My friend sent me a link off of a forum he reads the other day (ravevictoria.com, the source for all your raving needs) that had mention of a workshop that caught his eye. He knows I'm into popping and I think he probably sent it as a joke.

That aside, I looked into the information and got in touch with the guy teaching the course - I'm always keen on re-learning the basics, and I believe that no amount of instruction is wasted - practice honing the fundamentals will always improve your dancing. The dude's name is Jake Evans, and he's taken classes with the founders of both Popping, and Locking. Geez, lucky guy, makes me wish I lived in Nova Scotia. Ha, just kidding, screw that.

Here's the info I found on the website advertising the workshop: Funky Steppin’ is a team of professionals coming together for the goal of getting people to loosen up, have a good time and learn the art of street dancing. Workshop leader Jake Evans is an award winning performer and founder of Stepbruthaz, and co-founder of Funkdaddies & Lokdown Crew (Halifax, NS) Jake has performed extensively on stage and has made several television appearances including the Trailer Park Boys (Episode 9), Muchmoremusic and CBC’s Zedtv and Street Cents, among many others. Jake has learned form the Electric Boogaloos and Don Campbell to name a few. Jake has been supported over the years by Dance Nova Scotia and is a founding member of the Urban Dancers Alliance. For more information contact Funky Steppin’ by email jdg_@hotmail.com, phone 250-938-3255 or pick up a registration form at the VAC office.
COST: 2 day wksp (12th/13th) 11am-2pm $75; 1 day wksp (14th) 11am-2pm $50; Eve wksp (12th) 6-8pm $35.

I wrote Jake to ask about what kind of dancing will be workshopped, because I really don't have much interest in learning music video style hiphop dancing, and while I have great appreciation for breakin', it's just not a style of dance I want to pick up on. He wrote back and let me know that the evening workshop (12th of July, 6-8pm) can be devoted to popping and locking.

I'm not brand new to the funkstyles (hopefully that's obvious if you read this site), so I wrote to check and make sure that it wouldn't be an issue - apparently there is a good amount of one-on-one work, so no matter what your skill level, there should be plenty of help.

I'm going to do the workshop either way, because it's a very rare opportunity to get real popping talent out here, but it'd be really dope if anyone else wanted to take it with me. If it interests you, leave a comment, we'll sort the details out. Or, if you prefer, write me an e-mail (deathsushi@hotmail.com).

It's been a while since I've made a dancing-related entry, but that doesn't mean I haven't been practicing. I've been practicing fairly regularly, and I try and go out once a week to excercise what I'm working on in an actual dance setting (like Squash, doing drills/practicing and actually using the skills you've learned in a game/real scenario are two different things).

Dance-wise, I've been spending a lot of time practicing my hits. Hits are the primary component of popping, one of the dance styles that I'm into. If you've seen So you think you can dance, you've probably seen what hits look like in Onion's audition video. It's a tensing of the muscles in your body to give the illusion of a powerful shock hitting your body. Usually you do this at the start/finish of a movement, but there's a lot of room for variation.

I went to the clinic the other day because my left elbow had been hurting me for a while, and it turns out I have tennis elbow. Whaaaat? That's ridiculous, I'm a squash player, not stupid tennis. I got it from lifting weights a few months ago, but never took any proactive steps to fix it, so apparently it just sits around waiting for you to actually do something about it. I'm wearing some kind of band for the tendons in my arm for the next three weeks, and I've already been burned twice by getting called Justin Timberlake. That'll do some long-lasting emotional damage if it keeps up.

Because my elbow is healing, I'm trying to spend the time practicing hitting with my legs. Hitting with your legs generates an added dimension to your hit, and really lets you hit with more power. I've always focused on training the muscles in my upper body, and neglected my legs. Hopefully by focusing on leg hits whie my elbow is healing, I can get them to a level I'm happy with and really start to pop hard.

As an aside, the keys to a good hit are: isolation, timing, and the ability to tense and relax your muscle quickly and readily.

• Isolation means that you're hitting with specific muscles - sometimes you don't want to hit with your whole body - you just finished moving your arm, it should be your arm that is making the hit. Isolating the correct muscles and hitting with those makes the hit look a lot cleaner.
• Timing is critical with any kind of dance. If you're not moving with rhythm, you're not dancing. Before you do anything, you have to learn how to count the beats in music, and that these ultimately control everything that you do. Hits need to be correctly timed to the music - you don't necessarily have to hit on every single beat, but you should be starting stopping your movements with the beats, and hitting at the start/end of those movements.
• Being able to tense and relax your muscles quickly and readily is a skill that you need to train your muscles to be able to do. I think I remember learning in a weight-lifting class about quick-twitch and slow-twitch muscle-fiber (maybe twitch isn't the right word) - by practicing your hits, your body will build more quick-twitch muscle fiber, which will in turn allow you to hit faster, more readily, and harder.

