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.

Sometimes zero!

If you've followed this training journal much at all, then you know of my golden rule of training: "Never Zero." To quickly summarize this rule, there is never a day where there is no training performed, even if it's brief or only in the mind. Well... for the first time in a few years, despite doing some mighty difficult things, I had a day with zero.

Training tips for cold weather

After reading "When Cold......", by George on the Beijing Yin Style study group's training blog, I decided to put together some of what I have to say about training in cold weather, which is, obviously, appropriate for the season for many practitioners right now and will be again soon enough for our Southern Hemisphere friends. Definitely check out George's post on Y.S.Behind Enemy Lines when you get a chance, and take his advice to heart since it's solid information. It's also a poignant topic for us right now since the Knoxville study group trained this week outdoors in 25-degree Fahrenheit (-4 Celsius) for a couple of hours while damp snow fell lightly on us.

Working, working out, and training -- Exercises aren't created equally

Since it seems that I've had a bajillion things to do around the yard this summer, mostly involving a fair amount of physical labor, I've had some time to reflect upon how working, meaning hard, physical labor, working out, as in the gym, and training are similar and yet different. As it is easy to get caught up in substituting labor or a workout for training, particularly since both make you feel like you've accomplished something physical and eat into your training time and energy, I thought it might be worth putting something down about some of the differences, at least in my understanding.

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.).

Turning: Tips for Starting Out

Turning is definitely a cornerstone practice of baguazhang. In fact, as has been mentioned countless times before and bears repeating countless more times, it is fair to say that turning the circle is probably baguazhang's most basic and yet most profound practice. It is easy enough to do, and yet it is very difficult to do well. Because my circle was hit by a truck and then found to be too big for my purposes, I've got to embark on the process of turning without my anchor all over again, and I've developed some tips in the process. For the record, I just started my real new circle today, and I would have pictures to show you except that my wife is off having an awesome time with our camera right now.

The first thing I think I can tell you fairly enough about turning is that it really helps to have a place that you do the vast majority of it... a single place. I've spent the last couple of months without such a place, though I have a variety of acceptable locations that I've been using, and every one of them has something wrong with it. First, I want it to be outside. I have an indoor turning place, but it's definitely not my preferred spot and is reserved for times when it's really wet out or really cold. I particularly don't like cleaning up the floor when I'm done turning inside, and I keep this slight fear in the back of my head that I'm going to wreck the floor eventually if I keep it up. Second, it has to be comfortable. Here in East Tennessee, f-ing everything is a hill. Even the hills have hills on them. I thought I had the only flat-enough place in my yard to turn, which is the one that I've forsaken. Luckily, I found another one. It also needs not to be too exposed. It's a bit uncomfortable turning in a spot that directly faces a road. I've been videotaped and photographed who knows how many times (vidoed twice, actually, but I don't know about the pictures) turning in a spot that directly faced my street at my old place, which wasn't even busy. It's okay to turn in a public place, but it's nicer when it's a bit more private. There are fewer distractions to contend with.

The real benefit of finding a good place to turn is that the location becomes significant, even though it really isn't. It's easy to become attached to that place, which of course is not so good except that it becomes a place that is almost sacred in a way, hallowed ground for the practitioner. Like other "sacred" spots, that allows that space to serve the main function of sanctity: reseting your mind to focus on the task at hand, which in this case is turning. If you turn anywhere and everywhere, good for you, but there's just something about having your spot to turn on that really makes you feel like it's time to get down to business doing just that one thing. Eventually, you'll have to let that place go, but that's alright too.

Here's how to go about finding a space and "claiming" it. First, take your time. Wander around the area you have to work with and take a look-see and see what you see. Does this place or that look good. Stand and turn around a little. How do things look now? Then go try a couple of other candidates if you can find any. Do the same thing. Then you can pick your favorite: the one that resonates with you and your personality best. Once you have that, you might want to turn on it right away for about three to five minutes. I did that today and immediately found that the place I picked wasn't as good as I thought. At first it seemed perfect, but as I got into turning, I could feel how lumpy the ground was there and that it was less level than I suspected. Moving over to my second choice turned out to be a great thing to do. Don't be afraid to move around a few inches or feet in any direction to find the best place in your little area. Little annoyances now will be big annoyances fifty miles around the never-ending bend. Once you've settled on a place that you're pretty sure you can be happy with, turn on it. Do it for a good while. If it's in grass, go until you've made a pretty good mark on the grass. Not only will that make you feel like you've accomplished something and get a decent turn in for you, it will also help to mark the spot so that next time you turn, you can find the same place much more easily and beat it into even better submission. That's like a feedback loop, and besides, the desire to go beat your circle into a beautifully formed sight is maybe that little bit of extra motivation that gets you turning for a half an hour more a week or so than you would have otherwise.

