Gymnastics and Wushu Advice

Today it was back to the wushu guan.  I arrived a little early and no one had shown up to unlock the door yet so I wandered over to the 2nd floor over-look for the gymnastics area.  As I mentioned before, in our building there is Sanda below us, rhythmic gymnastics next to them, and then (non-rhythmic?) gymnastics across them them.  But you can see the gymnastics rooms from the 2nd floor because they have some windows (in need of cleaning) that allow you to look down and see them training.

I captured a bit of video, which you can see here:

Anyway, back to the wushu class.

Since the main wushu team is competing in 3 weeks they were doing competition preparation full sets (which are a little different than just doing full sets during a practice).  Instead of that I went with the non-competing wushu people (about 5 of them) and did basics on the side.  The people competing were given 30 minutes to warm up on their own and get ready for a full set – just like when they compete.  After their full sets they also each did a few half sets.

At one point Xiao Yu suggested that I join them for full sets, but I said that I wasn’t quite ready for that yet.  But even as I said that I felt like it was sort of a cop out.  Well, maybe not, but I felt like I was being lazy.  Of course, I have only trained twice in the last month or so, and I don’t have the endurance built up for full forms (which I could definitely tell as I was going through basics) but the truth is, if I have any thought of competing at CMAT (still a possibility) then I should really get my act together and start pushing myself a lot more.  She even suggested doing a half set, which I also said no to.

After class was over I came up to her and asked her for her advice on the things I needed to work on the most; basically asking what the main deficiencies/problems were with my wushu.  She really hit the nail on the head with her advice.

The main problem was my lack of power.  My technique is good, and my movement is right, but I don’t have enough power behind my motions, especially hand strikes and punches.  She said the best way to overcome this is to do more strength training, especially the “push-out” plyometric exercise with the weight bar.

And related to that is the problem of my legs.  She recognized that I had bad knees, but said that I’m not able to step with enough force, and that ends up affecting the power of my movements.  For this she suggested doing a lot of mabu-gongbu transition work and really trying to push the power through my legs and in to my hips.

And the third problem was that I needed to lose weight, or more specifically she said that my body was not at its highest capacity (which is a much nicer way to say it).  That it was keeping me from being fast and light enough to execute a lot of the movements to full power.  She said that for this I should do a lot of running.  Any day that I’m not training, I should be running at home.  She also said that this will help with my endurance.

And finally she said that I should be more consistent with my training.  I should come to the wushu guan every day to train, not just a few times a week like I’ve been doing.  She also recognized that I have work to do besides wushu and that it isn’t my full time job, but she said that daily training was important in developing all of the areas of my wushu that need work.

So, all in all a very astute observation from Xiao Yu, and I think all four areas are definitely what I need to focus on.  In that vein, I’m going to redesign my approach to wushu training this month to better incorporate these things she has brought up (or rather, reminded me of, since I knew this stuff already – but sometimes it just takes a person telling you something you already know before you’ll recognize its existence).

My wushu schedule for this month I already worked out, but it is a build up of days over the course of the month.  It looks like this:

So, as you can see I am building up my wushu each week. Unfortunately I will be going to Hong Kong for 4 days at the end of the month for a business/visa trip and since the Hong Kong Team is training in China right now there isn’t anywhere for me to workout.  On those days I will do my non-training day runs.  My runs aren’t 10Ks like the athletes do, but it is important for me to at least get out on the road and put in some distance as that will help my endurance.

As you can also see from the schedule, I will be going to Hangzhou on the 3rd.  This year’s qualifiers will be there and I’m going to travel with the Shaanxi Team to check it out.  They will be there until the 8th, but I’m not sure I can stay for that long so I might come home sooner.  I’ll probably have a better idea after my trip to Hong Kong.  I might even take a day to drop by Shanghai since I have a few things to do there as well, and it is only a couple hours by bus.  Again – something to be figured out at a later date.

I did get a bit of footage of Xiao Yu giving me her suggestions, so I edited that together for you to watch too.  Enjoy!

And there we are.  I’m actually pretty sore from training,but that is to be expected.  I hope that running tomorrow can help work a bit of that out of my system.  I’m not sure how far I’ll go yet, but I’ll be sure to blog it up so you can see how (poorly?) I do.

EDIT: Oh, and I had noticed that Zhang Yang wasn’t around much these past couple classes.  It turns out she is in Guangzhou training with the National Youth team in preparation for … a competition, I assume.  She will be back in 2 weeks before we head to Hangzhou for the competition.

EDIT: Also, I found out that the National Men’s Sanda Team is currently training right below our wushu carpets on the 1st floor preparing for the East Asian Games.  Apparently this means that the food in the cafeteria is much better than usual.  Most of the local athletes are hoping that they stay for a bit longer.  The women’s national sanda team is apparently in Shanghai training right now.

EDIT: I also heard that in the morning some of the National Taolu Team Coaches were at the practice observing the athletes.  It seems they are scouting for whomever will be on this year’s China National Wushu Team.  It’d be cool if one of the Shaanxi folks made it on.

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