A question about lower spine alignment in internal martial arts and life

A reader, Tom, commented recently on my post about training standing strengthening postures (a post I could probably add to at this point--maybe a future topic if I get around to it). Tom writes,

I'm running into some lower back issues with the flattening of the lumbar spine that occurs with the admonition to tuck (the coccyx). Lumbar discs, particularly at L5-S1, are compressed and held under compression for extended periods during YSB standing practice. It's one thing for a tuck to be a momentary phase during dynamic movement (of the spine), but to hold the tuck seems questionable to me.

The short version of my answer to this question is that I think that "tuck" is the wrong word and "drop" is the right one. For the elaborated-upon answer, keep reading.

Beast Mode and eating -- calorie intake and overtraining

So... Beast Mode is catching up with me, apparently. I haven't lost the mental fire and have kept pushing myself to do the workouts at my fullest capacity, but honestly, over the last several days, the physical gusto has just kind of been dwindling. This happened one day last week too. I noticed it particularly during last night's conditioning workout (details below) and in essentially everything I did with my training today. My body just feels tired and heavy, and the will to keep going is twice as hard as usual to maintain. I would figure that this is a symptom of overtraining, but I don't have any of the other primary symptoms of that issue right now (elevated heart rate upon waking, poor sleep, etc.). The problem is, I believe, undereating.

Flat back

A flat back... I have one.

At this year's successful seminar series, in which I was glad to participate in two tour stops, it was made literally painfully clear to me that I have an overly flat upper back, and that I am to work hard to correct this issue.

Armchair Training

Training in an armchair? What the hee-haw? Before anyone salivates like I'm about to throw out some crazy awesome secret tip for how you can achieve development without having to get out of your comfy lazy-boy recliner (such tips do not exist in real martial arts or development practices of any sort), let me point out to you my predicament and the reality of this. I'm injured in a way where standing and walking are kind of out for the moment, except for bare-minimum requirements. It's absolutely amazing how much pain and impediment a toe can cause you, let me just say that.

So I have this rule: never zero that I've talked about before. How can I hold myself to "never zero" if I can't really even move around? Standing postures? Nope, not with this injury, at least not in full. Standing with wide legs or toes digging into the earth (especially that second one) is blinding pain right now. That's out until I'm healed up.

Well, while development is considerably lower, there are modifications of lots of the exercises that can be done while sitting. I even trained the saber! Several of the isometric postures with the saber can be trained without having to get up if your feet, knees, or legs are in no shape to let you train properly. Please note: this is not a substitute for proper training, you hee-haw, this is making the most of a crappy situation. While holding your body in an active, upright posture, the saber can be held out in a variety of ways to strengthen various parts of the arm and hands. Here are a few examples:

• Hold the saber overhead as in "green dragon shoots to the sea;"
• Hold the saber out in front, as in "black bear carries the mountain on its back" or "rooster stomps into battle;"
• Hold the saber out in front or directly out to one side as if completing a chop or stab;
• Hold the saber in front vertically, as in "monkey king offers incense;"
• Slowly move the tip of the saber from horizontal to vertical by flexing only the wrist, usually done out in front;
• Slowly rotate the saber from pointing left to pointing right, and vice-versa, using primarily the forearm;
• Hold the saber extended and turn the blade over without moving the saber much, as if working a screwdriver, as far as it will go one way and then back the other, trying to keep the tip stationary.

Other things you can do don't require the saber if you can't get on your feet but are otherwise healthy and able. For instances:

• Focus on other activities like strength training (using weights) or stretching (preferably both);
• Watch some YSB instructional videos and make notes. If you're training properly, this is an activity that is usually hard to make time for (if you're like me, you're more time-limited than anything else in terms of what limits your total training);
• Review your notes from previous training sessions, video viewings, seminars, or intensives. Reviewing them can mean compiling them as well, which is harder but very useful;
• Train your mind. Try to do techniques, particularly combos, forms, and applications vividly in your mind. Research shows that this kind of training is nearly essential for greatness in a skill. The mind should be central in your training anyway, so if your body is telling you that you can't train any other way, train this way;
• Do modified versions of exercises that accommodate your injury. For instance, standing normally isn't too bad for me now that I'm on the mend (but not fixed), so I can do isometric standing strengthening postures without putting any hard effort into my legs, and this practice isn't causing me pain. It is, however, giving me some development in my upper body and building skill in doing the exercises correctly on that half.

As I'm learning, letting yourself heal from an injury before pressing foward is critical or you'll lose more training time than you would by doing a bunch of halfed training sessions. I learned the hard way, when this injury was initially on the mend and got to "mostly feeling better but still injured" that doing a hard session too soon on an injury makes the injury worse. Instead of having to take another day of careful, controlled stuff like I mentioned above, I made things way worse and have lost nearly a week of good training time. One workout isn't worth losing six or seven (or more, depending on the injury)!

Overtraining

This is a martial art that I'm training. Martial arts bring up the idea of boot camp, as do the seminars that we go to in Yin Style Baguazhang. Boot camp is a popular notion these days (see over a million pages on Google about "weight loss boot camp," probably the latest craze in the fad-driven weight-loss program industry), and I think folks training in the martial arts like to envision themselves in a boot-camp like situation in which they come out highly trained, skillful, and chiseled. This mentality, unfortunately enough, leads to the easy potential for overtraining, which I think I'm suffering from to some degree right now despite a relatively low number of total (physical) training hours in the last month (about 35 since Nov. 1). You can check out some of the signs and symptoms of overtraining syndrome here.

My problem comes directly from deciding to focus almost exclusively on one or two things, which rapidly builds the potential for overdoing it in those one or two things. In particular, I've been overcooking myself with the large saber, committing myself to hundreds of repetitions of tracing the saber each day (nearly 7000 in each hand since Nov. 1 actually... I kept track) in addition to a fair sampling of the other basic drills that I know whenever the weather permits. Here are some of the symptoms I've noticed:

• I can do way more tracing of the saber per day now than I could at the beginning of the month (400 in each hand each day isn't a ridiculous request on myself now), but the first few sets are literally painful until I'm "warmed up" and the number I can do in any given set has actually decreased over the month. Near the beginning of the month, I'd do mostly sets of 50 with an occasional 60, 75, or 80 thrown in there (and 100 straight once!). Now, a set of 50 is very hard, but I can do 6 consecutive sets of 40 or 30 with relative ease. I'm not sure that's how I want things to be going. To my mind, both of these numbers should be going up over time.
• Turning with the saber, particularly in bear posture (one that's relatively easy to do regardless of working a lot or bad weather because it fits in a relatively small space with no special ceiling needs) went from being hard to easier to really hard. After an initial increase in both total number of go-arounds I could do without having to stop/switch hands and an increase in total number of go-arounds I could do in a workout, switching hands as needed, I've seen a marked decrease in both of those numbers over the past few days (I've only been doing this one daily for about a week now). That can't be good. I'm seeing similar results with turning in the dragon posture (from the form) because I'm doing it kind of maniacally and daily right now too.
• Other drills with the saber are kind of similar. I've had tendinitis in one of my wrists for a while, so a good many of them have been kind of on the back-burner, but as I've gone back into doing them, I'm seeing similar results with the ones I do essentially every day. I'm getting cooked by them so that each subsequent day is worse than the day before it.
• I'm showing a number of the "stagnation" kind of symptoms given on that list of overtraining symptoms from above plus some compulsion to do tracing and to do it a lot.
  