Once you've got a circle, you can get into your turning. Even if you don't have one, however, or if you want to follow the above guideline, you've got to start your turning somewhere. This next list of tips is really helpful for beginners as well as more experienced people that really want to focus their training and development.

Start Simple and Build Up
You don't have to dive directly into some esoteric, hard posture and turn with it. In fact, it's best if you don't. Start by feeling the natural curve of turning, trying to maintain your circle. When you feel good, put more attention in your legs and try to develop your stepping a little, making it more formal. When that feels good, add weight to your legs and try to sink. Do all of that before you even lift your hands from your side. That might be your first few weeks of turning practice, as a matter of fact. You want to get good at this, so you don't have to be in a hurry. Eventually, adopt a posture with your arms, but don't worry about strength or tension. Get used to the change in your body and alignment and slowly add strength over time. Eventually try to bring it all together. For a beginner, this might take six months. That's fine. For a more established practitioner, taking the time to redo this might revamp your attention to details you've been missing, so taking a week out of your normal routine turning to refine various aspects of it can have a major benefit on your practice.

Be Consistent
Turning a little every day is much more valuable than going all-out today and forgetting about it tomorrow and the next day. They say you need to turn for a while to really get development, but you don't have to turn for a long time to get skill and to stay connected to the practice. If you do it all in the same place (whenever possible) the building effect of this suggestion can have an even bigger impact. You might want to try to turn for an hour a day every day, and if you have it and the ability, good for you. If not, do what you can but try to make it a daily habit.

Do the Best You Can Do Today
You turned for an hour and a half yesterday and kept really solid focus and attention and did a great job with everything and were totally stoked about it and then today it pissed you off big time when you couldn't seem to get a clear head and your arms were as limp as dishrags? Cool, welcome to being normal. Your job is to do the very best you can with turning every time you turn, realizing fully that you're a different chick or dude every time you hit the circle. Some days, turning just works great. Some days, it's a chore. Some days, it sucks outright and hurts like hell. All days, do the best you can with what you've got that day.

Do Not Measure Your Performance Against Others
If your mom can turn for an hour and you can only turn for twenty minutes, don't get all mad at yourself or at your mom (n.b. your mom here is standing in for "someone else"). You should only measure your performance against yourself over time -- not even against "yesterday." Are you turning better than you were a month ago? Six months ago? Two years ago? (Are you even still turning after two years?!? If so, then freaking good for you!) As long as you're seeing improvement over time, then you're doing alright. If you're six or ten months down the road and not really improving, then you might need to soul-search and find out why. Maybe something's standing in your way? Maybe you're not putting as much into the practice as you should be? Maybe you're in a major rut for whatever reasons life might have thrown at you?

Do Not Base Your Turning on a Clock, a Number of Revolutions, or Some Other Crap that Isn't Worth a Damn
Yes, you can use those methods as a measuring stick or motivational tool, so don't throw them out, but realize they aren't the goal of the exercise. This is a statement of quality must outmatch quantity. If your body today only has ten good minutes in it, get those good ten minutes, push for a little while longer, and let that be how it is (always push a little past what you think is what is great and you'll get better over time... no stress = no improvement, usually). The real goal is improvement over time, not five hundred go-arounds. If you're more worried about a clock or number of revolutions than the quality of your turning, then your turning is going to be crap. If you're forcing the exercise, you're not doing it right. You should be pushing yourself, sure, but not forcing things to the point where the posture or stepping are failing.

Turn to Get Better at Turning
Do you remember my last post? If you do, then you know why you're turning (small scale): to get better at turning. Pay attention to details and requirements so that the goal is achieved. Like in the last point, if you don't get a really long time in, so what... as long as you feel like you honestly got better at turning or at least some aspect of the practice. This is where breaking the exercise down and rebuilding it from the ground up can really have a benefit even for established practitioners. Drop your hands sometimes and really check your legs out. Are you sinking right? Are you stepping correctly? Are you paying attention to all of the fine details of the footwork and body? Turn that way for a long time and see how things change over time. You might be surprised at what you need to work on. You can do the same thing adopting an easier hands-posture than Lion or one of the other animal postures (e.g. "lower posture," a beginner's/health-building posture). See what adding in the hands, even in an easier place, does to your feet. You might go through the whole process of adding your hands in to an animal posture loosely and then adding strength, spending some time in each place to see how it affects the whole. Refine, refine, refine! It's hard to pay attention to 100 things at once. You might also ignore the legs a little and focus on the upper body (but isn't that what we usually end up doing when we pretend we're training seriously anyway? ...no comment on my practice...). Eventually put it all back together and start paying attention to the more subtle requirements (if you know them). See what comes up! Most importantly, keep your head in this game!!!

