Saturday
It’s getting difficult to make the interesting from practice to practice, as I’m working on the same goals from week to week, and incrementally improving my ability in each area.
I could go on about how my fitness is improving every week, or how the concious elements of good kick form are starting to become uncouncious, or how my understanding of the importance of the core muscles and how they relate to almost everything you do is moving on in leaps and bounds.
Or I could tell you about how Hugh visited the class and I learned how to RUN UP A M**********R AND DO AN ARM BAR TAKE DOWN IN MID AIR!
The reality is slightly less glamorous than the headline would suggest. It was a constructed practice, more for demonstration purposes than for practical self defense, but it did look very cool.
- Step 1: Opponent gets into a strong posture, with one leg forward, and grabs you like they’re about to choke you.
- Step 2: You put your foot (either foot) on the forward leg, right at the top where it meets the hip.
- Step 3: Pull down on the arms, while pushing up with the foot. Scale the opponent (at this point, I should it make it clear that it’s more like climbing someone, than running up them)
- Step 4: Leg that wasn’t used for climbing gets hooked round the back of the opponent’s neck.
- Step 5: Climbing leg assumes arm bar position.
- Step 6: you both fall over, but you have got your opponent in an arm bar, and it looks dead cool.
It does not look cool, however, if the opponent catches you and holds you up like a figure skater.
Tuesday
Tuesday’s practice started early in a way. My car is broken, again (by again, I mean that it seems to break every four weeks, on the dot). As such, I have to get the train, and take on the big hill up to the train station.
Last time I did this, I noticed that I had a considerable drop in my fitness. I’m pleased to report that practicing twice a week has improved my fitness somewhat, as measured by how out of breath I am at the top of the big hill. I was less tired, and breathing fairly easily by the time I reached the station, to await the late arrival of the dreaded sardine can, packed with smelly folk.
Tuesday’s practice went well, it was nice to get to work on re-learning Katas, with a lot of detail paid to postures that I’d either forgotten or never known about.
In truth, I’ve forgotten almost all the Katas, and offer up some feeble approximation, dragged from the pits of foggy muscle memory.
The main revalation regarding Tuesdays practice involves this blog. There were a lot of concepts that I’d been having trouble grasping. I mean, I understood the words, and the order in which they were said, but recreating said concepts into physcial action was less successful.
The good news is that having this blog means I constantly need to concentrate on what I’m doing, in order to have anything to write about. The increased concentration, plus the revision involved in writing the experiences down, has helped unlock a few things that previously eluded me, so that’s nice.
On a side note, Catholic Schools are strange. Tuesday night got moved to one, and I’d never been inside the building before. I promtly got lost.
I was looking for any kind of directions, but all I saw were pictures of Saints, above every door. The School was called ‘All Saints’. I didn’t think it was meant so literally, saint upon saint staring down at me as if to say ‘You know how can help you if you’re lost?’
Strange.
