.

15 minutes of practice a day is way better than no practice. Most students do 3 classes a week, max. Nothing wrong with that, but if you really want to improve at kung fu, practice every day, even if only for a few minutes. But make those few minutes quality ones. No distractions, no TV. Do just one or two things, three max. Such as, train stances or work on your newest technique. The improvements will be noticeable, maybe not right away, but sooner than you think.

It's not trivial

This morning before kids' class started one of the younger students came up to show me the praying mantis he found in his backyard a couple days ago. It was a big specimen with a dark green iridescent hue. Unfortunately the student didn't punch any air holes in the container, so the mantis also had an iridescent funk, kind of like a freshly turned mulch pile.

Sifu went over our last test scores after the class had left, pointed out errors in the written section mostly. "You have to know these things," he told us. "You're teaching now."

"So we should spend more time on the trivia?" I asked. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to say.

"It's not trivial," Sifu replied.

See? Bad choice of words. The written test is kung fu history, details on the style's theory, lists of forms and concepts. A student only has to answer about five written questions, but he has to study 50 questions before the test. They are short answers, like trivia questions. But they're not trivial.

This week I'll think about how to incorporate those questions into the class. Asking one of the questions at the end of class is OK but it probably shoots out of the student's mind as soon as they're dismissed. So maybe a 5-minute "think break" during forms training instead, so students don't feel put on the spot.

Jump up high

A guideline of blogging is to get good at it, one should blog a little every day. Even if you don't have much interesting to say. So here is my little blog with some totally uninteresting stuff.

Yesterday's workout:

• I jumped back and forth over a heavy bag for 90 seconds.
• I threw weighted jabs for a minute and a half.
• I jumped rope for 1/60th of an hour.
• I did a wall sit for 45 x 2 seconds.
• I kicked some targets for 270 seconds divided by 3.

Plus a regular warmup and 3 sets of 20 leglifts without puking, and a little practice with the gim.

Hope you were entertained.

The knees are creaky

First, congratulations & best wishes to my kung fu brother & sister, Marlon & Leesha, who were married Friday night. Two of the best people I've ever met.

Kung fu in general draws good people from all walks of life. It draws its fair share of kooks and frauds too, but the folks who tend to last are people of genuinely good character. Hell, even if they don't stay with it, people try it out because they look for a positive experience. Most of my close friends I met, either directly or indirectly, through martial arts.

I'm giving the knees a rest today. Since last year I put on about ten pounds -- okay fifteen, but I dropped five pretty quickly by laying off the ice cream. And I've got a little extra time on my hands these days. So I've increased my workouts and added about 6 miles a week of jogging to the schedule. But it's clearly time for new shoes; even though the mileage is pathetically low my knees immediately got cranky. Working out yesterday, low stances were just agony so after a few attempts I gave up on them completely and just worked on upper-body stuff. One of these days I'll admit that I'm no longer 19. Probably when I'm dead.

UFC on Spike TV

Tonight's event? Nice, so far. Offering a main event for free? Genius marketing scheme by Dana White. Scheduling the fights before bedtime? Brilliant -- kids everywhere are practicing the triangle choke on their siblings and begging to go sign up for MMA.

That was a wicked choke that Ed Herman just got put into.

I'm going away to drink more beer and watch more fights.


Update: Well, I'm glad I didn't pay money to see that fight. I'd say Tito figured out Shamrock's game pretty well, LOL.

Shaking hands on national TV was a nice thing, though. And it's about time Shamrock retired; while it's true there are several fighters out there well past age 42, he's already hit the top of his game and no one is going to take away his laurels as a hall-of-famer. He should go ahead and just coach. But hire a good business manager, Mr. Shamrock. You're a great fighter, but from what I've seen, not so much in the brains department. So let somebody else do the books, so your gym stays in business and you have a little money to retire on.