When I first started hitting it felt very awkward, but the more I practiced (and it's so easy to practice, since you can do something as simple as flexing the muscles in your arm while waiting for the bus), the more natural it started to feel. I don't even think about actually making the hit now, I just do it in time with the music.

The beauty of learning to hit is that it can be used to complement any type of motion. Something as simple as walking in a straight path can be made to look totally weird just by hitting on each step you take, in time with the music.

So.. I've got some videos I've put together here. First up is a video showing some of the hitting I've been working on. My camera is starting to die on me it seems, so the video quality is a bit off. When I next have cash for it, I'd like to buy a hybrid camera so that I can take better videos. The hitting video is here. Bad quality aside, some of the hits I'm making are visible, and that's an improvement over a few weeks ago when I tried to film some popping (you have to hit reasonably hard to get them to show up on camera).

Starting at 14 seconds onwards, I start to do some dimestopping as well. Dimestopping is a technique where you hit, then shake in place for a few seconds. This gives the illusion that my body is a very large hydraulic machine, and is shaking back and forth as the momentum dissapates. The key to a good dimestop is to hit hard when you initially stop, then allow yourself to just wobble gently back and forth in the direction you were moving. You don't want to move too much or it won't look convincing.

I put together a few videos breaking down the isolations for arm and body waves. The videos look pretty weak when you watch them, specifically because of the fact that I've broken the moves down very slowly. If you're having trouble seeing the connection between what I'm doing in the video, and the way a wave actually looks when it's done properly, just drag the slider on your video player to speed up the video and you'll be able to see that it really is the same illusion.

The first video is for arm waves. I'm doing something wrong here though - when doing arm waves, it is important (at least at first) to leave your arm up in the same position after the wave has passed through it. If you drop your arm right after doing the wave, there is less visible for the wave to be compared to visually and you lose some of the effect. I cheat and do this a few times.

The next set of videos is body wave from the side and from the front. I was having trouble figuring out exactly what it is that I do with my knees to isolate them for the wave. I think what I normally do is to roll them each outward in a circle, then back in. If you look closely you can see me doing this.

These two videos tie in nicely with one another - arm waves lead naturally to a body wave, since you have to puff out your chest as one of the isolations for the arm wave. At this point, it is easy enough to carry the wave either downwards through your stomach and legs, or continue across through your other arm. This is just one of the many combinations that you can do once you have some of the fundamentals of popping and waving down - there's a huge canvas upon which to express yourself with dance.

Lastly is a really bad video I made trying to break down the basics of a very simple twist-o-flex. Twist-o-flexes are meant to give the illusion of your body being segmented at various points and being able to rotate those segments individually along your vertical axis. There are many different types of flexes, but the one I'm doing here is just the most basic twist-o-flex I know of. The key the move is to learn to move your feet, as I do, without turning your upper body very much. The less you can turn your upper body, the better. You can get away with more than you'd think with this move, since you speed it up when actually dancing and the viewer's eyes won't notice if you're not keeping your torso perfectly straight. The key, as always, is to practice and get things as close and as well isolated as possible.

Practice on leg hits will be posted as I come up with some. For now, that's already a ton of writing today, so I'll put this entry to bed.

Alright, I think this is the first entry I've made since starting Pain and Torture, or at least the first one that will talk about that. I've been super stoked on squash lately, and have turned a lot of that energy into training hard. I'm jogging for about a half hour two to three times a week on my lunch break, and doing Pain and Torture (court movement and speed training with a dash of drills on top) once a week. At the end of the day my body is tired, but I wake up feeling well-rested and refreshed. I feel very fit, and that's a pretty good feeling.

We have a pretty sweet Pain and Torture group: Bevan, Drew, myself, Emily Paton, Emily Parsons, and Nikki. Bevan and Drew run hard, and the girls are all several thousand times faster than I am, so I've got a lot of motivation to push.

Playing league, taking lessons with Dan, hitting with better players than myself, and our hitting drills have made me very aware of a few things I need to work on, so, let's bring out the littany..

1. High Backhand Volleys

Whoa. I suck. Seems to me like improving and playing squash is laced throughout with moments where I go "how on earth do I get by with shots like that?". Lo and behold, high backhand volleys are just such a shot. Horray.

I mentioned me trying to work on getting my elbow up higher for this shot, and that ties in with the other thing I need to work on, which is racquet preparation. These two are mutually inclusive - they both relate to setting myself up properly for a good shot. The more you play squash, the more time you start to feel like you have between each shot, and to make a return. I think this is owed at least partially to learning to prepare yourself as much as possible before making a shot (and I suspect this is a factor in most sports, with the exception of Nascar racing, where it is overshadowed by the advantage of missing part of your frontal lobe).

