Category Archives: Training Log

Illness, injury, and rebirth

March 17, 2015 kungfuwithwashu Leave a comment

Hello everyone!

Just an update for those of you who are following my 1st hall training with T25. I had to take two weeks off due to illness and an injury that was not T25 related (word to the wise wear a cup even when working with kids.) an now I am restarting with week 1. In my two weeks off I gained back the 3 pounds I had lost because dieting during an illness if not done correctly can prolong your illness. I don’t know how to properly diet, and needed to get better ASAP so I refused to put any of my meals in MyFitnessPal and just ate what I felt I needed.

Now that spring has sprung I will have many more opportunities to exercise. Just yesterday I walked to and from the kwoon. That is 6 miles round trip! I am really excited to have winter behind us.

What is your favorite springtime activity? Let me know in the comments!

Training Log

Imagination is the path to success

March 5, 2015 kungfuwithwashu Leave a comment

Imagination is how we create new possibilities for ourselves (space). This added space gives us room to grow. If you can not imagine yourself succeeding at your goal how can you even begin to achieve it?

As a recovering negative self motivator, I understand how hard it is to create this space for yourself. Recently I have been looking into Lucid Dreaming as a possible way to create this space.

Lucid Dreaming is a concept where through different techniques one can learn to detach their body from their mind and dream but at the same time know it is a dream and willfully interact with it. So far in my investigation it has been much like other meditations I have found you may find you have some things to deal with personally before you can move forward. I don’t want to speak too much about my experience because I do not want to influence anyone else’s experience.

YouTube has some great guided meditations and binaural sound meditations that can help with this process. This is one I have found to be helpful to me http://youtu.be/QfUh5v8V0F0

Let me know in the comments if you’ve had any experience with Lucid Dreaming…

Namaste!

Training Log

The Red Pill/Blue Pill Nature of the 6 or 9 Gate Theory

March 1, 2015 kungfuwithwashu Leave a comment

The secret society Wing Chun systems have a 6 or 9 Gate Theory (depending on which system you are learning), and much like in the movie “The Matrix” once you know you can not un-know.

The 6 or 9 Gate Theory is many things, the most superficial of these is that it lays out the body in a manner where you can more easily deal with incoming attacks by occupying the space in the gate not chasing a technique.

This information makes me sound arrogant when I am asked by someone “What would you do if it threw technique X?” Because my answer has to be “I don’t know, please don’t do that” because anything else would be dishonest. To be absolutely honest my answer is “cover the corresponding gate and flow to your center”, but there are two problems with this answer, the first one is I may not really go to center. The center may not be available or not be optimal in some way, and also I sound like I’m talking about Star Trek or something.

This also has effected my “Hong Kong” style wing chun training. It is actually more difficult knowing this information but not using it in certain drills. Once you take the red pill there is no going back 🙂

Namaste!

Training Log

Exercise is all well and good but did you change your diet?

February 25, 2015 kungfuwithwashu Leave a comment

This is how my diet typically looked

So now we can see why I had a weight issue. The goal is what is set as default in MyFitnessPal (totally recommend downloading that). So I am assuming that is a normal diet. We can see that I was not really doing so well.

The week of my 30th birthday I decided that I couldn’t treat my self like that anymore and we can see here what changed.

I bought T25 at the end of that week and had to wait on shipping. Here is now things are looking are now.

Not too shabby. I did run into some issues however. You noticed above that my protein was way too low. Once I started paying more attention I realized I still wasn’t getting enough protein. So I did some research into protein powders.

I know this is a hotly contested issue on the internet and I am not calling myself an expert by any means, if anything I am a lab rat on this subject. I did however look at some research from the Mayo Clinic which basically said, and I’m paraphrasing here “Protein is Protein”. They did say that egg protein was the most complete but that protein is protein. This being said you can get this from food, and that is probably the best way to do so. But I am not in a financial situation right now that is going to allow for quality meat purchases right now.

So my choice was Whey Protein. Most people out there are now thinking “Whey Protein, do you even lift brah?!?” and the answer is… no. I understand why people would be concerned. Most people use Whey Protein to add more protein than normal so they can get swole. I needed it because I had a protein deficiency.

We’ll talk more about my diet in the next post…

Seminars, Training Log, VTM

November 23-24 1Chi Sau Workshop at the VTM

November 24, 2014 kungfuwithwashu Leave a comment

I had a blast at this event. I have been training hardcore as part of my certification for 9 months now and this workshop helped me two fold. I was able to touch hands with someone other than my kung-fu brothers so I got to see how my hands had come along. We were just drilling but it was a totally different experience than drilling with my brothers. Secondly I was able to help others which only solidified what I had learned. Sigong then took these drills to a totally different level. Where we were able to train in a more live environment. If you aren’t training in live environment you can not trust that your skills will work in the real world.