Liminal (from Sunday)
Apr. 28th, 2025 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonTrying to wrap up the week before it can wash away in a stream of new places and new experiences... it felt like a week of tear-down for the most part.
Oh, I did responsible shit that felt like build-up, too. I got a bunch of data together for my financial guy, and got all the windows in the condo unstuck and free of their decade-old plastic window wrappings (ten years had turned the clear, pliable tape into yellow strips of adhesive that were both brittle and sticky). I got some other adhesive off a ceiling, too, although I think I'll have to paint to completely get rid of any trace of the ill-fated string lights that were there once. Acetone, my favorite solvent, you did your best. And a guy came to soft-wash the exterior, in preparation for re-painting the outside. So: some house stuff. Some email and LinkedIn discussion.
But what's on my mind is handstands and circus, because after four years it looks like I'm breaking up with my distance coach. I want to work with Professionally Tiny Person, who just moved back to my area and whose approach to handstand pressing has always seemed really promising to me; and I want more freedom to program my own workouts, hopefully getting back to some stuff I've really missed; and anyway, four years of this coach's stuff hasn't gotten me to my press and it's time to switch up. I've upset him, sadly, and that's largely because I took a lapse in his response times as a reason to pause and talk about the larger picture. Natural as that is, it allows him to put it all together and think "I lapsed in my responses and now I'm losing a client" when really I think this has been brewing for a while, and in some ideal world I told him about Professionally Tiny Person months ago (instead of getting caught up in the mad dash of leaving Zillian and losing track of the timeline of her move). Meanwhile, the lapse is because he lost some staffers from his gym and has taken on a lot more in-person clients and is now asking way too much of himself. So that's a pain. We had a good run; four years and countless hours. Time to let me go.
As for my actual handstands, this has been a long long quest for the press, and of course maybe I just won't get it. However, I think there's technique stuff to be unlocked that Distance Coach doesn't even see as an issue, and spine/shoulder mobility I could be working on along with just strength strength strength. Some positions require not more tension to get into, but more relaxing; I did some surprising and very lightly-spotted presses with Spring in which I tried to keep myself completely limp except for my shoulders and arms, and wouldn't you know it.... gravity led to both compression and spinal rounding, and I wet-dishclothed right onto my hands. Clearly a promising direction.
Somehow I stumbled into an odd military SF kick in my reading, reading Some Desperate Glory (good, because it's also a coming-of-age story and a cult-escape story) while audiobooking the Murderbot series in an attempt to get through to the award-winner and fifth in the series, Network Effect. That one is good or at least amusing, because of the snarky autistic ace non-binary narrator. In both cases the military SF part is the boring part. I've brought what looks like a very good cozy-nasty horror book on this trip with me to break the streak.
(Also, in media consumption: we told the squirrel's 80-year-old mother about Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and she binged it for hours the next day. Haha. Spreading the word.)
Oh, I did responsible shit that felt like build-up, too. I got a bunch of data together for my financial guy, and got all the windows in the condo unstuck and free of their decade-old plastic window wrappings (ten years had turned the clear, pliable tape into yellow strips of adhesive that were both brittle and sticky). I got some other adhesive off a ceiling, too, although I think I'll have to paint to completely get rid of any trace of the ill-fated string lights that were there once. Acetone, my favorite solvent, you did your best. And a guy came to soft-wash the exterior, in preparation for re-painting the outside. So: some house stuff. Some email and LinkedIn discussion.
But what's on my mind is handstands and circus, because after four years it looks like I'm breaking up with my distance coach. I want to work with Professionally Tiny Person, who just moved back to my area and whose approach to handstand pressing has always seemed really promising to me; and I want more freedom to program my own workouts, hopefully getting back to some stuff I've really missed; and anyway, four years of this coach's stuff hasn't gotten me to my press and it's time to switch up. I've upset him, sadly, and that's largely because I took a lapse in his response times as a reason to pause and talk about the larger picture. Natural as that is, it allows him to put it all together and think "I lapsed in my responses and now I'm losing a client" when really I think this has been brewing for a while, and in some ideal world I told him about Professionally Tiny Person months ago (instead of getting caught up in the mad dash of leaving Zillian and losing track of the timeline of her move). Meanwhile, the lapse is because he lost some staffers from his gym and has taken on a lot more in-person clients and is now asking way too much of himself. So that's a pain. We had a good run; four years and countless hours. Time to let me go.
As for my actual handstands, this has been a long long quest for the press, and of course maybe I just won't get it. However, I think there's technique stuff to be unlocked that Distance Coach doesn't even see as an issue, and spine/shoulder mobility I could be working on along with just strength strength strength. Some positions require not more tension to get into, but more relaxing; I did some surprising and very lightly-spotted presses with Spring in which I tried to keep myself completely limp except for my shoulders and arms, and wouldn't you know it.... gravity led to both compression and spinal rounding, and I wet-dishclothed right onto my hands. Clearly a promising direction.
Somehow I stumbled into an odd military SF kick in my reading, reading Some Desperate Glory (good, because it's also a coming-of-age story and a cult-escape story) while audiobooking the Murderbot series in an attempt to get through to the award-winner and fifth in the series, Network Effect. That one is good or at least amusing, because of the snarky autistic ace non-binary narrator. In both cases the military SF part is the boring part. I've brought what looks like a very good cozy-nasty horror book on this trip with me to break the streak.
(Also, in media consumption: we told the squirrel's 80-year-old mother about Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and she binged it for hours the next day. Haha. Spreading the word.)
no subject
Date: 2025-05-06 06:48 pm (UTC)When I press, I start in that classic position on my tippy-toes with spine rounded, and from there I kind of lock my abs to hold my spine/torso in that shape, lean forward till the weight's off my toes, and open my shoulder angle *without* changing the shape of my spine. That's how I get my hips up. For some people, like you said, the spine can kind of roll segmentally into a straight line. But for me, it works best to focus on opening the shoulders. The key thing is that once my weight's off my toes, I don't lose the cat-throw-up shape I was previously in. I open my shoulders while still in a spinal-flexion position.
Because there is no tempo, the body has to be balanced at all times. So as long as the legs are on one side of the equation, other body parts have to be on the other. Ideally, as MANY other body parts as possible. So not just the head and shoulders (that would be "planching") but also the upper back, even the mid back. Then slowly as the shoulder angle opens, the hips rise, and eventually both the shoulders and the hips move to the midline of the balance point.