Saturday, 27 May 2023

PREP - Monthly Mini Challenge - June

Hey all, I hope everyone who took part in the tiger challenge had a good time, it looked like a blast. Wishing again I could have made it.

For the upcoming MMC, we will be doing something a little different! Junes challenge will be…

A three-person Day of a Thousand!

Everyone will have until Friday to interact with this post to confirm your participation. On Friday, I will randomize teams of three and post them along with the official issuing of the challenge.
 
From there, you and your two teammates will find a day (as soon as you can, preferably) in which the three of you will work to 1000 push-ups and sit-ups between yourselves. So, for example;
Person A could do 250 pushups and 250 sit-ups 
Person B could do 450 pushups and 300 sit-ups
Person C could do 300 pushups and 450 sit-ups

I encourage each of you to still do enough of each to get your daily numbers in, however, how the remaining numbers are split will be up to you and your team, and what each member is capable of. This is an excercise on communication and teamwork. It is quite easy to create group chats in WhatsApp, so I encourage the use of them once teams are created for the sake of communication. 

For those with injuries or restrictions, I still encourage you to participate. This is a positive teamwork activity, and any contribution is better than no participation.

If there are any questions, please let me know! I will reiterate these details on Friday!

Thursday, 25 May 2023

A Little Tired

 Not too much for insights or discoveries in this post, more so a "hey, I'm still here" blog since it has been over a week since my last post (and blogging is important!). Between starting my summer semester and figuring out the many workings of this new job, I have not had a lot of extra motivation in my days. While my numbers have not taken much of a toll, my forms have reached the dreaded "doing them to get them done" state, which I am sure many have experienced at one point or another. I think this is just a wave I need to ride out; once I become more accustomed and settled into my current workload, I should have enough gas in the tank by the end of the day to work on what I want to work on. If this isn't the case, however, I may have to undergo some more time management. Alas, worrying about it now will only worsen the case, so I have decided to temporarily backburner this "coming up with a solution" dilemma. 

Best of luck on the Tiger Challenge everyone! Wishing I could be there :)

Tuesday, 16 May 2023

Nothing Ventured…

I’ll start this post off with a quick appreciation note to my parents. I think I was raised as good as one can get. I wouldn’t say I was handed everything on a silver platter, but I by no means had a rough go of things. Looking back, I have been fortunate to have had many things growing up. My living conditions right now, however, happen to be very different. There are many things in life I realize I’ve taken for granted after spending such a short time here.

I am not used to driving 45 minutes for groceries 
I am not used to having extremely limited hot water
I am not used to having no wifi 
I am not used to waking up with bugs on my bed
I am not used to having very questionable potable water
And many other little things I’m slowly adjusting to.

However, with all that comes advantages. I wake up to dozens of birds calling, and fall asleep to moose braying. I walk on to my front porch in the morning and am surrounded by trees and squirrels and other small critters. The lack of wifi has definitely helped support this, but I can spend my days off outside for the whole day exploring and enjoying the environment. I have enjoyed doing Kung Fu hidden in the middle of the woods; it has been a peaceful experience. It has allowed me to make several insights and realization, but those are blogs for another time.

Tuesday, 9 May 2023

The Most Painful Experience of My Life

 For those who read and looked at the latest monthly mini challenge, you would know that on Saturday, I underwent OCS exposure and contamination testing (or in short, I got pepper sprayed). While the experience itself is something I would want to share, I happened to get two big Kung Fu insights from it. Two birds, one stone. Before I get into it, however, I think I will repeat the title of this blog. I can confidently say I have not undergone anything more painful or brutal in my lifetime than those 30 minutes. You know that stinging in your eyes when you get soap in them? I was rubbing soap into my eyes to make them feel better. Not a pleasant time. 

Unfortunately, all videos taken were deleted after viewing and not retained, so I have no fun stuff to share. I did get to watch it myself, however, and I noticed something. One of the drills we had to do was various strikes on an individual, including palm heels and thrust punches. I was really impressed with my techniques for those strikes. Everything from my rotation, my power, my six harmonies, my vectors, my stance, it all looked good. I could not see, I could hardly breath, I was in a lot of pain, and yet my muscle memory was still in tact. I talked about how my muscle memory has given me some grief during this week in my last blog, yet this was a positive light I very much needed to see. A quote our instructors have said numerous times this week is "under stress, no one rises to the level of their expectations, rather falling to the level of their training". My level of training got me to the point I was at. It was a pretty good feeling (although to be fair, after I got my vision back, all feelings felt pretty good).

