Owie with a side of cute
So...I finally started on the Asharah belly dance video, y'know, the one that's three hours long that I was bitching about a month or two back. I ran through the exercises in the first 45-minute segment that comprises the "warm-up."
Oh my fucking god, but I am sore...from my Achilles tendons all the way through to my shoulders. "Warm-up" -- HA! I think if I can get to the point where the warm-up section doesn't hurt anymore, my muscle strength and control will have increased exponentially. And most of the stuff involved is just stretches. She does a few isolations -- chest circles and some kind of three-part undulation thing involving the upper back muscles (chest lift), upper abdominals (chest drop), and pulling in the lower abs, which I suspect that if it isn't the actual foundation of the "camel," it's a really close relative. She speeds these things up past eight-note tempo, which is about as fast as my belly dancing teacher makes us do any isolation that isn't a shimmy, all the way up to a sixteenth-not tempo. I thought my brain was going to explode with trying to process it that fast, though I did halfway decently at eighth-note tempo. I just don't have much stamina.
I'm going to try to resist the temptation to make some sort of overly ambitious plan about it until I've managed to do it a few more times by just focusing on taking it one day at a time...or rather probably at first one day every two days at a time, judging by my current level of muscle fatigue. Otherwise, I think I'll overwhelm myself because some of these positions are just friggin' complicated as hell to get into and it's going to take a while for them to become even vaguely natural or automatic. And then once I get to that point, it's going to take a while to actually figure out how to do them right. I've figured out quite a lot about how I process skill acquisition, y'see.
And Rhiannon was carrying around Chris' Tai Chi book, and I taught her how to say "Tai Chi." So she's been running around randomly -- and quite gleefully, I might add -- announcing "TYE CHEE!" I'll have to get video of it. It's just too cute.
Oh my fucking god, but I am sore...from my Achilles tendons all the way through to my shoulders. "Warm-up" -- HA! I think if I can get to the point where the warm-up section doesn't hurt anymore, my muscle strength and control will have increased exponentially. And most of the stuff involved is just stretches. She does a few isolations -- chest circles and some kind of three-part undulation thing involving the upper back muscles (chest lift), upper abdominals (chest drop), and pulling in the lower abs, which I suspect that if it isn't the actual foundation of the "camel," it's a really close relative. She speeds these things up past eight-note tempo, which is about as fast as my belly dancing teacher makes us do any isolation that isn't a shimmy, all the way up to a sixteenth-not tempo. I thought my brain was going to explode with trying to process it that fast, though I did halfway decently at eighth-note tempo. I just don't have much stamina.
I'm going to try to resist the temptation to make some sort of overly ambitious plan about it until I've managed to do it a few more times by just focusing on taking it one day at a time...or rather probably at first one day every two days at a time, judging by my current level of muscle fatigue. Otherwise, I think I'll overwhelm myself because some of these positions are just friggin' complicated as hell to get into and it's going to take a while for them to become even vaguely natural or automatic. And then once I get to that point, it's going to take a while to actually figure out how to do them right. I've figured out quite a lot about how I process skill acquisition, y'see.
And Rhiannon was carrying around Chris' Tai Chi book, and I taught her how to say "Tai Chi." So she's been running around randomly -- and quite gleefully, I might add -- announcing "TYE CHEE!" I'll have to get video of it. It's just too cute.