I keep pushing myself thinking that I'll train through this, or more specifically, that if this was real military "saber camp," I'd be picking that thing up for hours a day and sucking this up big-time or else. The thing is, while I'm feeling stronger in lots of ways from the workouts, I'm blatantly less able to do them now than before. Boot camp mentality or no, that's simply not how this thing works. Days off aren't just important, they're critical, at least for my physique.

I'm thinking that taking days off of using the saber completely isn't actually necessary, but a more complementary set of exercises should be arranged so that the same kinds of things aren't being done day after day after day. Besides the dangers to the tendons in some of those exercises (chops and stabs, in particular, for us little-wrist people), overtraining syndrome can eventually actually cut into baseline performance so that we could end up worse at what we're doing for having done a lot of it, basic skills improvements aside. The two things I've seen suggested to help deal with overtraining issues that aren't "put it down," which is the main advice, are to intentionally do "light days" as well as to shake things up by doing things that are completely different on different days. That's the plan, I think.

The funny thing is that with an art like Yin Style is that the drive to really get good at things through heavy repetition and single-purposed focus creates the compulsion to overtrain so strongly that it can put you in the problematic situation where it somehow feels inappropriate to train something different to "shake things up." Ironically, this occurs in an art in which there is certainly enough material in it so that many practitioners mention at one point or another that there's "too much stuff" in the art to give full attention to. Doing something else, some of that other "too much stuff," is just what's needed, though. I think this is probably how it has to be: Train a few things very dilligently and primarily, but incorporate other things for variety, interest, and to give your body something to work on while you recover from your primary training goal(s) (which should, of course, change over time and with changing interests). You must respect that your body will need time to recover fully from each exercise you do, anywhere from 12 to 72 hours depending on your fitness, your genetics, the muscle group in question, your diet, your level of hydration, the amount of sleep you get, and a multitude of other factors. Yeah, it's that complicated (actually more complicated than that!), and it can be different for each muscle group or system in your body!

The basic truth of how your body reacts to exercise as an adaptable organism is as follows: You have a starting level of fitness that I'll refer to as your "starting point." When you exercise or train, you stress your tissues, which takes away from their full capacity for a time for a variety of not-fully-understood reasons. This time is called the "recovery" phase and takes an amount of time that is very difficult to determine from the list of above factors. Following the recovery phase, your body adapts to the stress by elevating the particular tissues involved in whatever you did to a level that exceeds their original level of fitness. This is called the "supercompensation" phase. The supercompensation period decays exponentially back to your original "starting point" over a time period that is influenced by all of the above factors (including the myriad that I didn't mention).

The thing is, to sound smart and technical, that your tissues kind of deal with this sitaution in a Markovian way, in other words, when you workout again is something like your new "starting point." You enter a recovery phase that drops your level of fitness temporarily based on the intensity of your workout (harder workout; bigger drop). That, in turn, causes an overcompensating swing into a supercompensation phase (bigger drop swings to bigger peak, it appears). Thus, this is all about timing. If you work out again before you get "out of the woods" of your previous recovery phase, then you're starting from a lower point on the curve than if you would have waited a little while longer. If you work out again during your supercompensation phase (particularly near its peak), then you reap maximal benefits. If you wait too long, then it's essentially, in terms of your tissues (not your developed skills), essentially like you never worked out the first time. The tough part is that these time periods are very difficult to determine and variable on about a bajillion variables. Thus... be pragmatic: If you feel overtraining symptoms setting in, back off, slow down, and cross-train; otherwise, keep on keepin' on.

Some ideas for shaking things up include:

• Putting the saber down for empty-hand practice, if you're overdoing the saber;
• Picking the saber up if you're not doing so much of that;
• Turning more (always good?) and/or in different postures (try the various strengthening postures or what you know of different animal postures);
• Changing palms if you're focusing on a certain palm or small number of them;
• Picking up a new form (from the videos) and drilling it;
• Hit the gym or go running (worked for me yesterday... shook me up out of my normal mentality of how I "have to train" and had me moving at the same time -- plus made be suck wind like I ran an f-ing marathon even though I only did a rather slow 800m);
• Trying something out from another animal system (if you have the videos) for a couple of days to vary things up;
• Training the same stuff with intentionally and markedly lower intensity, focusing on some different requirement(s) of that technique or mentally "using it" more than just drilling it in the body;
  
• Something else that you've thought of that I'm not right now (leave a comment!).

To put things plainly, I suppose, the science says that if you're exhibiting symptoms of overtraining, more training will not make you better. If you're really lucky and really determined, you might improve in skills while you deteriorate your physical ability to improve, but more than likely, the built-up fatigue (unfinished recovery) will cause you to be sloppy and less precise than taking some time off and coming back to it another day. If you're less fortunate, you could actually end up simultaneously developing bad habits, getting weaker, and even possibly seriously injuring yourself (tendinitis, tweaked joints, repetitive movement/stress injuries, etc.).

My Wrist, By Request: Trigger Points and Tendinitis

The dadao can really wreck your wrist if you're not careful, as can some of the other practices if you repetitively overdo them like I apparently did in London. My left wrist, which I've mentioned a couple of times already, has been unduly sore and less training-worthy ever since I got back. Since I got asked what I've done to help it, since I have helped it a lot, I decided to make a post about it.

The culprits that cause joint pain in the wrist are usually limited to three or four things: broken/dislocated bones, torn ligaments (sprains), tendinitis, and trigger points. I suppose you could do those first two with the saber or training, but I see those as being more likely by doing applications irresponsibly than by doing the training regimens. The last two, however, are more common, and luckily, one is easily treatable. In fact, if you have tendinitis, it's a virtual certainty that a fair proportion of your limitation in movement, discomfort, (abnormal) weakness, or pain is caused by trigger points in some nearby muscles as well. Treating those trigger points can relieve you of some of that trouble. Since all you can really do for tendinitis (if it really is just tendinitis) is ice it and rest it, eventually starting some stretching after time goes on, there's not much to say about that treatment. It is the case, however, that as often as not (probably more often, actually) trigger point issues create symptoms that are nearly identical to tendinitis that doesn't really exist.

