systema notes - el-dog-o edition

-first thing was jogging combined with breathing exercises; it didn't actually alter my ability to run at all to alter my breathing pattern consciously, I'm used to doing that on my own, but I did notice I have this huge difficulty really extending my exhale, I find it curious
-a battery of pushups to strenghthen the structure of our arms, and learn how to consistently keep the wrist aligned; staying in a pushup position while someone else does pushups on you works the most random muscles isometrically
-squats on other people lying down, front and back - pops the back nicely, interesting for the squatter's balance, and the bottom person's breathing-under-duress
-doing systema-situps while being hit, to work on moving under duress, and also learning how to pick where to hit to stop a given movement
-agility drills that looked like breakdancing combined with rolling, then rolling to evade and absorb someone trying to kick you while you're down - I think at this point my parents' dog randomly arrived to tackle me and then do figure-8s around the class, to everyone's amusement
-then most of the class was working on attempting to feel and achieve the "heavy hand" state so important to systema strikes; to be honest I didn't quite ever really feel it, that's definitely still a work in progress for me, I'm going to guess I need to relax my shoulders more
-I came closest to it when I was advised to let my hands just be dead-weight in a wingchun-esque drill; then, like aikido, it didn't even feel like I was doing anything when I was apparently (by his reaction) hitting immensely harder
-when it got too dark to see well for punch-for-punch, we switched to sitting shoulder to shoulder and trying to hit each other, like siblings on a roadtrip...quite fun, and a great skill to develop, to boot, really gets you rolling with punches to the head and thinking up unorthodox strikes
-apparently I've improved a lot in relaxing, but still have a lot of work to go...a little blow to my ego, but I'm excited to see what drills the teacher said he'd give me to work on it