11.19.05 - Saturday Training

New Items Today:

1. Juan officially joins the class
2. Kicking defense (Marty)

Reviewed Other Items:

1. Warm up drills
2. Ball & Roundhouse Kicks
3. Techniques

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Juan is Now Officially a Student of T.K.I.
Today was Juan’s first day as a student and he jumped right in with the basics. Because of his work schedule on Saturdays, Juan will be starting his training at 6:30am with Bill so he can get a full two hours in before he has to leave. I volunteered to come in early if it would be of benefit and Sifu took me up on it. So from now on I’ll be working out on Saturdays from 6:30 to 9:00am.

Bill pulled Alexandra and I aside with Juan at one point and we critiqued each other’s neutral bow. Juan called me on my narrow stance – my heel-toe alignment was indeed off. Anything else was relatively minor but I made a mental note to watch the stance.

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Marty Lead the Warm Up Drills
Bill took Juan to the side and worked with him exclusively for the beginning of the class today and asked Marty to lead the rest of us in warm-ups. That was interesting. We did the basic kicks, punches and blocks as usual, if at a quicker pace. He then went into techniques and this is where it was kind of funny, at least for me. We did the technique normally, and then we switched and did the technique from the opposite lead. Since I have only ever practiced most of these from the one side, I was finding some humor in my difficulty as I tried to do it from the other lead. I noticed that I wasn’t the only one struggling but to their credit, the Purple belts got it sorted out and did fine. I got a few of them… that was about it. It seems so obvious to practice from either side, but it felt so awkward to actually do it that way.

Funny. Just as I thought I was getting the hang of the techniques, I realized how far I really was from fully adopting it into my mental repertoire. Although I will likely always use them in class the way we were taught, it would be nice to be able to react with more choices should I ever be confronted.

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Final notes at the end of class:

• Vic LeRoux is tentatively schedules as a guest of Marty and TKI on Martch 18, 2005. To defray costs, we will be pitching in by way of purchasing tickets. More details to come later.
• Bill received word that the mat(s) he had ordered some time ago should be arriving sometime soon as another company has taken over the original contract.