2.47

 This past week was my first week of winter break, and the most prominent thing that stood out to me while doing my daily Kung Fu is how easy it is to get distracted. During classes, I have something or someone that makes sure that I'm focused, but when training by myself, I don't have external influences to keep me focused. I instead have external influences that want to direct my focus at them. The distractions were difficult to ignore at times, but overall I did a fairly good job at ignoring the distractions. That was my main takeaway from the week.

2.46

 With school out for Christmas break I now have a lot more time to use towards Kung Fu. Now that I don't have any homework to do or even classes to attend, I can now spend almost the entire day on Kung Fu. I won't be training all day every day, but most days I will be training for longer periods of time. I'll be training like this until school starts again on January 4th. My blogs until then will be summaries of the week and what I learned during the week. 

2.45

After doing each days challenge, I find that I am trying to find how I would apply the technique in real life. Some are easier than others, like the combative roundhouse being a fast kick. However, there are some that aren't as easy to find a "practical" use for. Today's challenge of Cross Step Back Kicks is one of the more difficult ones to find a use for. The concept of the technique is easy to understand and find a practical use for, but I find it difficult to see myself using the kick itself if I were to get in a circumstance that requires physical action. While I'm sure that it does have it's place where it is very effective at what it needs to do, I feel like this kick would very rarely be high on my list of choices that I can use. I do know that it is still good to practice and learn it, because we may end up in that situation where this is best suited defense.

2.44

 800 push-ups is a great way to not only celebrate Master McNeil's 80th birthday, but it is also a great time to see where we are at. To do the push-ups, I am doing 50 of them every half hour. This has gotten me up to 450 so far. This is helping me figure out where I would score on the black belt test, and it's safe to say that I still have lots to improve on. With school being shut down again, I'm now at home all of the time and I will be putting a lot more time into my training. This will help me get more reps in and it'll help me find more questions to ask.