More Takeaways From Class

Last night’s class was a good one. It reinforced two things for me:

1) When I practice, I need to spend double the time on my left side that I do on my right. My right side is extremely dominant and I learn pretty quickly with it. We were working on spinning back kicks and I felt like my right side was pretty good. I was able to spin and make eye contact with the target before kicking, and then when I did kick, I made pretty good contact. On my left side it wasn’t very good. My balance was worse, my timing was off, and my kick didn’t make very good contact. I hadn’t really practiced spinning back kicks much up to this point so it was obviously just a matter of natural dominance on my right side. My goal is to make my left side equal to my right so I’ll have to shift my training focus a bit to allow for this imbalance.

2) The hardest things are usually the most important. We worked on horse and open x stances last night and my legs are pretty sore today. I work on my horse stance regularly but I still dread warm ups when we’re in a horse stance for what seems like forever, blocking, punching, etc. It’s clearly very important since we do it pretty much every class and there are so many applications for it. The point is that your stances are one of the most important things to master (at least that’s what I’ve been told) as they are the base for all techniques. If you have poor stances, you’re going to have poor forms, and probably poor overall kung fu. They are also, for me at least, the hardest part of learning kung fu.