The Beginning of the End

I appreciate that this one is a bit late, but I haven’t been at home for the past two nights. So when I’m referring to “today” I mean last Thursday (not that it really matters)

Tonight’s training was yet another interesting one; in fact, I can’t say I’ve ever had a boring session. I’ll take two, perhaps three major points away from it.

Number one: Forward kick
Retracting my leg as fast as sending it out is still not coming naturally to me and I really need to focus on this, but there’s progress and in time I recon I’ll manage. However today’s session wasn’t just focusing on that. Today was about power generation, or as my instructor likes to refer to it: Juicing it up.
One of the other students kindly held up the kicking shield and my instructor and I laid it on him by alternatively kicking with plenty of force. Initially I really used all the muscles in my leg to really put pressure on the shield and although there was plenty of power there, it wasn’t quite the point of the exercise. My kick was very slow and unbalanced, nothing like a proper forward kick. The power of the humble forward kick is generated by thrusting the hips forward, not by much, but enough to really put some grunt into this actually rather fast and “unspectacular” kick. The other aspect is balance; we were doing the kick not from a standing position, but by slowly walking up to the target. The way to keep you balance through the kick then becomes more “interesting”, because when walking naturally your balance is between the two legs and not on one leg as you would have it for a kick. To shift the balance to the supporting leg when kicking you simply chamber the kicking leg coming through the path of the supporting leg, simple. And so easy to remember, as it is what we’ve been doing this for all punches all along!

Number two: The mindset
This lesson came about as we were playing a little game to teach us how we should move when faced with multiple opponents and how stressing this can be, both physically and mentally.
Our instructor told us a nice little story about a tea master and a samurai and the way our mindset influences our ability to perform at martial arts. I’ll not repeat the story at this stage, because a) I’m lazy :-) and b) I’m not a good story teller.
Enough to say that the main lesson from the story is that when we perform any martial arts technique, we will have to have our mind calm and focused on what we are doing. Sound simple, but when exhausted and faced with the danger of imminent death it’s not simple at all. This is why we train our techniques in a controlled environment and spar, to prepare us for the (hopefully never occurring) situation where we have to put our lessons into practice.

Number three: The beginning of the end
The way our instructor’s syllabus is structured is in my opinion very clever. Rather than dumping all sorts of techniques on beginners, we are taught the very basics and as we progress through the ranks the complexity of the techniques increases.
I’m not sure if it is as a side effect of this, or if it is intentional (I shall ask at our next training session), but this leads to an interesting fact when looking at the sequence of a fight. What we learn as beginners, through the first three belt ranks, is in fact the end of the fight. The final blow or takedown, when our opponent is weak and we focus all our energy on ending the fight with a single technique.
This is the mindset we should have when performing these techniques; focussing on executing them with precision and determination.

That’s it for now. Unfortunately our instructor will be travelling for the next couple of weeks, so I will have to train in my own time, more so than usual. I’ll focus on the forward kick and losing a bit more of that excess fat I’m carrying around (damned be that lovely food at Christmas time).