So, I've been making a real effort towards this end, and really started to notice a difference last Thursday when I was drilling with Sarah and Emily. There's still a long way to go, but at least I can start to feel/see some results. Racquet preparation (actually, preparation in general) is an easy thing to do - I mean, it's not like training yourself to swing a racquet properly, or to boast at the right angle - it's not so much a skill as it is mental training (which I guess is a skill in itself). Because of this, there's really no excuse for me having taken so long to start thinking about it.. but that's just the way she goes (old trucker proverb).

2. Fitness

This one isn't really a skill so much as training - but I'm planning on putting a fair amount of effort into improving my fitness over the summer, and so I hope to have a real advantage when I step on court against someone that hasn't put in this kind of effort.

There aren't really any specific steps to doing this - just me going jogging, getting good rest, and eating healthy. I still don't really have any idea how to measure how well this is coming along, other than to see how long it takes me to recover between games and at the end of a match. That being said, I've been jogging for about three weeks now, and doing pain and torture for the same amount of time, and I feel like I'm starting to notice a difference. I can't remember how many weeks it's meant to take before you can visually notice changes to your body based on your workout routine (I think it's about three weeks), so this could just be a placebo. Either way, feels good.

I think that most of my focus this summer is going to be spent on fitness, along with tidying any other big errors I notice in my game until league starts up in the fall. Bevan and I are both planning to tryout for division 1, but I don't really think that I'm likely to make that cut, so I'm hoping to get into division 2 with a reasonably high rank. This should be possible if I stay steady with my current pace.

I guess posting the weaknesses in my game on a public website may make it more likely that those weaknesses will be exploited, but my thinking is along the lines of "what better way to practice a shot you suck at than by having people try to exploit it against you". The more people that know what I suck at and use it against me, the faster I'll learn to make it correctly.

I just finished editing some dance videos, and will put those up, along with an entry about what I'm currently working on shortly.

Updates have been slow lately - the weeknights have been packed with things for me to do, Bay and I are looking for a new apartment (let me know if you here of any 2 bedroom units with in-suite washer, dryer, dishwasher for around 1000-1200), and work has been very busy. My computer at work was causing problems and so I had to backup my files and format the hard-drive. I spent the last three days of the week restoring everything to its original state, which is a really lame way to work. Additionally, I didn't have any sound card support on the machine for those three days, so I was stuck listening to plain boring old white office noise.

Everything for me (and probably a lot of other people) is very cyclic. I get super stoked on one of my hobbies and go head-first into it, often to some neglect of the other hobbies. Magic and dancing were really at the forefront after the Pac-Rim, partially just because I was starting to suffer from tournament burn-out. That doesn't mean the tournaments stopped being fun - they're always fun. But, tournaments definitely take their toll on me. I'm not much good at being a boyfriend, cleaning the house, taking care of chores, or relaixing mentally when I'm playing in tournaments. It's just the way I am - I devote all of my focus to thinking about the games and visualizing how I want to play. Anyone that has seen me play knows that this gets thrown right out the window as soon as I step on the court, but it still doesn't stop me from doing it.

We had a cup tournament this past weekend, and that got the squash gears turning again - so now I'm back on the squash train. Both summer league and pain and torture started this week, and those two items are also keeping my motivation running high. Most people already know, but Pain and Torture is something Stu puts on every summer that is essentially court speed and training for an hour and a half, once a week. The idea is that you train during the off-season (Squash season over here is during the winter), and then kick everyone's ass with your conditioning when the season starts up again. I've also started jogging during my lunch break (I work downtown, so there's lots of beautiful coastline to jog along) and so I'm looking forward to having a lot better conditioning come next season.

Our summer league is a really good bracket this year, and I place myself somewhere in the middle of the players in my slot, which is nice. Playing at the top gets boring, because you're likely to win every game you play. Playing at the bottom is hard, because no one likes getting their ass handed to them each week. This way I get the best of both worlds - self-esteem boost sometimes, and the chance to get wailed on (and learn from it) the rest of the time.

The lessons I've been taking with Dan and Stu (plus help and tips from guys like Mike (Gaube) and Jarryd) have really been paying off, and I've been making a lot of effort to work on what I've been shown. So, as per the norm, here's the current list of things I'm working on.

1. Court movement and positioning

Dan, Stu, and Jarryd have been telling me about this forever, but my focus in the past has been on learning to get my stroke down correctly. There's a bit of a catch-22 here. Good court movement and positioning set you up to hit the ball correctly, and give you the greatest number of options for shots that you can make. However, for a beginning player, I didn't see that. All I could see was that my swing sucked eggs. I don't regret the way I've learned, but now that I'm happy with my swing (that doesn't mean it doesn't need work, but I no longer suffer from an aneurism every time I hit the ball), I've shifted a large amount of my focus towards the way I approach the ball.

