Ancestral Simon's Underworld Adventures

[SimonT]

I see what's going on here.

 

My plans for this year:

 

- To delve deeper into the hidden worlds of bushcraft and "rewilding", learning the ways of the plants and animals (and eating them), and meeting and training with knowledgeable folks around this country, starting with the east coast where I have already made many virtuous connections, and then venturing further - up into Arnhem land sometime around July/August, and who knows where else.

 

- To continue my brave quest into the realm of the Daoist Immortals, practicing neigong every day without fail, and various secret exercises to develop whole-body connected power, and to re-instate my xingyiquan five elements and baguazhang circle walking practices soon as I settle in to an auspicious place of my own.

 

- To crawl and swim as frequently as possible, and to master the muscle up to the point that five sets of five becomes easy.

 

- To properly rehabilitate my achilles tendons, last remaining of the countless parts of my body which have suffered from chronic pain.

 

Todays log:

 

- Unilateral farmer's walks up and down the back yard with the 16kg kettlebell, for 15 minutes.

- Unilateral overhead press, 20x each side with the 12kg kettlebell, 2x10 each side with the 16kg.

- Quadrupedal circle-pushups, 10x each direction in sagittal, frontal and transverse planes.

- 2x30 negative calf raises for my right achilles, morning and evening.

 

Waigong:

-30 minutes each of sagittal, frontal, and transverse plane hand circles, single and double arm.

 

Neigong:

- Four breaths in each of the nine positions of the Da Xuan Nei Gong, for the "feeling", "grabbing", and "grounding" rounds, 36 breaths x 3 rounds = a highly auspicious 108 breaths.

[zenwoof]

woof woof! Like like like

[Craig]

Like! Osssuuuu!

[[DW]]

A Virtuous log, indeed.  How are the unilateral farmer's walks coming?  Vijay is trying to convince me of the merits of heavy two-handed Farmer's walks.  The swimming improvement is a noble quest.. being in the ruff surf two days back was fun (especially at 80kg now), but I would like to be a much stronger swimmer than I am..what with living on a giant island and all.

[SimonT]

I love the farmer's walk, especially the unilateral. Because I've been on the road a lot I haven't had my precious KB's, but now I'm in a place in Orient Point with a big long back yard that's perfect for walking up and down, so I plan to do a lot of it. Honestly, I think the unilateral loaded walk is one of the very best exercises around. I still haven't got my heavier bells down here so I'll have to go for volume rather than weight, but that's alright too since that's kind of more what I'm trying to do for the next little while anyway. Just have to remember where I put those FAT GRIPZ™...

 

Heavy two-handed walks are pretty amazing as well, definitely good if you want to turn into more of a tank.

[Kit_L]

Honestly, I feel strongly that the unilateral FW is more useful than the two-handed version; the diagonal loading is gold, and the overall pressure on the lumbar spine less. The two handed FWs are brutal, but you are balanced (so less core work in the diagonal sense); grip quickly becomes the limiting factor (not that this is a bad thing), and (like deadlifts) the lower back is more at risk.

[SimonT]

A good friend of mine who overstayed his visa in Brazil and ended up broke and living in a little shack he built himself in a slum in Salvador is my main inspiration for the high-volume asymmetrical carrying training. He worked selling cashew nuts for about four years to earn money for his flight home to Japan, so he walked around carrying about a 10kg barrel of cashews on one shoulder all day long, swapping shoulders whenever he needed to, putting the load down and lifting it back up to the shoulder and walking with it. He was a small dude, but his torso muscles were massive, and he could do the craziest slow-motion sideways-leaning cartwheels and hand balances like they were nothing.

[Emmet Louis]

I'd agree with the unilateral farmers walks being awesome. Kb/db in the front rack postition make an appearance for 90% of my clients who have back issues. 

 

 

[SimonT]

Today:

 

54 reverse breaths seated, followed by 10 minutes reverse breathing while walking.

 

36 "grounding" reverse breaths in standing position, pressing heels into the ground on inhale, balls of the feet into the ground on exhale. Amazing exercise, inhale especially really switches on the entire posterior chain.

 

gorilla (on the balls of the feet and loose fists) crawling on the beach, about 8x60 steps. Was fatiguing in serratus anterior at first, quickly moved into medial hamstrings and glutes as I focused more on driving forwards from the legs. Crazy amount of rab work, of course, and going for speed was starting to get the heart rate up nicely as well.

 

Also caught some "beach worms"! Which we will use for bait tomorrow. Interesting process, using dead fish and live pippies to catch sneaky worms to catch more fish later.

 

"Teacups" exercises (basic hands number 7), for 30-45 minutes each of both palms forward (together and alternating), both palms backward (together and alternating) and one-forward one-backward. Absolutely killer stuff, mad gainz in the rabs, spine, abdomen, hips and of course the shoulders.