I'm not going to detail tremendously here what trigger points are or how they arise, but knowing a little about them helps quite a bit. Essentially, if you overwork or misuse a muscle in any way, the potential to develop a trigger point is there. Even excessive resting can cause them, particularly if the muscles aren't taken through their natural ranges of motion (sitting is an example of this which causes many trigger points in the iliopsoas muscles --which cause stiffness and low-back pain-- just due to the fact that sitting in a chair naturally shortens those muscles and lets them stay that way). Trigger points are like tiny bands of contracted muscle fibers within your muscles, and they almost never resolve themselves on their own. They do, however, have two phases: active and latent. In their latent phase, they slightly restrict movement and have a high potential for becoming suddenly active, though they don't usually hurt much. In their active phase, they create tremendous discomfort. More often than not, the following truth should rule your thinking about trigger points: trigger points almost always refer pain to a place other than where they are, i.e. the problem isn't always where it hurts.

How can you get rid of trigger points? There are a few methods, none of which are fun: certain doctors can inject them with salene or procaine, they can be made very cold and then stretched (under the supervision of a trained professional), or they can be massaged (for free at home!). The massage is quite painful. In fact, you can identify where a trigger point is in your musculature because it's a spot that is inordinately painful ("exquisitely tender" is the term used by Davies, an expert in the field -- this book is almost a must-buy for anyone that does anything remotely athletic or abjectly unathletic). Once you find the spot and make it hurt with the massage, you have to hold onto it until it doesn't hurt. Basically, the process sucks, but you're looking at a few minutes of rather big discomfort to cure you of possibly months or years of increasingly degenerative discomfort and restriction in range of movement. The choice is pretty clear.

For the wrist, most of the time the problem isn't in the wrist, although it can be. It's usually reassuring to poke around the area that hurts and see if anything local is causing the problem. Depending on what hurts, it very well may be (the ligaments in the wrist can contain trigger points as well, notably the one between the thumb and the radius bone). More often than not, though, wrist pain arises further up in the forearm in the muscles that flex and extend the wrist and fingers (flexors, extensors). If your symptoms more strongly match "tennis elbow of the wrist," then your extensors are more of the problem. If your symptoms more strongly match "golfer's elbow of the wrist," then your flexors are more of the problem. In either case, rather aggressive, deep-tissue massage (typically using tools like balls or sticks) on the bellies of those muscles as well as (especially!) their attachments near the elbows will help. The massage is painful and slow, so you might need to set aside ten minutes to a half an hour to do it, and you should do it at least twice daily for a week to see really big improvement. After massaging, whenever possible, it is extremely helpful to ice the areas that you massaged for a few minutes.

My basic suggestions to anyone with wrist pain is that you search thoroughly in your forearms (extensors are on its back and flexors are on its front) for tender knots in the muscles and then press them hard, especially if they reproduce your wrist symptoms in any way (those are the main things you're looking for). That's not the whole ball of wax, unfortunately, for wrist pain.

You might find trigger points further up that cause pain in the wrist as well. Some examples of places to look might surprise you. This list isn't exhaustive, but here are some suggestions: brachialis, brachioradialis, pectoralis minor, subclavius, and the scalenes. You might also check the musculature of the thumb and, again, the local tissue in the wrist. The best massage technique I've experienced is to press hard enough so that the pain index (scale of 1-10, 1 being essentially no pain, 10 being unbearably excruciating) hits between 6 and 8 and then hold it long enough so that the pain diminishes to the 3-5 range. It seems like that will probably never happen, but it will... just keep breathing and trying to relax, and eventually your muscle relaxes and the trigger points let go. After treating and before icing, stretching those muscles is also advisable, though stretching trigger-point-afflicted muscles without massage first tends to make the problems worse, not better. You may find many, even dozens of such spots in your forearms if your wrists hurt. Sorry, but that's just how that works.

A last note: you will probably try to guard against the invasion of the massage tool (tennis balls and golf balls are particularly good, placed in a sock and then leaned upon against a wall). That's natural, but you want to try to breathe, focus, and let those muscles relax. Guarding will not help you as much and can create other problems (trigger points in other muscles). Also, you may bruise from the treatment, and if you do, then you should not continue pushing on that spot until the bruise goes away. Finally, don't interrupt the blood flow in main arteries or push hard on nerves. The first is identifiable by feeling a very strong pulse and then when you let go a flood of warm liquid inside your skin. The second is identifiable because it causes a lot of local pain (usually) and distal numbness. If leaning on a ball is making your fingers go dead-numb, that's bad.

Good luck and happy hunting!

Yin Yoga -- Fix It If It's Broken

This post is about supplementing your Yin Style (or any martial arts) practice with a form of yoga called Yin Yoga. Yeah, yeah, I know... supplemental practices! Yeah, yeah, I know... I've mentioned this before! The thing is that this particular branch of yoga is really helpful for putting you back together after hard training, particularly when your joints are aching and sore or if you have any kind of chronic pain. The practices are primarily suited for the lower body, probably from the ribs down -- particularly in the hips and lower back, and they're really, really helpful (though difficult to do because they're so easy and somewhat uncomfortable) for helping fix tension in those areas. I'm a big fan of the practice... I just wish I could find/make time (will?) to do more of it.

Here's the basic rundown of Yin Yoga if you've never heard of it. First of all, this "Yin" is Yin like Yin and Yang, not like Yin Fu. The basic idea is that a few carefully chosen poses are selected, primarily for their ability to affect connective tissue in the "yin areas" of the body, practiced according to three basic rules (that need attention to prevent injury), and are held for what seem to be ridiculously dangerous amounts of time. The theory is that this gives the body time to stop resisting the stretches and allows the connective tissue (tendons, ligaments, fascia, dura, etc) to be directly affected. Furthermore, the theory is that the qi meridian systems of the body are also directly affected (removing blockages and stimulating flow, for instances).

The rules are simple enough:

1. Find your appropriate position, which means making sure that you've chosen yin-suitable postures, that you've entered into them correctly, and that you've appropriately found "your edge," discussed briefly below, and not exceeded that;
2. Breathe deeply and relax, focusing the attention inward to the tissues being affected;
3. Wait.

