It's been sunny and lovely all week so everyone is much more cheerful in general. I don't really mind cloudy weather but a month straight, with rain, is a bit much.

I went through all my forms videos to pick out some of the things I want to work on during class time. The main flaw I saw was that my side kicks were too rushed, I hadn't really finished the kick before I was on to the next movement. I'll be working on really defining those kicks. It actually ties in well with something I've figured out this week: I have an imbalance between the strength in my quadriceps and the gluteus muscles. I've been relying too much on my strong (and tight) thighs and it's caused some problems. For a few months now I've noticed some weakness in what I thought was my lower back and I've been having periodic knee pain for a really long time. I thought these were unrelated but apparently they're both symptoms of underdeveloped glutes. So, guess who's going to be doing lots of deadlifts and leg extensions? This gal. It should also give me more power on those sidekicks too so it all goes together quite nicely and now that I'm doing so much individual practice, I should really get a chance to fix this stuff. It's gotten me all jazzed up for the next week of training!