 

"Yin-Yang Palms" (basic hands number 8), for 20 minutes straight with increasing force and speed. Whole-body spiral powers are really coming along. Can't wait to see where I'm at in a year's time.

 

Da Xuan Nei Gong 108 breaths. Reverse breathing is getting more and more interesting, squeezing-linking is killer, especially in my everythings, and grounding (pulling the central axis strongly toward the ground without moving) absolutely smashes the deep insides of my thighs like they haven't been smashed since I started Chinese martial arts with low tai chi walking and ultra-low chicken stepping back when I was 20.

 

Good times!

[jon.valentine]

Late to the party but would just like to add my 'sweet!' to the chorus.

[SimonT]

Yesterday:

 

- 30-45 minutes each of "provoking hands" (Serge's basic hands number 9) and "pulling-slicing" (number 10).

- Da Xuan Nei Gong auspicious 108 breaths.

 

Today:

 

- 15 minutes baguazhang roushengong "soft body training"

- 15 minutes chen style taiji "silk reeling" shoulder circles

- 1hr of basic hands number 11 "stretching"

- 30 minutes of number 12 "crossing"

- 20 minutes straight of number 13 "beng quan pendulum"

- Da Xuan Nei Gong 108 breaths.

 

The basics hands set is really excellent. Crazy action through the lats and shoulder girdle, intercostals and abdominal walls, erector spinae, hips and adductors, spiralling down through the backs of the knees and peroneals into the feet. After each one I find my torso inflating completely differently when I breathe, and the spiral powers through the legs are really coming along. Whole-body connected spirals are there, now just huge amounts of volume - as much as my body can handle - to make those spirals STRONG!

[Nathan]

You should formulate a sequence of exercises for maximum spiral cultivation and call it "the Fibonacci sequence"

[jordan]

That's a lot of volume!  Something for me to aim for

[Craig]

pulling/slicing aka john travolta throws the ball.

 

I've just began hitting the basic hands again with my newly found deep external/internal rotator powers in the shoulders and hips, they are crazy good! some super crunchy shoulder action too, I'll have to show you next week

[[DW]]

[SimonT]

Things are going well!

 

I have been camping a lot, and spending a lot of time at the beach. Both of these have given me plenty of auspicious exposure to families of large tree-climbing goannas, and many quadrupedal cousins in the forms of possums (trashing the campsite every night), wallabies, and dogs. Ate some sea-snails, abalone, and smoked lots of fish and meat on the fire, while defending everything from aggressive lizards and fat little possums.

 

I also recently finished reading several books, amongst which was "At The Water's Edge", an excellent account of the evolution of tetrapods from lobe-finned fishes, and then the evolution of aquatic mammals (whales, dolphins etc) several million years later. How walking evolved from swimming, and then how swimming re-evolved from walking again. Others were "Prehistory of the Mind" and "Origins of the Modern Mind", the first of which is an archaeologist's attempt to recreate the minds of early people, from chimpanzees through australopithecines and all the early homos to homo sapiens sapiens; and the second of which is the same story, but written by a neuroscientist.

 

Anyway, I've been practicing a lot of quadrupedal and pseudo-quadrupedal movement of various sorts, and have been getting a LOT out of experimenting with the basic undulations/locomotor patterns in water, shallow water, sand, ground, and in trees, and loving the fact that the same basic motor patterns apply to all of those environments, hence there is a huge amount of transferability of strength and movement skill from one to the others. I feel like they're all making me a better wrestler and hitter and climber and swimmer and walker and runner, all at the same time.

 

Besides all of that, I've been practicing my Serge-y neigongs daily, seated reverse breathing several nights per week, and working a single one of the "basics hands" drills every day for as much time as I can get, trying to do 1000+ reps per day (after reading that Sagawa Yukiyoshi practiced all of his solo exercises in sets of 1000). It's awesome. Also smashing hundreds of reps per day of the basic push-pull forwards-backwards taijiquan legs drill that Serge shows in his intro video. Like just about everything else, it's an exercise I'd learned before many times and practiced for many years, but meeting Mr. Augier has inspired me to make it a major focus of practice once again. The best thing I've got from all of Serge's stuff is that it came along right when I was really connecting with a particular part of my spine and torso (the very highest abdominal muscles and the zone in the spine from the thoraco-lumbar junction up to the mid-thoracic between the shoulder blades, and the diagonal slings which pass through these zones), and Serge's neigong and especially the basic hands all seem designed to specifically highlight the basic body mechanic involved with these areas (what is referred to as the "spinal bow" - like a bow for archery - in taiji and xingyi).

 

So, it's good times over here!

[Craig]

Re nei gong targeting your specific problems... It seems to also be targeting my specific problem areas (different to yours) almost like it was exactly made for this problem. It's a very clever way of doing things! I'm finding its dissolving the deep restrictions that no stretch could get to, and building connections that I was unable to build with conventional exercises. Exciting!