What a day!

Yesterday was a busy day for TKD

I picked up my balance board from the depot (at the end of the world, or so it seemed. Let’s just say I had an extended lunch break.) and had a good play with it after work. I was amazed as to how bad my balance really was, but after about 20 minutes or so I really felt more comfortable on the board. I guess it’s one of those things you just have to practice.

And then later on … training, after 2 weeks of TKD withdrawal.
Since it’s been a while, our instructor thought it’d be a good idea to push us a bit during warm-up. So instead of doing our normal push-up, crunches and leg-work routine, he doubled the count for all exercises. I’m really glad I spent all that time in the gym while he was on holiday (yes 2 weeks of training do make a difference!)

As mentioned before, I’ve recently been promoted to a new belt rank and associated with this, there are a number of new techniques I have to learn. New techniques really take me out of my comfort zone, but then how else are we to learn? Anyway we started off with a small combination of block-strike-strike, which I really struggled with, as the technique used for the strikes is still relatively new to me. I’d leave it to my instructor to explain the details at this stage…

Next was more work on the forward kick. I recon I’m moving ever closer to what I’m meant to be doing. We worked on a bit of application (read I kick my instructor and he kicks me) and this gave me a better understanding of how I’m meant to actually execute the technique, particularly when my instructor started obstructing (I wouldn’t call it blocking or covering at this stage) my approach a bit, which showed me where I was going wrong. I always find it more insightful to work with a target than simply performing a technique in air (any thoughts on this are welcome).

Finally, we did yet another new technique to teach us how to use the full flexibility of the arm to “escape” from it being held to the body by an attacker or if the direct path to the target is obstructed. This is a very new concept as up until now all techniques were very linear from A to B. Needless to say, I’ll need to do some considerable work on this in order to get it right.

It was yet another challenging training session yesterday and today I feel the aftermath more than I’d like to admit. At this point I’ll give a heads-up to a little something I’ll be posting in the coming weeks, which will includes a short notion on pain “the day after”.