About time for a catch up I think, it has been almost two months! I have so much to write about I am am finding it hard to remember everything, so appologies for this mash of different events.
Backtracking a little here…
At the beginning of the month myself, my instructor and two of my seniors recently travelled up to a place called St Neots which is just outside of Cambridge to attend an EMTF self defence seminar. The drive took about seven hours and as the driver a pint in the travel lodge bar was very welcome. Unfortunately the night extended to an all out, New York, New York nightclub, hell fest which meant I was massively hung-over for our four hour seminar the following day. Doh!
The seminar was a mix of different styles which included Kali/Eskrima which was basically double stick fighting, Penkak Silat – an Indonesian style of martial art which involved some very interesting self defence including sash and belt takedown applications, Trodai Karate (Irish full contact style), Jeet Kune Do and TSD self defence.
Training on the whole has been very hard lately blending the extremely technical Tang Soo Do lessons with the all out brutality of the new look Kickboxing format. We have mainly been covering the Chil Sung set of Hyung in our traditional classes which has been a pleasure for me as I really enjoy my forms. We have also revisited the first of the Yuk Ro Hyung too which is awesome too. I have learnt the first two Chil Sung now and Yuk Ro Cho Dan. One of my current aims is to enter the Chil Sung category at the upcoming British/World championships later this year (depending on whether I can get the required time off), so hopefully I will be able to get this looking good by the time this comes around in October. We have also been going through the EMTF self defence and Knife self defence syllabus in class, but it will only be applicable to Dan grades and above. Some of the applications are barbaric as I learnt first hand , but I actually quite like being thrown, locked, choked etc, which is a bit worrying! It was also the first time I have seen throws in a Tang Soo Do syllabus (meaning obvious ones, not applications from forms) which was very cool and also includes dragon sweeps, some immensely painful arm locks and very cool takedowns.
After suffering a nasty shin injury over a month ago my training has gradually started to pick up again after a bit of a low patch – hence the lack of posts. My fitness has suffered a bit recently which I have definitely been feeling in lessons, so I have tried to attend every class and work as hard as I can to get back to my best again. I have been really enjoying coaching the kids as our instructor has given myself and three of my seniors control of their classes now. It feels very strange teaching as opposed to being taught and very hard trying to make every lesson different and interesting. I also had a bit of a shock in a recent Tang Soo Do class when I was asked to take a section of the class through their forms! I have never been given responsibility of this magnitude before, i.e. teaching adults, but I really enjoyed it and I hope they managed to take something from it, even it was something very minor!
Sparring has been very good too and I have been learning a lot from our squad sessions recently. Unfortunately due to pretty much everyone being injured we have not had more than three fighters each week which makes the rounds fast and extremely tiring. Luckily last time we had a full team and it was one the most enjoyable sessions we’ve had. I still make the most basic of errors when sparring but I really think I am moving forwards (albeit very slowly) and I can only thank my team mates for working with me each week on my improvement. It is weird as it feels like I have two diaries going at the moment, this one and the one on our club website for the squad sessions! We also recently had the second Kickboxing grading which for some of us meant moving from red belt up to yellow belt as we have now adopted a more Japanese style belt system. It was basically an hour of non stop partner assisted drills which left me completely shattered but very content.
The Sunday just gone was host to another sparring seminar, this time hosted by Jacey ‘2fast4U’ Cashman who is two times WAKO world kickboxing champion and one of the UK’s top points fighters. The seminar itself was very similar to the ones we have attended before with Drew Neal and Robbie Hughes, but there was certainly a lot to learn. The guy is just exceptionally fast and this seems to be mainly down to his footwork and timing, which is something that I seriously need to start trying to incorporate into my sparring, although coming up to the age of 29 and as my workmate put it “almost dead” there probably isn’t much hope for me on that one! It was a great day and always an honour to be taught by such a talent, my only regret was that I didn’t get the chance to fight him myself.
A bit of a scrambled mix on this post, but at least I’m up to date now!
