Finding balance with the monk spade

        I chose the Monk Spade as my weapon this year, because I knew it would help me connect my hips and shoulders better.  With the weight of the weapon I have to utilize my hips and the rest of the body to swing it around.  The hurdle I'm experiencing with this, is controlling the weight, and not letting it throw me off balance.

        There is a technique that I've been working on that Sihing Simon Kohut helped me with, and I am having trouble finding stability in the pose.  Basically I'm crouch down in a sort of narrow kneel stance, with both hands near one end of the monk spade, and trying to lift the weight to keep the tip, in this case the spade part, up.  The problem I'm having is as I'm twisting and corkscrewing down into the ground, the other vector of the spade is going up and out.  More often or not, this is creating instability and I can't hold the pose long.  Not all the time.  There are times I can pull off the move, and I'm really trying to nail down the feeing of what I'm doing right when that happens, versus the feeling of when it doesn't.  One thing is, as I try to speed up the technique, I have a harder time controlling the weight.  So as I try to sit down in my stance, I get pulled forward and off balance.  Slowing down the technique, I can get my feet where they need to be, and the vector of the spade is almost an afterthought, instead of connected.

        Aside from my Karambits, I think this is the most I've changed and played around with a weapon.  Especially in the context of creating a section for demos, I've narrowed down what moves I want to highlight, and patch them together so that they're fluid.

Numbers:

Km's- 1609

AOK's- 552

PU/SU's- 22,754

DMH- 318

Monk Spade- 337

Sparring- 452