Seven steps » drills

Monday night training

Trevoke — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:17:52 +0000

I received an email from sensei on Monday (sent to every student) – if you’ll be here tonight, bring your fighting gear. Uh-oh. Her sensei was there and taught a few classes, including the adults. The entire class turned out to be pretty much a blur of drills. I’ll be able to dredge them out of my body memory, I think.
A drill about basics – chain two basics together, using shifting. Then up to six basics together, by series of two.
A couple of kicking drills. A few fighting drills – these are important. shift, step back, kick, finish, disengage.
Come in and jam, elbow, finish.
I am obfuscating these on purpose.
This was a harder training session than I’ve experienced in a while, as evidenced by the appearance after 40-some hours of a slight tightness in my upper abs and shoulder muscles.. Oh, and the fact that my lower legs were one solid body, instead of having a freely moving calf muscle.

Of course, I was supposed to the student in the best shape, so I wonder how the others did feel. This wasn’t particularly hard on my mind, just a little bit past my comfort zone.. I do feel like I am more aware that I can stand more than I think. Was my willpower muscle flexed? It seems like it was.

Tonight’s training (good AGAIN!)

Trevoke — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:40:26 +0000

It was surprisingly good. I didn’t feel very good tonight – slight headache, slight tingle in the throat. I wasn’t going to stay for my class, just help teach and then go home, get tea, get sleep.. But only two other adults showed up and sensei was upstairs, so I started the class and took it easy on the calisthenics and the stretches. Those two adults are the two with the most issues of muscle contractions (as in, they have no idea what relaxing means). So I started off real, real easy, taking them back to the basics.
I spent the entire class putting no emphasis on heavy force (or rather, an emphasis on the lack of such). All I wanted was high chambers, and then high and with the correct angle, and then high + the correct angle + tight chambers, and then that plus the kicks. So it was five reps of just chambers, then the other side, then five reps of loose, relaxed chambers on the first side, then the same thing on the other side.
I did that on all the basic kicks, which took about 30 minutes. It was time very well spent, because I noticed marked improvement in both students as well as in my own body.
Sensei came down about halfway through and listened, then watched. She gave a few key corrections to the students and one to me, and then afterwards, she told me I’d done a good thing! WOO HOO!

All in all, the light exercise gave me a light workout, keeping my body temperature up without exhausting me.. Now I’m home, sipping Silver Needle tea in a “Mug of vi” from Thinkgeek. Life is good, right this moment.

Kali sticks

Trevoke — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:13:39 +0000

Yesterday we had a small class, so we were able to each work on what we needed. I, hopefully, now have the full chatan yara no sai form, so I just need to work it..

We did some kali stick work. The yellow and blue belt had never seen those drills before so we started with a simple high-low-high, but we did try for a little bit the sinawali drills, specifically heaven, because that one’s fun Kali sticks are very good to work follow-through, speed and flow, and god knows I need that.