09.02.06 - Saturday Practice

New Items Today:

1. New Students
2. Flow Drills

Reviewed Other Items:

1. Basic Warm-ups
2. Joint Locks & Manipulations

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Warm-Ups
I have been out of class for about a month due to vacations, anniversary travel, and other stuff. For whatever reason August seems to be a busy month for me as I missed most of the month of August in 2005 as well. It felt good to come back to class – I missed it!!

There were three new faces in class today – one of which was visiting for the first time, and two who have been there several times in my absence. I didn’t have a chance to work with two of these new people but I did work with one of them in some group drills that I will detail a little later.

The warm-ups were mostly simple review this week. We started out with some leg stretches – both dynamic and static. From there we did the four basic blocks – 20 of each. Then we did some roundhouse kicks, both rear leg and lead leg. Finally we did some ball kicks and discussed briefly the difference between horizontal and vertical targets on the body.

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Flow Drills
After the warm-ups, we broke off into two groups. Sifu took two of the new students aside and worked exclusively with them. The Blue belts and I worked with the other new face in the school. She is a 2nd degree Black belt from the Paul Mills school of American Kenpo and agreed to show us some flow drills from her system.

We did several different flow drills utilizing strikes such as overhead hammer-fist, straight punch, back-fist, roundhouse/upper-cut, and elbows. She instructed us to focus on rhythm and timing in the drills and less on other aspects of a would-be attack or defense. I was working with Phyl and Walt was paired up with Alex. We worked these flow drills for quite a while, working on speed & timing for both right and left sides. Eventually we moved to a different sort of drill that more closely resembled a technique or forward advancing strike.

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Joint Locks & Manipulations
Although this was review for most of us, the 3 new people in class had not been exposed to these particular maneuvers – at least not the way Sifu instructs it. We started out with the Downward Elbow Lock and again, I was paired up with Phyl. We both knew the mechanics of function but Phyl has much more experience with the maneuver. I think we were both a little rusty but before long we had it down again.

The other lock we did today was the Downward Wrist Lock. Although this one was much more fresh in my mind, I had more trouble with it. Phyl is very good at this on and he pointed out something that I was doing that was minimizing the effectiveness of the lock – basically, I was going too slow so as not to hurt him. Unfortunately, in doing this it allows for all of the tissues to sort of “stretch” into position, thus taking away the immediate response that we are looking for in doing this lock. Phyl instructed to move the hand in a decisive but controlled manor so as to get the effect we were looking for without twisting his hand off his arm. We were able to practice this a couple more times before class was brought to an end.