My favorite drill for working on this right now is boast and drive. For real beginners out there reading this, it's a pretty simple drill. One guy boasts the ball to the front, and then the next guy drives the ball to the back. Then guy number one boasts to the opposite front corner, and guy number two drives. Simple. I like this drill because I find boasts the most difficult shot to position myself for - I have a natural tendency to follow the path of the ball into the front corner. When I do this, I end up too close to the ball and have the following options:

• Drive to the back corner

If I take this option, I'll be too close to the ball, and my opponent, if they're on the T, will step across, hold their racquet up and be awarded a stroke against me. No good.

• Drop shot/Trickle Boast (is that the right name)

Again, I'm too close to the ball, so I've got farther to move to get back to the T, and again, an alert opponent can step in and trap me beside the ball. This is not a cheap play on his part - I've positioned myself too close to the ball and am not giving them a clear shot at the ball. Stroke to me, or, best case scenario, I'm out of position and am running like crazy after the shot they make.

• Lob

Hey, I love lobbing. It is without a doubt my favorite shot in the game. But, I don't like being predictable, and I hate making bad lobs. If I'm too close to the ball, I'm not able to get the right angle for my lob, and it's going to end up being a fat shot in the middle of the back of the court. My opponent positions himself, I'm trapped against the side wall (I have to give them a clear shot to any part of the front wall), and they make any number of shots for an easy point.

So, to train this, I do boast and drive with a friend, and focus mostly on anticipating the path that the ball will take and position myself to make the best shot given where the ball will end up. This is what I have learned to do - the more you play squash, and the better you get, the more time you find you have. When I started playing, a boast to the front corner meant I had to charge to retrieve it. I didn't have time to think about the path of the ball, where it would end up, or how I needed to position myself, because I was playing a purely reactionary game. Once you start to learn how to anticipate the shots your opponents will make, and where the ball will end up, you give yourself more time to think about how you're going to hit the ball.

2. Boasts

I was doing boasts with Dan and it became immediately apparent that there is still a lot of work to be done on this shot. I was relieved to find out that my technique is correct, I just need to work on where I hit the ball into the side wall. I've had to work through so many different bad habits that finding out that it's just a matter of refining technique is all good.

Nevertheless, my defensive boasts are usually hit either too far forward or too far back on the side wall, so I need to keep working on boast drills until I know exactly where the sweet spot is. Kevin and Stu have both told me that sometimes it helps to visualize another squash court beside the one you are playing in - hitting the ball into the front corner of this imaginary squash court is exactly the angle that you want for a good boast.

My forehand attacking boast is lacking in deception. I feel good on my backhand, and can catch people off guard when I approach a shot that has popped out near the T, but on the forehand, I need to practice making the swing for an attacking boast look like a forehand drive.

3. High volleys

So I asked Dan what he would tell people if they approached him before playing me in a tournament and asked how they should beat me. His reply was that they should try to hold their shots more and throw me off balance, lob more, and change up the pace.

Dan would know better than I, but I've been spending a lot of time working on softer slower shots, like high lobs from the back of the court and deep crosscourt shots. I also make a point of trying to play some people that like fast paced games and other people that like slow paced games, so I'm feeling pretty good about my ability to change the pace, and to deal with having it changed on me. This is, of course, only a reflection of the games I've been playing recently - I have no doubt that as I continue to improve and move up, I'll come to realize that there's a whole lot more ground here that I need to cover.

I'm not sure how to train having shots held against me, other than to continue playing people that are better than I am.

My high volleys are indeed a compelling reason for me to quit playing squash altogether, and I know how to train this one, so this is the last thing I'm currently working on.

Jesse and I have been practicing volleys whenever we can find a time that works for both of us, and hopefully we can start including lobs and volleys in our drills. Mike Gaube showed me the other day that I need to get my elbow up higher so that I can use more whipping motion in the swing. Currently I'm using my arm to generate a lot of the power, which greatly reduces the punch you can give the ball.

Before my games right now I'm spending time doing figure 8 drills as well as standing volleys, which will hopefully help this last item. Just stand in the back of the court and hit high volleys to yourself over and over. As I improve I'll start varying the pace on the ball a bit and practice kill shots as well as deep returns.

That's everything for now. We have another team tournament coming up in July, and then August I'm going to head over to Vancouver for the Sun and Surf tournament at Jericho. I missed this one last year, but it's meant to be pretty def.

UPDATE: I was talking to my friend Simon tonight (a fellow dancer), and he noticed I was using a sweet sweet sweet picture of Luke Perry for my MSN avatar. Everyone who knows who Luke Perry and Jason Priestly are owes it to themselves to follow this link and check out some of their amazing adventures.