Turn to Get Better at Baguazhang
Ah ha, now we've hit it: the real point of turning. Whatever your goals with Baguazhang are, they are enhanced by turning as long as your point in turning is to enhance your Baguazhang: be that as a martial art, a health-building practice, a moving meditation, or whatever-else-have-you. This has to underscore the entire practice because it is really the entire purpose for the practice of turning the circle: to get better at the art in which turning serves as a cornerstone. Keep that in the back of your mind while you turn and reflect on it while you wind-down afterwards. Ask yourself, out loud if you have to, "how did this benefit my bagua?" Try to find answers. If you don't have any, then you might need to break things down and look at the requirements all over again or listen more closely to the changes that should be taking place, slowly over time spent in a regular and dedicated turning practice, in your body and mind.

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.

It Works....

Oh the excitement! Oh the joy! Oh the enthusiasm! Oh the training that is to come!

I did some striking practice today and found out that finally, seemingly at long last, my body works again. I've trained lightly almost every day since I got back from London, but it seemed that while my head and heart were in it, my body just wasn't. In fact, it intended to have no part in the entire affair. That was a bit discouraging, to say the least, because it made me feel like I was half-assing when what I really wanted to do was get in a rock-solid workout that allowed me to expand upon and review what we covered in the London intensive. Wants aside, my attempts at striking and forms practice up until now have consistently resulted in feeling fairly week, somewhat uncoordinated, and too stiff or sore to accomplish much.

Standing and turning haven't been much better, though they have been better. The problem there is primarily that my left wrist is still too angry to turn properly, which is particularly irksome while turning. I have to say that it's much better today than it has been, but it's been a long road to what I'd call 60%. The best that I can self-diagnose is "repetitive use injury," i.e. tendinits as I claimed. With a hard, consistent effort in self-massage (and a little help from my therapist wife) and a relative avoidance of twisting it too far even when I was training (another source of feeling like I wasn't putting in my all), I've finally made some real progress on it. Furthermore, my toes are considerably less numb than they were, so I think being on the mend is definitely in my future. My calves still don't feel right, but they're another story all together....

In about an hour, I'll have a chance to really go get a good test-run in on striking and forms practices. I'm really looking forward to it and carbing up (on some beautiful multigrain porridge) right now. Honestly, I'm so excited that I can barely stay in this chair. Woot!

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.

Back from London

I made it back from London, remarkably enough in one piece. It was quite a trip... definitely too much to detail here in any salient or appropriately brief way, but it is at least fair to say that it has made and will continue to make an absolutely tremendous difference in my training and ability to use the art.

In fact, I'm itching to put my new understanding to use in some serious training, but I've figured out that my body isn't completely willing to go along with all of that yet. I've got a little tendinitis in both wrists and a general fatigue and stiffness that I figure will take a few days to work its way out. Still, I spent about three hours yesterday training at a medium pace, trying to review briefly as much of the intensive as I could remember, which is a lot because of the effectiveness of the repetitive drills that we did.

All-in-all, I have to say that the seminar was excellent. The London group did a spectacular job of organizing the thing, and then Matt and JB did a top notch job of executing it so that it seemed very systematic. Thus, I feel I was able to build up a lot in the places that I most needed to, and furthermore, I was able to retain a lot of the information that was being passed (even without the 39 full pages of notes that I took).

Hopefully, in the coming week or so, I'll be back up to full-gear again and will have more to report as I start to train this material myself. Then I should have more to say!

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.

Integration

A number of things are going on. I have trigger point work steadily improving the dilapidated state of my low back to the point where I feel *mostly* normal again. I'm still leaning forward somewhat, but sooner or later, I'll get that released. My (outer) body is feeling more integrated.

I found a book on my shelf on "Internal Exercises" that looks totally crappy because it has no artwork and is mustard yellow, and I've been reading it. It's really freaking cool. The exercises I've been up to with it for the last few days seem to have made me feel generally better, are helping my back along more quickly, and seem to be improving my myopic eyesight. My inner body is feeling more integrated.

I'm doing a fairly powerful intestinal cleanse. I feel lighter. That's all I want to say about that.

