211. Daddy..., You're just no fun anymore (The Conclusion of Ep.205)
The Way through Baguazhang - 八卦掌道 - A podcast by Peter Hainzl
After I did the podcast 'Daddy..., You're just no fun anymore', I showed the transcript to my daughter. She asked me if people would listen to it, and I told her it would make her famous. For the next few days after that, all was quiet. Peace returned to my home and I took my wife's advice to not start any more wars against my children. Then after a week of peace: Whack!! My daughter punched me directly in the back of the kidneys, and ran off. Over the course of many days she kept doing it. Harmless whacks designed to bait me into chasing her like an ogre. But I held off, because while the whacks made a lot of noise like a piece of steak slapping a chopping board, they didn't hurt at all. Or so I thought. Two weeks after I thought peace had been made, I woke up one morning with a growing pain in my side. My muscles had knotted up so tight along my one side that sleeping became difficult, with lots of midnight visits to the toilet. I couldn't figure out the cause of my symptoms. It was a total mystery. Until my daughter whacked me in the kidneys again and pleaded with me to chase her. Unable to chase her around the house, I negotiated with her a grappling session on the floor on the condition that she would later help me to stretch my back muscles. Now here I must point out a key difference between hard style and soft style training: Modern mixed martial arts is great and all, until something goes wrong like pulling a tendon, ripping a muscle or induced severe inflammation. Then the practitioner has to stop, rest and wait for the injured body part to heal before they can get back on the mat. With my Genchitaofu system of doing things, the healing of injuries is sped up through the assistance of the training itself. It's a bit like horses when they're sick. To stop them dying, the best thing sometimes for them is to get them on their hooves and moving around again. So getting back to my story, there I was grappling with my daughter and a muscle in the back of my head went pop! It hurt like hell, but it also felt really good immediately afterwards. And I had a sudden realisation of where my back pain came from. It was from all those whacks my had given me. And I had never made the connection until then. Basically, what had happened was that the whacks were too light to cause bruises. All she had been doing was sending loud shockwaves through my body and my body reacted by tightening up my muscles at the point of impact. Through repeated shockwaves, the muscles kept tightening until it spread down to my thigh and up to my neck. When you think about it, it's a very clever strategy and I got to learn through experience something new. And my daughter won the grappling match against her far bigger and far heavier daddy. And we were both finally content.