Monday Tai Chi class – 6/16/08 – A new movement.
I was not sure what to think about my Tai Chi classes. Even though they are interesting, they do feel slow compared to my Karate classes. I knew that going into it and one of my reasons for taking it was to slow down and relax but I was still a little unsure about it.
Tonight was a little different. We have been doing the same movements for all of the classes and although I feel that I am progressing, I am used to doing something a little different. Tonight, we did the same movements, called our preparation movements, like we do each week but after we finished those, we did one of the first movements in our first form.
A form in Tai Chi is much like a kata in Karate. It is a series of movements with a meaning behind them. It can be a type of self defense movement where the person uses the opponents energy against them. It can also be considered an exercise or a way, that some feel, to increase the flow of energy in the body.
After doing this first, simple movement, I am starting to understand a little more about what we are doing. The movement reminds me of a short back stance with a knife hand block although the movement is distinctly different. Instead of using power and force, we slowly move into this short stance and turn our body at a 45 degree angle. The front hand is held below chin level and loosely open and the other hand is about rib height and loosely open. We then move from facing forward and then into the 45 degree angle while lowing our stance. I cannot remember the name of the movement and I will ask again in my next class but to make a long story short, I am starting to become more interested now that I am seeing some of the movements that I will be learning as time goes on.
When I started taking this class, I thought that it would be much easier than my Karate training but I am finding that the movements are so different and using different muscles, it is much harder than I expected. I do feel there is some benefit to my Karate training by taking these Tai Chi classes and I think I will keep it up for a while longer before I decide if I want to keep doing it or not.
Saturday Karate class – 6/14/08 – The dojo floor is pretty hard.
Sometimes, during Saturday classes Sensei Plocharczyk will have us do some self defense moves. I really like classes since I see how to apply the moves in my kata’s with more detail and explanation.
We started with a brisk warm up and then got right to it. Sensei had us get a partner and pad and line up across from each other. For the first movement, he had us both stand in a horse stance, our partner would hold the pad and we would shuffle in behind them, but only half way to get beyond their center of gravity, and throw something like a downward block but ending with the hand in the hammer fist position. The idea was to give them a hip check, get down low enough to come up under their hip, put our foot a little past their center of gravity and then hit them with the downward hammer fist and throw them down to the floor. We didn’t take our partner down but we worked on both parts of the movement, the stance and arm motions and then put it together. Sensei demonstrated the movement on my me and I ended up looking at the ceiling a couple of times which explains the title above about the dojo floor being pretty hard. The floor really isn’t that hard but I like to throw in a little drama every now and then when I type here.
Next came a movement that was very similar, except we did a ridge hand to our partners upper chest and started in a front stance instead of a horse stance. In this movement, we still used the hip check and the horse stance but used the other arm to throw the ridge hand. I seemed to be able to do the stance or the ridge hand separately but doing the movement in a fluid motion escaped me for some reason. I ended up using my upper body more than anything and I think I could get my horse stance low enough because my legs were still extremely sore from last nights class.
Next came the test of what we learned. Sensei had a couple of pads on the floor and we were able to test our newly learned skills. I was able to take down my partners but I was using more upper body power than anything. I need to spend some time working on this movement. I also think that applying Sensei Cieplik’s salad bowl movement when getting into the horse stance would help me make this movement more effective.
We also spent some time on conditioning and did a kata but I wasn’t able to squeeze the floor too well when I did Jion since my legs were screaming from last night.
It was another excellent class.
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