Wedge this….
For the last couple of weeks, since Shifu Painter’s workshop on the Wedge. We’ve been playing with it against various types of punches and kicks. On top of practicing it’s basic training exercises.
The Thursday following the workshop it started with some discusion about the wedge and then moved into some basic exercises.These are exercises that help you get an idea of how the wedge should feel, getting the angles, footwork and structure correct.
After this, we then started to play with the wedge vs. a straight punch, and wedge vs. an upper cut to the body. We kept it simple, just keeping to a single step. The interesting thing that we found is that there is very little difference between the two. This makes it a veritile tool in self defense. Remembering and internalizing a single concept is easier than 5 or 6 different techniques.
Last Thursday, we started off with some discussion on the Ba Step and then spent some time working on it. There was also some time spent playing with a game to work our night swallow stepping. Before we did another exploration of the wedge. This time we took some time to look at it vs round house kicks to the upper and lower torso. This was also kept to a single step, but we also acknowledged what would happen next if we were to keep moving.
I look forward to more playing with the wedge in it’s different layers. Here are a couple links to blog posts with video clips from the workshop recently presented about the wedge, http://bagua.ca/secrets-of-the-secrets-of-the-wedge and http://bagua.ca/secrets-of-the-secrets-part-2 and http://bagua.ca/secrets-part-3-disciplined-freedom .