The Carreau's Nest

We performed our weapon beta forms ( as well as hand forms) during Thursdays class, and it's really put into perspective how little I have done in terms of creating the form itself. Every practice session I've had with my three segments staff has been decently lengthy. However, when it came to our in class performance, I realize I have been practicing in a more general sense rather than creating a sequence to learn off of. I performed by first (and only) 5 moves so far in the form, bonus points for still managing to hit myself in the face. The whole thing lasted about 7 seconds, and it's really put into perspective how much I still need to add to the form for me to be happy with it. Of course that's a number I can't exactly quantify at the moment, but I do know that it involves a lot more "fiddling" so I can figure out what to put there in the first place. All this to say that I need to train more. The only way I'm gonna get better with the "stick...

I woke up this morning with about 5 hours of sleep, and dear god I could feel it.  For the past month or so I have been keeping myself to a decently strict sleep schedule, go to bed at 10:00 PM and wake up at 6:00 AM. No sleeping in, no going back to bed, I get up and I start my day immediately. Alright, maybe not immediately considering half the time I stare at a wall for 10 minutes daydreaming, but I think that's more of a "me being a space cadet" issue than any fault of the sleep schedule. Regardless, the effect that it's had over the past month is quite shocking to me. The urge to lay back down after my alarm goes off has been drastically reduced since I started, and my habit of staying up until "whenever I feel like it" has been almost nonexistent due to having a consistent wake up time. Don't get me wrong, the first week or so sucked, but as I went along my body seemed to adapt to the daily cycle. It's great that I have a level of consistency t...

Sorry I was gone for a week. I've been practicing a bit more with my three section staff recently, still wiggly as ever. I've been noticing more and more, however, fat I've chosen a weapon that requires a decent bit more "precision" than I'm used to. I'm not just talking about swinging the thing without hitting myself (albeit that still happening quite consistently), but rather having the staff flow nicely into the next move/stance. Most of my practice with the weapon has me trying to consistently land the same move in the same way. Having this many hinges on a weapon really does change the degree of finesse that you need to use in order to obtain a decent level of precision. For instance, I have a move where I swing the staff in front of me, and use its momentum to wrap behind my back and catch it underneath my left arm. That happens about 50% of the time, I'd give 25% of that to have instinctively trying to catch it in my hand instead, another 20% wo...