10.03.07 - Wednesday Practice

New Items Today:

1. Classes at Rejoice! Academy
2. Yellow Belt Techniques

Reviewed Other Items:

1. Mat Work
2. Orange Belt Techniques

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First Night of Classes at Rejoice! Academy
This was the first night for TKI to be in the Rejoice! facility in Raleigh, NC. I left work a few minutes early anticipating heavy traffic on the way to North Raleigh but I was there much quicker than expected. While I waited for others to arrive, I was looking at some of the work on the walls posted by students of this private school that we are working out in. I was surprised to see a pretty cool article written by the daughter of another TKI student, Jeff.

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Warm Ups
After Bill & Donna arrived, Phyl and Walt came in shortly after. We dressed out and started moving around a little bit, just getting used to the new place. A few minutes past 6:00pm Sifu asked me to warm up the class. I wasn’t expecting that! At that point it was just Walt, Phyl, and me on the floor. We just did some light warm-ups and then Sifu had us do some additional maneuvering drills: step-drags, step-throughs, and then a combination of the two in a single maneuver. After a few minutes we were warmed up okay and Sifu decided to get things rolling… so to speak.

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Mat Work
Sifu has us get the mats out and do some forward rolls. The floors are a little different here than at Red Sun so we did some preliminary testing. The individual mats were sliding a bit. We wound up putting them end-to-end with one end against the wall. Problem solved. Alex had joined us by this time and we started out with some forward rolls staying down. I was fine on my right side but for some reason kept landing with my feet reversed on the left side. Out of practice I guess. After several repetitions we did the forward rolls coming up into a fighting stance, and then eventually switched to “belt rolls”. This is the first time I’ve done these and was a little awkward at it. The idea is that you start with your thumbs tucked in your belt so you don’t have the advantage (or disadvantage?) of using your arms. When you come out of the roll, the arms come out to their normal positions to help defend and break the fall. We finished up and set the mats aside.

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Yellow Belt Techniques
The next thing we looked at was something that we haven’t done before: the IKCA Yellow belt techniques. After much consideration, Sifu has decided to add these techniques into our curriculum. We covered four of them tonight: Thrusting Salute (Defense against a front kick), Delayed Sword (escape from a right hand lapel grab), Lone Kimono (escape from a left hand lapel grab), and Obscure Wing (escape from a right flank shoulder grab). As Sifu described them, it seems that these techniques are pretty much taken directly out of the American Kenpo system created by Ed Parker. They seemed a little awkward at first, as with learning any new technique, but we warmed up to them as we kept working with them. I was working with Walt and as we became more comfortable with each technique, we started playing around with possible extensions and modifications. By far, my favorite was Obscure Wing as it just seemed to lend itself to so many possibilities. It quickly delivers three very hard strikes into three different areas of the body and leaves the would-be attacker vulnerable for so many possibilities for follow-up. Good stuff.

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Orange Belt Techniques
As we were finishing up with Yellow belt techniques, a couple more students were getting dressed and warming up. We all reassembled into two groups and worked some more technique. Alex, Phyl, and Walt separated to one side of the room working their material. I was joined by Ces & Rich and reviewed Orange belt techniques. Sifu took us through several techniques by demonstrating and then having us practice. The first one we covered was Thunder and Lightning, followed by Returning Serpent and Deflecting Thunder. While we did spend a fair amount of time on all of these techniques, we spent the most time on Beheading the Dragon.

After Sifu went through the particulars of the Beheading the Dragon, he went over to spend some time with the Green belts and asked if I could continue practicing with the Ces & Richard. One of these gentlemen is a 2nd degree Black belt in American Kenpo and the other is starting our system from scratch after holding rank in American Kenpo several years ago. We worked through the gross movements first and then spent a fair amount fine tuning. By the time we wrapped up class it seemed that they both had a good understanding of the technique.

We wrapped up class and lined up. Sifu thanked us all for coming in and we bowed out.