"Your edge" in Yin Yoga means finding the place in the posture for which your body starts to feel some affect but is not being taxed. There are particular cues that you can read up on or become educated on (if you take a class in it... good idea if you've never done it or don't have a helper) that will tell you if you've gone too far in most poses. The best rule of thumb, though, is to remember that it's "YIN" Yoga, and therefore the proper position is usually where your body will go without having to put in any extra effort. That means you don't pull yourself into poses, you let yourself fall into them (Yin... check). Gravity (Yin) is the main operator once you're in position. You should be mostly "comfortable" in these poses (though I wouldn't describe it that way), apparently.

"Wait" in Yin Yoga means that you hold the pose until the natural resistances of the body and mind stop. That means that you're going to be there for a while, maybe two or three minutes, maybe twenty in a more advanced practice (I've never exceeded about six, actually, but I'm not serious). It also means that in a class or a single practice session, you can't expect to do too much and should probably plan out what you intend to do with specific goals in mind ahead of time. The natural resistances of the body are some forms of tension or discomfort that the body will relax through. Those of the mind are boredom, thinking it's futile or stupid, a wandering mind (off the given task and affected tissue), and that sort of thing. Pushing through these boundaries has to be done with some caution, though! Specifically, you want to learn to distinguish between a tension that you can let go of and a signal (or cry!) from your body to let go and back off. Your body's signals have to be respected here or injuries will result, but at the same time the resisting tension in the body has to be perservered through, so some listening skill (to your own body now) has to be present to do this practice safely and well.

How can it enhance Yin Style practice (or any other martial art, for that matter)? It first of all helps cure chronic stiffness and pain and seems to naturally stimulate the flow of blood and qi in the body, removing blockages and the like. It should also increase flexibility, mental focus, internal awareness, and meditative capacity while serving as a form of meditation in and of itself. It can help you learn about your body and get to know it. It can put you back together when training makes you sore or gives you lasting muscular or connective-tissue-based injuries. As long as it's done safely, the only danger I see in this practice compromising progress in a martial art is the amount of time it takes, though it's very easy to train this right before bed and greatly enhance the quality of sleep that you get.

For those of you that follow what I say about trigger points or know about them on your own merits, I'm starting to suspect after taking a Yin Yoga class today with my wife that practicing the stretches in this style of yoga might work to deactivate trigger points in perhaps a heretofore uninvestigated way. Stretching, it's well known, can cause trigger points to get worse, not better, and frequently does just that. Spray and stretch, however, is a technique to treat trigger points that uses stretching (after an administering of cold to the area) that has a good deal of efficacy. I strongly suspect that yin yoga, given the time frames in which the poses are held can have a similar effect on trigger points and the muscles that contain them (if done safely in a responsible, intelligent manner that honors and respects the body doing them!). I don't know, but if I ever go into that line of work, I will probably make it one of my research tasks to find out. Maybe I'll even get a second Ph.D.... (yeah right... those SUCK to get).

You might consider it, anyway. The website linked to above, I'm told, is one of the best, containing much of the information of the book Yinsights, which is probably the best book on the subject. I'm going to keep at it; that's for sure.

My Saber, My Wrist, and My Remedy

Every person that does something physical needs this book: The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Section Edition by Davies and Davies. Seriously. Get it. Use it. Love it.

I'm not here to be a commercial; I'm here to talk about training. Well, as many of you have read, my wrist is still pretty well wrecked from maybe overdoing it a little bit in London (or being weak, however you read that). Well... I went out to work with my saber today and did a drill about forty times in my right hand (described below) and felt pretty damn good about that. Then I went to do it in my left (the wrecked-wrist side) and nearly dropped the saber in extreme pain on the first attempt, which was obviously piss-poor. That's not acceptable, and it's holding my training back. Then I tried tracing the saber back and forth. I did a bunch in my right and a whopping two in my left before I couldn't really hold the saber up any more. I'm secretly to the point with my wrist "right now" where I can't unscrew a jar (not a new, sealed jar, but one that's been opened many times) in the morning without some real difficulty and pain. That's screwed up. I can't do cutting strikes worth a crap, my standing and turning postures in Lion are a partial failure due to the external rotation of the bottom hand that I can't really do, and a number of the qinna strikes are also wrecking me or largely inaccessible. That is unsatisfactory.

I came directly inside after tracing and put the saber down earlier and picked up the book mentioned above. I re-read every page that related to wrist pain of the kind I was primarily experiencing and within about ten minutes had identified the most likely areas that are causing me trouble. I spent half an hour working hard on them (painful) after that, and function is improved probably by 60% in one session. I'm still not going to man-up the saber in my left hand until I'm more near 90-95% improved, but the jar is no problem, seizing and grasping seem to be much better, and cutting only hurts a little. External rotation: check. I did some standing strengthening in the Lion posture to celebrate. Nice.

We all get sore from training, and if we're training correctly, we're probably sometimes getting some repetitive-use injuries. Many of those can be treated by following the instructions in this book and enduring a little pain. That means we can train more, harder, longer, more frequently, and sooner if we end up injured. Awesome.

The drill: the first series of movements from the Monkey-King section of the Nine Dragon Saber form, up through TaiGong Goes Fishing, snapping the saber back into the Monkey-King posture after going fishing. Since I can't do that whole series forty times, I interlaced it with repetitions of turning around the circle once in Monkey King and doing the first movement (Fair Maiden ... Buddha), then stepping back onto the circle for another go around. I probably did the full-to-fishing sequence every fifth time, once facing forward, once facing backwards.

Easing Back In

So I'm officially easing back into training, which means that I've admitted to myself that I cannot physically train as hard as I was before and during the London intensive yet and have decided that the situation will not hold me back entirely. I pushed myself last night, however, and tried to have a more vigorous training session and almost undoubtedly injured myself -- my hamstrings and leg adductors are too tight and I seem to have pulled something right around where those things become my ass on the left-hand side. Hopefully that won't interfere too much with my recovery and eventual return to what my friend described as "attempting to become a beast." I believe the cause was trying to train on muscles that had been subjected to a weekend of torture in an emergency trip to visit my wife's family on literally no notice that kept me in a car for over twenty hours out of fewer than sixty. Much of the remaining time was spent in a stiff, uncomfortable chair in a hospital waiting room, and I believe it pretty much wrecked everything from the bottom of my ribs to my knees. Dehydrated and essentially fresh out of the car from a solid eight-hour stretch in it, I went straight to training with a will that outstripped my means. Now I'm paying for it.

Still, the tendinitis in my wrist seems to be improving daily, though I still cannot properly twist my left arm out to even properly execute the Lion's representational posture with the left hand as the lower. The point cutting strike, which I believe is the donor of this tendon issue, is still more or less completely out too, unless I completely ignore one of the main corrections I was given and thereby do the strike somewhat incorrectly. I've opted to do that since I'm aware of where I'm cheating and at least 90% of the mechanics (particularly the body movement) don't involve the use of my wrist and can therefore be done as long as I'm somewhat judicious and don't force myself too far too soon.

