(no subject)

Apparently this is my 500th post.

Went to bagua yesterday. Did some of the warm ups without my right arm, but otherwise kept up with the class through all repititions of the form, and most of the Xing-yi stuff. Go me! Okay, some pretty lame renditions of the form, I'm afraid, but it still felt good to be doing it again.

My current idea is that when I can get through bagua, including dropping all the way into the low stances, without hurting, it will be time to go back to wushu.

Very darned sore today, but not in a particularly bad way. I think with some stretching I'll be fine.

Core stability and muscle retraining

In physical therapy I'm learning a lot about supporting my spine with certain sets of muscles rather than other muscles. Which takes some doing, but lucky me, I've practiced weird muscle isolations since I was a kid... (Gods but I was a weird kid, thinking back on it. I remember working for hours to learn to move just the muscle that would make my lower eyelashes move horizontally.)

But for all the fact I can make them do what I want them to do, getting them to keep doing that and not return to the old pattern is proving difficult. It feels like it should be a programming problem, but it's just not coming together that way. Maybe more standing meditation?