Today I did 20 push-ups leading directly into 20 squats.  My right arm has been hurting on and off for about three weeks, and I’ve not done push-ups reliably as a result. Today was a bit ginger, but we’ll see if this becomes the new habit.

It also seems sometimes that I am far more fragile than I think I am.  Some of this may have to do with being 46, with having a high-risk-of-death infection as a child, with not being as physically active in my teens and twenties and thirties as maybe I should have been.  But maybe doing more than 20 push-ups is not a good idea for me — I do seem to have more physical challenges going over that boundary than not.

Squats led into Eight Pieces of Silk.  I’ve been finding that EPoS does a better job of energizing me than Five Golden Coins; it does what a tai chi routine is supposed to do — wake me up, flex and stretch some muscles, and start the chi flowing.

And then, you guessed it, four repetitions of the tai chi form.  I should really work out some sort of fluid set of movements that move me from the starting position in the East on the first iteration, to the starting position for the South in the second iteration, to the starting position in the West for the third, to the starting position in the North for the fourth. That would give my tai chi practice the druidic/circular component which it’s currently lacking.

Something like, Left-handed Cloud Hands, spiral single whip, snake creeps down, false (True) close.  Or maybe, more like Left-handed Cloud Hands, spiral single whip, Step Block Punch, False/True Close.  I think that’s probably it.  There’s a pause as one faces each direction, but practicing those four moves again as one moves into the four iterations makes a larger meta-cycle with four smaller cycles within it.

Hmm!

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