Finally, the numbness in my toes seems to be slowly clearing up, though progress there is much, much, much slower than I had hoped. I'm working on the apparently afflicted area two or three times daily with a penetrating, rather vigorous massage, and I'm being a little less aggressive with my stances and stepping until feeling returns to full in them.

Of course, some of you reading this might be thinking: "Shit, look at him.... If everything in here it true (it is), then this guy trains pretty damn hard and the intensive broke him. I'll never go to one of those!" I will be going to one of those again, however, and I do not feel that the London intensive broke me, though I'm certainly not performing optimally after about two weeks of recovery with light training. The injuries I've sustained are quite minor, I'm sure, and the amount I developed while there and learned in the process, which will fuel a huge amount of development in the coming months and year(s?), vastly outweighs some temporary discomfort and reduced training capacity. It gives me a really good reason to take time to seriously mull over the art and how I want to train it as well, preventing me from falling into a rut where I train and train and train and eventually find myself essentially training just for the sake of training, which is no good at all.

Tape

I've used a lot of tape lately. As strange as it may seem, as crappy as I still am with it, my muscular ability to cope with the saber is growing significantly faster than the coping ability of the skin on my tender mathematician hands. I had been getting blisters, some quite bad, some that tore the skin off before I knew I had them. Now I'm getting callouses, but I'm also rubbing my skin completely raw. Part of that might be due to the deep, unending, vague throbbing exhaustion in my hands from working with the thing day after day -- my grip kind of poops out on it after a bit and it slides ever so slightly around, giving me raw skin. The rest of it is a time-in-contact issue: I'm spending lots of that. Since my skin shits out on me long before my drive or ability to continue (not in any one particular drill... those still kick my butt), I wrap them with athletic tape and go back at it with hands looking like a boxer's before getting gloved up. New tender spots come up as a result of the extended training and slightly modified usage of my hands due to the presence of tape, so at the moment, I have at least seven such places between my two hands. It's awesome.

Today, I think, I will not pick up the saber on those grounds, and that perhaps will be the case tomorrow as well. My empty-hand training is suffering a bit as a result of wanting to get reasonably solid with the saber (which is a very slow-going process), so I'm planning to take the next couple of days to let my skin recover and my striking/turning endurance to get a little piece of the pie. Between my dissertation and the saber, turning has really suffered (to the point where a half an hour straight is pretty brutal for me instead of a relatively "pleasant" walk outside). That's got to be remedied... at least until my adviser gets back on me about other things to work on. My striking is, in my opinion, okay but nowhere near where it could be. I tend to tire-out pretty quickly, which isn't so good. Standing is alright, but my thighs are constantly wiped out from the low stances with the saber, so alright is as far as it goes. Forms... I'll get back to those one of these days, I promise... at least back to those that don't involve a giant sword.

Oh, I'm informally compiling a list of the initial questions I get when people see me with the saber. Here are the three most popular so far:

1. Where did you get that?
2. Is it heavy?
3. Is that thing real?

I think the third one is my favorite. I'm not even sure what to tell them because it's pretty obviously real. Almost everyone asks if it's sharp too, but that comes out later. I suspect that's what people mean by "real," though. It would be a complete nightmare if it was.

Keeping it Up

Two days in a row now have given me workouts that, though shorter than expected, brought me to the point of complete fatigue. I'm turning with my saber, and I'm turning without it. I'm doing strikes and forms and standing, and I'm tossing in body-weight resistance and some light weight training with dumbbells for overall fitness and increased strength, I'm stretching deeply with integrated massage and patting, and I'm doing daoyin (for the first time in my life pain-free in my back, though it hurts a little again now that I'm sitting down and cooled off). In this way goes my tribute to the China intensive, which isn't so intense surely as what my friends in the East are getting.

I'm not sure I'm pleased with my circle at the moment. The wreckage wrought to it earlier in the year by a truck on wet earth has been repaired with a shovel and about fifty pounds of sand, but now it feels a little bit like the beach even after a couple of good hard rains and a fair amount of walking on it. It's not the same feel that it used to have, but I might be quasi-paving it in the process, which is kind of cool. I hope that a few dozen more miles on it will pat it down and bring back the good feeling I had with it last summer. It feels all strange and awkward now, and as often as not (mostly because of the mud but partly because of the feel), I find myself turning indoors or on pavement instead, when my dissertation life provides me time to turn properly at all. I miss the days of feeling like I cheated myself if I hit fewer than five hours on the circle in a week. Right now, and probably until I graduate, I am lucky to get a third of that, most of the time I'd have spent strengthening my body being replaced by sitting in a chair that may be slowly debilitating me instead. I look forward to them being on the horizon again. Maybe by then my circle will feel more normal again, and I won't be adding my current last exercise to my list any longer: sweeping up the sand when I come in the house (because I keep forgetting that it's still on/in/all over/part of/inextricably linked to my shoes, which I lazily only take off sometimes and only rarely when I'm tired, sweating, and wanting something to drink.

Plantar Fascia

The bottoms of my feet are rejoicing, after much swallowing of the bitter. I hope it translates into improved training. Time (and having time) will tell.

Due to my persistent low-back pain/problem, I've sought a variety of treatment options and modalities and have found the largest degree of success so far with trigger-point release and patient yoga type stretches. Combining the two did more, it seems, in two or three weeks than anything I've tried in years. Since starting this trigger point adventure and getting more keenly aware of what one is and feels like, particularly when it releases, I decided to re-re-re-restart my quest to release my plantar fascia (connective tissue in the bottoms of my feet). For the endeavor, I enlisted a trusty sidekick, and I've used it as one of my excuses to get out of my chair (my prison: see any post where I talk about my dissertation) and get the blood flowing properly through my body. My sidekick is a golf ball. I stand on it. It hurts.. a lot.

I've done this every day in a row now for seven, save one day of rest because I went too deep (in the wrong place) and awoke a demon (like Tolkien's Dwarves, though the Balrog here is a mildly bruised heel). Otherwise, it's been a delightful (read: very awful but worthwhile) experience. My feet feel amazing, and I feel generally lighter and freer of movement. Whether due to the stretching, the other trigger point therapy, the greater mindfulness of the amount of time I spend in this chair, or just the feet (most likely some combination of all of those things), my back is slowly starting to give up on its seemingly unrelenting quest to ruin my life. It's by no means fixed, but it's much less broken. Most noticeably, I can almost stand on one foot on a golf ball on one of my feet (the other is tighter and has more work to be done still) without it being unbearable. That would have been unthinkable a week ago. The pain was in-tense.