I figured out a great way to "integrate" the saber into training as well as into life. First of all, when I make my "rounds" in the yard (checking on the various plants we're cultivating), I carry my proxy saber around with me until my arm burns so bad I want to drop it. Then I switch arms. However long my little yard adventures last, that carrying around does as well. That's day-to-day activities. Secondly, I just did a fantastic workout where I alternated between saber drills and empty-hand drills. I'd do some standing or striking or forms work without the saber, and then I'd pick up the saber and do a basic drill or turn or go through the three sections of the form that I know. Back and forth, back and forth, one or two drills each time. It was pretty nice and kept me busy for roughly 90 minutes straight. If I sucked wind in between, instead of standing there and waiting, I walked around my driveway (which is a little loop) at a brisk pace, in a low stance when my breathing wasn't terrible and in a relaxed manner when I was huffing and puffing (some of those low-stance saber drills wipe me out still). The only thing I didn't "integrate" was turning. I'll do that in a little while.

So this is the beginning of my humble tribute to my friends suffering and improving in Beijing, since I couldn't go with. They should be sleeping now, but I'm sure they're dreaming about the warm spring sun I was just soaking in while I sweat, keeping them in mind.

Bronchitis

Bronchitis sucks. Freakin' kids.

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.

Stuck

Well... I'm stuck. Before I talk about being stuck, I want to talk about my circle again a little.

I haven't walked on it since the truck hit it. In fact, I haven't walked on it in months, turning either on something paved or indoors (usually in the small, unheated room we have with the windows open to get the pseudo-outside experience). It was and is a mud hole. Currently, it's a very bumpy mud hole. I did plod around it a few times to get the new feel of it. It's going to need some work before it's workable again, but it's not as trashed as I thought it was on first examination.

So... stuck. My training is only kind of stuck in that I usually have less than an hour a day that I can give to it (often enough much less). Still, there is training every day. My dissertation is my training, mostly, and it's not training me in bagua. Still, significant progress is being made on that, so that seems well enough.

What's stuck is my frigging back, or more accurately, my sacrum. It feels stuck, all the time, and has for months. This has the direct result of limiting mobility, limiting training intensity, and causing pain (sometimes severe and surprising), all of which cut into my training terribly. I've been working trigger points, and many of the symptoms of the back pain seem to abate but I'm still stuck. Chiropractic essentially hasn't helped, but it doesn't mean I haven't found the right doctor. Incidentally, that's a component of the "stuckness:" even a fair chiro used to be able to make my low back pop, but now it just stubbornly resists (and twinges with pain at the forced effort to get it to release something). Stretching seems to help some symptoms but not others. Meditating and releasing is the same way. The prevailing "stuck" feeling and subsequent shooting pains (particularly any time I lean back and to the left) persist. I wake up in a fair amount of discomfort every morning, and silly things like rolling over in bed hurt tremendously (compare that with doing squats, which doesn't hurt at all). It's most frustrating, to be sure.

I hate to be negative on here or anywhere, but honestly, it's starting to bug me that nothing seems to help this issue. In fact, I would rate myself as worse than I was six months ago despite a variety of expertly recommended and diligently applied tools that should help the matter. I desperately want to kick my training up, using what spare time I have around my thesis, but this problem has been and continues to hold me up severely. I've had enough, and I'm ready for it to be over!

Sigh.

Changes

Finally, after what has seemed like almost three months of stagnation, I feel like I'm moving forward. First, my advisor set a fire under my ass, and so my dissertation is coming along better. That's well and good for my life but bad for my training. Second, I'm most definitely getting stronger. My proxy saber and I are getting along at least 3-4 times a week, and particularly with my right hand, I'm noticing rather dramatic increases in my ability with the tool, although I'm still nothing to Carl "Hungus." Third, my back seems to be letting up somewhat. The "stuck" feeling has remitted tremendously in the past week and a half thanks to an odd combination of serendipity, yoga, and highly salubrious bagua exercises courtesy of my friend from across the Pond. I've been stretching on my own quite well, my wife wrangled the living crap out of me in a rather uncomfortable position that I thought was going to kill me or maybe break me but seemed to "turn the key in the lock," and then I suffered unbelievably at the edge of my abilities through a couple of the health-building exercises of Yin Style, which led directly to my back crunching around and eventually letting go! The "stuck" feeling has, for the moment, left me, although the musculature on my left side (primarily my iliacus, psoas, gluteus medius, multifidous, and serratus posterior inferior -- looking these up helped release some of their anger) is very knotted and fly-by-wire. Still... my training can now, finally, resume at the level that I had this summer, at least as long as I pretend that my advisor will still be happy if I choose that road. In theory, though, a quarter of a year later, I feel stronger, not weaker, and moving forward, not stuck.

The moral: do your exercises regularly and within your capacity, not pushing yourself too hard too fast, and anything is possible. Also, sometimes you have to burn through your injuries, not overprotect them. That balance is difficult to find.

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.