Buffening Up

Word on the streets is that my peeps are worried about if I'm getting stronger yet. Those peeps should rest assured that I'm working on it, day by day, and hopefully will have something to show for it despite the hee-hawing I could do about having a dissertation to write, correct, rewrite, correct, and rewrite a few more times in the intervening months and some kind of apparently serious lower-back injury that I'm only now getting somewhat out-of-the-woods on... being very tight and stiff on one side but not the other now with far less of the overwhelmingly painful and frustrating "stuck" feeling I've lived with since last summer. Today was no exception for buffening up.

This morning, after only a super-mini breakfastish snack, I hit about an hour and twenty of calisthenics and basic saber drills, followed by what sections of the form I know, along with my new favorite way to burn myself up that isn't the saber. This afternoon, I'm planning more saber drills, more saber form, some saber turning, and some zig-zag step strikes, probably with some more of my awesome strengthening drills and standing. If I can still stand after all of that, then I'll turn. If not, I'll probably get some of that in this evening. My puny weights were yesterday, so I don't expect they'll make it into today's routine.

So... this new exercise thing was kind of motivated by a few factors: 1) daoyin exercises; 2) weightlifting; 3) the overwhelming feeling of pointlessness that consumes me while I'm weightlifting, causing me to hate it not because it's hard but because it's lame; 4) little-to-no weight equipment here and a general disdain for the gym, and 5) standing postures. I'm doing weightlifting-like exercises with "extreme isometric tension" instead of actual weights. I haven't yet found a weightlifting maneuver that I can't do this way, though I'm not sure it's quite as hard as lifting a massive piece of steel, but I've also found about 100,000 exercises that I can't figure out how to do with weights that I can do this way. Isometric, by the way, isn't the correct term because there is moving in the joints. It's more like performing the exercises in super-slow motion with overwhelming internal resistance to them. Notably, I can do static strikes this way, which I'm nicknaming "mud striking" because it feels like dragging my arms through mud when I do them. Doing even ten to each side is really tough, and if at any point during the movement, there's a loss of "connection" within the body, it's immediately apparent because the strike starts to feel empty (like the mud suddenly disappeared). Mixing sets of that in with sets of strikes done normally seems to work both aspects of powerful, effective striking: strength and proper mechanics, and doing them so slowly and mindfully allows me to experiment nicely with putting my thought on various aspects of the strike or its goals.

Wicked. I'm about to go get at it again now, so for those about to rock... I salute you (with a badass workout).