There's a really neat secondary effect with the method I'm employing: heat. My feet get hot and give off heat like little radiators while doing the treatment and for some time afterwards. It's a very potent sensation that I'm sure is caused by "enhanced circulation" but I'm chalking straight up to qi. It's most pleasant, and my feet have this well-massaged feel for quite a while after the treatment. So here's what I do. Be warned, it takes 10-20 minutes to do the whole thing, but it's SOOOO worth it.

Step 1) Get a golf ball (or tennis ball if you want to start out lightly) and get ready to swallow bitter, probably a substantial amount. Put the ball on something relatively soft (a rug or carpet is ideal, a spongy mat like a yoga mat works too but makes the experience a bit more intense).
Step 2) Start just behind the ball of your foot in line with the split between your big toe and second toe and sink your weight slowly down onto the ball (it's nice to have a chair to lean on). Feel what there is to feel. Put enough weight down to make it quite uncomfortable but not completely awful. Stay still and wait until that spot isn't so awful (20 seconds to 2 minutes, probably). It will probably still be bad, but that's okay.
Step 3) Roll the ball a little bit toward your heel with some pressure on it, trying to follow the tendons of the feet (looking these up in an anatomy book or online is helpful). Stop and repeat the pressure above about every half inch or any time you feel any particularly bad sensation like more intense pain, a resisting knot in the tissue, little electrical crackling feelings (that kind of hurt and feel hot). Proceed until you get close to the beginning of your heel. Spend more time there like at the ball because it's an attachment area.
Step 4) Go back to the ball of your foot, this time nearer the middle (near Kd-1, for you acu-buffs). Repeat, spending time on purpose at Kd-1 (you should know it when you feel it, in the hollow just behind the ball of your foot near the middle). Go all the way down toward your heel, pausing just like before as needed and near the attachment area.
Step 5) Go back to the ball of your foot, this time nearer the outer edge but not all the way out. Repeat all the way down toward your heel, coming in a bit toward the center as you go. Just like before. Good times. Your foot will probably be quite hot by this time. I find focusing on enjoying the heat takes my mind off the pain/discomfort.
Step 6) I know there's another band of fascia in the bottom of the foot; skip it for now. Repeat the WHOLE process on the other foot and let the one you just worked rest a bit.
Step 7) Go back to the first foot and work the shorter band of fascia on the midfoot (more toward the back) on the outside edge. Give it the same attention as the main part of the foot.
Step 8) Do the same to the other foot.
Step 9) Go back to the first foot and slowly roll the ball the other way, starting near the heel and going toward the toes, stopping at knots. You'll find knots that you didn't find the first time because of the change in direction. Enjoy them. Do the outer tendon too, if you like.
Step 10) Do the same to the other foot.
Step 11) Pause and analyze: which direction seemed to benefit me more? Focus on that direction in the future (do it first and spend longer on it).
Step 12) Sit on your knees with your toes dorsiflexed (bent up toward your head, so they're on the floor and the balls of your feet are trying to get there). Sit back on your heels with as much pressure as is comfortable and deep-stretch your feet. This is important and valuable to do, though it's not fun. It's more important, I'd say, than going both ways on the tendons with the ball. Hold this stretch for as long as you can (it can be BAD, esp. at first), aiming within a few sessions for a minimum of 1 minute but preferably closer to 2 or 3.
Step 13) [I haven't tried this but it's apparently awesome. I'll try it soon and report.] Plunge your feet into cold water (icy, if you can take it) for 30 seconds or a minute. Towel off.
Step 14) Do it again tomorrow, every day until it's not awful to do it in any particular spot. As you get better and better, with time, you can do it more quickly and focus only on the tighter spots. Chances are, unless you do this kind of thing anyway, your feet are probably almost 100% trouble spots. If they're WAY sore, take a day off of everything but the stretch, maybe rubbing them firmly with your hands instead of the ball of terror. Be careful not to bruise yourself by going too deep too soon (use your chair!).
Step 15) Get to where doing this once a week, then once a month/as needed, is more than enough to manage your good foot health. Awesome. I'm not there yet.

The plantar fascia connects, one tissue to another, through the heels to the Achilles tendon, up the calves, behind the knees, up the hamstrings, through the butt and the back side of the pelvis, across the tissues that stabilize the sacrum and lumbar spine, up the spine, across the occipital, over the crown, and to the muscles that lift your nose when you crinkle it up. That's a lot of connection, and all of it benefits from treating problems in the root (which affect bit by bit everything above with every step you take). I understand that this process can help tremendously with chronic headaches, but I don't have them, so I don't know.

I also like to add hamstring stretches when I get done with my feet, seeing as that's close-kin kind of tissue. It's an interesting experiment, by the bye, to "release" one foot and then stretch before releasing the other. There's a definite difference. Oh that reminds me: this is deep, hard therapy, so it's critical that whatever you decide to do to one foot, you should do to the other to prevent imbalances from coming up (in flexibility and usage) that could make for some nasty problems if you're lazy. Drinking a lot of water afterwards seems to help too. Some people say it releases toxins trapped in that tissue, and the extra water helps flush it.

Happy standing on a ball to you!

PS: In other health-related news, I'm going to be starting my kombucha-brewing adventure within days. I've been wanting to for a few years, and now it's go-time. I really recommend the stuff.

Changes

So since admitting to myself a recipe for healing and following it rather determinedly, though not flawlessly, and since implementing even more information about dealing with the lumbar spine and hips, things have been coming along. I'm better than usual, although things are still different, still feeling "stuck," but they aren't holding my training back in any case -- not nearly as much as my dissertation and family-in-for-the-holidays are.

Training is changing too, mostly with the weather. In the past few weeks, we've trained together out in temperatures well below freezing, in sleet, in snow, in the frustration of people not able to meet up with us, and in the excitement of new folks joining our ranks. I'm convinced that training outside is an amazing thing for the body, as I used to loathe being outside this time of year, claiming that I was more of a warm-weather kind of person, but now I find it entirely bearable to endure being outdoors for long periods, if at least mostly properly dressed, and over short periods, I hardly notice that it's cold except in my fingers. A similar turnaround happened for me two summers ago when training outside every day all summer long -- despite loving warm weather, eventually it would be hot enough and humid enough for me to write off on being outside. That situation is no more. I think it's important to live this way too because it just feels all unnatural to remember how sensitive to heat and cold I used to be and how strongly I rejected those natural phenomena.