The other insight I gained was just how vital my training in breath control has been. A side effect of pepper spray that I saw a lot of in my classmates was anxiety and fear. Although I experienced some minor moments of this, I definitely excelled in avoiding it. I believe it is because I very rarely lost control of my breathing. When decontaminating and soaking my eyes in copious amounts of water and soap, I remained in constant pace of breathing in for three seconds and out for three seconds. I was able to crack jokes and make conversation in a fraction of the time as others, and I genuinely believe it is because I was the one who could slow down and take a breath.

Overall, while I have never experienced more pain, it is surprisingly short-lived. Within 25 minutes I was able to see unaided, within an hour I could fully function with no drawbacks, and within 24 hours it was like it never happened. It also cleared the sinuses remarkably well, so it may be worth doing again if I have a cold. 

Friday, 5 May 2023

Monthly Mini Challenge - MAY

Hey everyone, with the new month comes a new mini challenge. As the weather is getting nicer and nicer, I think it is a good opportunity for the challenge to be…..

Three EXTRA kilometres

To clarify, when I say EXTRA, I mean three kilometres on top of your normal practices in a day. If you walk 6km for work, that does not count! The goal for this one is to get out and get some steps in for the sake of getting steps in and going for a walk. 

Although I am not in the Stony Plain area, I do know that there is an air quality warning from the fires, yet I do not know what the actual conditions are. Please proceed and partake at your own discretion and in accordance with your health. 

As always, be mindful of your injuries and body limits. The goal is participation, do not hurt yourself pursuing that. Again, this does not need to be completed on Saturday but should be done within 24h. I myself will be going on Sunday as I am getting pepper sprayed on Saturday and have no intention of doing anything after that. 

If there are any questions, let me know! Happy hiking!

Thursday, 4 May 2023

New Ground

I have to write this blog on my phone and I’ve got a lot I want to write about and an early morning, so I apologize if my thoughts aren’t terribly cohesive

On Monday I started my training for my summer job with the rest of the new seasonal officers (31 of us total). A lot of what we have been doing has been defensive tactics, something I obviously have a pretty good background in. On the first day we went over some basic theory stuff, which included the “keep your eyes on the persons chest, not their eyes or hands” tidbit. When that was taught nearly everyone hastily went to their notes and wrote it down in detail, yet I saw no need. I mean, that’s a concept I’ve been practicing longer than our instructors have been teaching it. 

With that said, something I’ve been mindful of is leaving my ego at the door. The new guy who thinks he has nothing to learn from the instructors isn’t going to get far in mastery, after all. While I’ve been mindful to go in without relying previous knowledge and ready to learn, I’ve run into a lot of struggles with certain things. 

We’ve done several takedown/wristlock/armbar restraint sort of actions. For better or for worse, no one in my class has any injuries, making my shoulder injury give me some leeway. As such, for these takedowns, I’ve been paired up with an instructor, giving me double the practice time. Turns out, I sorely needed it. 90% of the technique of what we have done has been similar to what we learn and practice at the Kwoon. In that regard, that bit has been like clockwork. The remaining 10%, on the other hand, has been really causing me grief. The technique they’ve been teaching us has been nearly the opposite of what we do. It’s not that it’s wrong; it’s just different. Even though I have the mindset of doing what they teach and not just trying to do what I know, a mindset doesn’t seem to affect muscle memory. 

I suppose one could liken it to learning your first language as a child versus learning a second language once you are older. For most of my classmates, they are building from the ground up with nothing impacting them. This “language” they are learning is currently all that they know; it is the one true language. For me, my attempts to learn are hindered by my experience with another “language”. I automatically fall back on what I already know and that messes up my ability to use the language.

As such, I had three of the six instructors working with just me for the entire period of this specific exorcise, while everybody else got got through it once, switched partners, and got through it again, while having only the other three instructors between the thirty of them. My inability to conduct this technique properly was overwhelming and frustrating, to be frank. I am remarkably thankful for my instructors patience, because even with their support and aid I was starting to get emotional near the end. Going completely against such hardened muscle memory, as minor of actions as they were and yet in a way that made no sense to me, was so overwhelmingly difficult I genuinely wanted to cry. I could do it slow, but every single time I tried to speed up I ended up doing it how I wanted to do it, before I even realized. 

Something I will be working on going forward is focusing on keeping my adrenaline and heart rate down so I can don’t get as worked up and I can think a little more clearly. I have a few more thoughts on why I think I am struggling so much, although I didn’t want this blog to be too long (whoops), so I may try and get them in a later post.