More specifically, within my training, I've decided I need to learn to root better. I'm moving fairly well, my agility and strength are increasing, my understanding and application of the techniques is seeming to get slowly better, and if I had to isolate a single aspect that is holding me back most in applying the techniques, I would have to guess that it is in my rather limited ability to root myself. When experimenting with strikes the other night with a partner, I noticed that he was able to apply a sudden pushing force to me that would cause me to step back several steps. When I'd repeat the experiment on him, he'd step back one or two, but so would I. I established clearly through that experiment that my root is still too high, or it's not set, or some other terminology that means that I can't root myself well. Since in VT this year I heard the admonition "get heavy" about 1100 times and since throughout my entire martial arts life (extending back well before baguazhang) I've had a problem with achieving proper and heavy base (as my BJJ friends have happily exploited for years), I think I've been in denial of the fact that I never properly developed this particular skill.

When I stand calmly, say before turning or standing practice or just during qigong or while trying to relax, I can palpably feel "sinking qi" flowing like a wave down my body, almost from head to feet and sometimes below. I think that's what I'm looking for, but I believe I need it in a more dynamic sense. When I turn, I can get and stay low, but I'm now thinking there is more to sinking the qi properly, particularly while turning, than just getting and staying low in my stance. When I strike, I sometimes feel fairly rooted, particularly during static striking, but when adding stepping, I only feel somewhat rooted. I think I should be rooting into my legs at the conclusion of every step, every strike, every shift of the weight, and indeed, every movement -- not staying permanently rooted but rather being able to deeply root in an instant, by choice or automatically through disciplined training.

The thing is... how do I get where I need to go? I may apply a technique I use when teaching that is perfectly obviously the way to solve essentially any problem. If I'm given instructions to
get somewhere specific, even if all I have is the name of that place and some details about its location, then my first step is to procure a map. In training, the map is laid out by the requirements and the methodologies of the art, so I have a map, even if it's rather incomplete. Secondly, I have to figure out both where I'm going (which I laid out above) as well as where I am (which I also discussed above). In my case, I believe I might need more details on both of those facets before continuing. Once that is all in hand, so to speak, it's merely a matter of using the map to chart a course (training regimen) that is designed to get me from where I am to where I want to go. To summarize the method: Consider a reasonable representation of the situation (Map); identify where you are/what you have (You Are Here); identify what/where you need to get/be (Goal); draw course (Plan); follow it (Follow-through). As it's always a good idea to seek difficulties and pitfalls ahead of time whenever possible, I'll take a moment to note the largest of them in this particular case. Here, a main difficulty is that many of the roads that exist are not on the map, and since they're not physical roads, I may or may not be able to see them, much less where they go, as I come near them. It is always a good idea to reflect at the end to decide if you're really done getting where you wanted to get and to consider whether or not the path you took was the best one, but I have to walk the road before I can do that.

Admitting

As I've posted several times in the past, my lower back has been something of an issue in my training and life for as long as I've been practicing YSB, and actually even for longer. For all of this time, I had hoped that baguazhang would heal my lower back issue, finally freeing me from the grip it had on me. Partly from doing many of the basic exercises incorrectly, which I attributed the continuance of my discomfort to for a long time, my back pain neither abated nor got significantly worse over the almost two and a half years I've been training. Finally, I think I'm ready to admit that the practice of baguazhang directly will probably not heal my back, although once it is healed (through other means), it will almost definitely strengthen, protect, preserve, and improve it. Admitting it means that I can choose a sensible course of action and follow it, and, unfortunately enough, it will require that I set aside a fair amount of my preciously sparse training time (during the more intense end of the semester and my quest for doctorate) to do so.

There are exercises in bagua that I believe would (help) heal me, and those are definitely going to be included, but they are basic, basic exercises. For instance, I've seen an exercise from the Lion System (holding/rolling the ball), another from the Bear, one from the Snake, and one from the Phoenix System that all help, but doing basic strikes and forms, and even the standing postures, are of limited benefit and potential detriment if I overdo them. What this has meant, after hearing the description of what those exercises are traditionally used for (preparing unprepared bodies for practicing bagua properly), is admitting to myself that physiologically, I have not been prepared to properly study bagua all along, and most of bagua's practices are too physically demanding for my injured, weakened frame.

A fact that set this notion more firmly into my thinking was reading recently that many times in baguazhang or xingyi, a practitioner with a chronic health complaint, particularly hips, knees, back, or shoulder problems, would frequently be given the prescription of studying taijiquan or receiving massage and qigong therapy for a while before being permitted to work on anything but the most basic exercises of the art. This information served me by showing me that it was typical to need to prepare the body correctly before taking on something as demanding as one of these arts, and therefore that the basic exercises in the art might be too tough on the body to create healing in and of themselves in certain situations. That rang true with the fact that frequently, I feel about the same before and after practice in my low back and hips and feel exceptionally better everywhere else. It also left me with wondering what to do next.

Luckily, it seems, I watched my wife heal herself tremendously of a chronic sciatica issue using a version of yoga that actually has Taoist roots, like bagua. Combining that with yoga and sensible stretching practices, approaching them from an experiential, need-based perspective, gave me a practice that I really believed could help fix the root of the problem I suffer. I started it about a week ago, putting serious effort into this yoga/stretching regimen combined with some basic massage therapy on trouble spots (see an earlier post about trigger points), some basic standing, sitting, and prone qigong, and the small number of very basic bagua healing/developing practices (mentioned above), practicing them for 30-60 minutes a day when I usually have very little more time for practice or training available to me (I'll pay tonight for taking out this time to type this up, for instance). In six days, which is tiny compared with the almost eight years I've been suffering this way, I've seen more progress than I expected, though I am not, of course, healed. I hit the point recently that really told me I had to do something, and it's one of the measuring sticks I've been using: I can't jump. Jumping or even bouncing causes severe spasming or failing (it feels like mistrust) in my lower back -- immediately. I also cannot run or jog. That's disturbing because I'm still in my 20's, in good shape otherwise, and should definitely be able to participate in these kinds of activities as ones that build me, not break me. In six days, I've changed enough to where I can do some bouncing around (jumping jacks, for instance) again, I move and stand more freely, and I'm only about half as stiff when I get out of bed in the morning, though it's apparent that the problem still exists. I'm getting measurably better. As the problem has lasted for 8 years or more, I figure that in roughly 8 weeks or so, I will have seen a tremendous change, if I stick with it. If I stay with it to whatever degree is needed for 8 months, I'd be surprised to see anything other than a full recovery.

It's made me immediately aware, for instance, of the tension stored primarily in my lower abdominal muscles, hips, spinal erectors, and quadriceps muscles, tension that prevents me from developing properly in bagua and that keeps me in the prison of constant physical pain and limitation. It's also taught me the exceptionally useful lesson that the body and training must be practiced intelligently with inner sensitivity and that emotional and physical habits create powerful chains that bind us needlessly. It's also made me take responsibility for my condition, no longer wanting to rely on some chiropractor, osteopath, magician, or mysterious energetic miracle to heal me. Ignoring my tissues and mistreating them, be that via an injury or two that I sustained and never healed properly or via training on structure that wasn't ready to train on, have created and maintained this problem entirely at my own fault and decision.

Treating it before, at least for a year now, has centered on the idea that I needed to stretch, going into the tissues mentally and experientially as I did so to release the problems, and I even knew many of the stretches that would be required. Still, I refused to set aside time from my work or training to do it, and things have only gotten worse. Now, I'm ready to admit that this is part of my training, part of what I must do at my level, or else I'll never get to a very high level overall being always limited by this ceiling that I've put over myself. That gives me spirit enough to concentrate on these efforts without the guilt that might normally come from laying in some stretch on the floor instead of walking those extra few minutes around in a circle in my yard, particularly knowing that if I'm as right as I'm almost sure I am about this, I'll be able to more than make up for lost time once I'm whole again.

Hammers, Hatchets, and Triggers

For the past two weeks, I've barely been able to train, which sucks. I noted that I was suffering from what started out seeming like a mild low-back-pain episode but which actually manifested as being just about the most long-lived one that I've had. It was never exceptionally severe as it has been in the past, but it never got much better either, which was frustrating and, obviously, uncomfortable and limiting. I'm *mostly* better now, 18 days after the day when it all went to pieces, though long-period turning sessions (more than 20 minutes at a time), most vigorous static posture practice, and many of the strikes are still right out of my ability set -- stuff starts cramping. It's strange, sad, and motivating. I want to train. I want to live without this for the first time in about a decade. I'm going to have to fix it.

The other night I was looking into the matter further, reading up on it via a slough of articles hunted down off of the internet with no real way to know for sure what was accurate and what wasn't among what I studied, and I found a bizarre article that talked a lot about trigger points in the sacroiliac region. I thought there might be something to it after seeing where this guy got his ideas and how he's used them. I poked around in my psoas muscles, which I'd already been stretching intensely from as soon as I was able to get into the positions, and instead of feeling what I expected (muscles, most likely tight ones), I felt what the author was talking about: trigger points, dozens of them. Probably scores, actually, were in there. It felt quite a bit like a sack of pellets stuffed very tightly, in fact. Immediately, I climbed in bed and started working them out even though it was far later than I usually like to stay up now, but I fell asleep after an hour and a half or so in my right side and had barely touched my left. I woke up the next morning and went directly back to it, working a little in my left but almost entirely in my right, again going for more than an hour, and when I went to stand, I felt several times better than I had all along in the preceding weeks, even after chiropractic. My psoas muscles also felt remarkably different. In the days since, I've worked more into those (the article said it might take two weeks to two months to work all of them out of the pelvis, depending on how bad it is in there) and made significant progress. I've also explored around and found trigger points in the other hip muscles, lower abdominals, and some into the low-back region, though it's HARD to reach and work on. My hands are quite sore, having dug deeply into my flesh to push out knots of tension for about 5-6 hours in the last three and a half days, but I'm feeling almost better than I usually do (generally better than usual, though there's still a stiff spot that isn't usually there). That keeps me going; well, that and the idea that my hands are going to be very, very strong from this. I think that this combined with stretching and a little chiropractic will actually heal me as opposed to just keeping me at a barely acceptable status quo (which is where mediocre attempts at stretching and some chiropractic was keeping me).

Interesting little things come up, like sudden releases of a tiny knot, no bigger than a grain of rice, followed by an intense sensation like hot water flooding down and spreading out through the inside of my leg. That comes up a lot. Relief usually follows. I'm having very bizarre dreams, which the author suggested might come up since his belief is that trigger points are primarily "stored-up fear-based emotions." When you release the point, apparently, the emotion starts working its way out. Hence, I rub into these painful little areas with a mantra of "am I willing to let this go?" Sometimes it seems to help. Sometimes it doesn't do much. Maybe that's my subconscious answering yes and no, respectively. Maybe it has nothing to do with it. I like it, though, so I'm keeping it up. As a weird side-effect, I'm in a wholly better mood than I have been in over the last four to five years (length of Ph.D. program?).

In any event, Sunday, the first day I was feeling much, much better, running around with a bit of a gleam in my eyes, I went to the store to get some duct tape to finish off my Proxy Saber, v. 2, which is superior in nearly every way to the original by following Ket's design. While there, since I have some yard work to do that requires a hatchet that I don't own yet, I went to look at the hatchets. Some I liked but wasn't willing to pay so much for, and some I didn't despite their bargain price. Eventually I was holding one, feeling its weight and balance, trying to decide if the price for it was right when all of a sudden three teenagers dressed in a vaguely counter-culture way came into the aisle. One was smaller, maybe 115 pounds, and a young man. One was bigger and clearly not as sharp or at least less of a leader but probably no older, maybe 15 or so. The third was a girl that was running around with them, skinny and frail looking with a falsely tough exterior. The smaller guy stood a few feet from me and picked up a eight- or ten-ounce ball hammer off the rack and eyed it for a minute, bouncing it a little in his hand to get used to the weight. Then he turned to me and said the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, particularly seeing as I was still holding the hatchet and bigger than him by at least 50-60 pounds and almost a foot of height: "Hey mister, have you ever been hit in the head with a ball-peen hammer, and would you like to experience it?"

I would love to know what the kid was thinking when he said that. I'm guessing that he was trying to be funny, which he, of course, failed at. I turned to face him, still holding the hatchet, and grinned at him, almost looking excited, and said, "you wanna go?"

He looked like he was going to soil his pants in response and then tried to play it off all nonchalantly: "Nah, man, I was just kidding around." I put the hatchet back on the rack as he put the hammer away. Then I looked back at him and asked him if he was sure, now that I didn't have an ax. He told me he was just kidding again, his friends laughing like I was the stupid one and missing some hilarious joke, and used a tone that indicated the same. I went to pay for my tape, and though they were laughing, they made a rather quick exit from the store.

Weird story, huh? Good thing I didn't have to break it down on some kids. I'm not entirely sure of the legality of that kind of situation, seeing as they were minors but that they, I think, technically threatened me with a weapon. I guess it's an equally good thing that the kid didn't find out my opinion about feeling a hammer in a more direct way, asking me after he tested it out. The moral, I think: kids these days are punks, i.e. I'm getting old.