State of My Arts

My shoulder surgery was Jan 19, which was exactly six months ago today.  It actually seems like longer ago than that to me.  All in all, I think my shoulder is doing very well.  I’ve been lifting weights and making good gains in strength.  I can do pushups now without having my shoulder feel like it might come apart.  I also don’t need to limit any of my activities, other than Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, for fear of reinjury.  My next appointment is in a couple of weeks, and he’ll probably clear me for that as well.  We’ll see.

That being said, I just took another picture tonight, and… well.  The shoulder itself doesn’t look much different than it did before surgery, which is slightly disturbing.  Despite that, the collar bone is actually connected to my shoulder, which it wasn’t prior to surgery.

And without further ado, here are the shots:

Before Surgery:

12 days after Surgery:

6 months after Surgery:

Seriously.  You wouldn’t think to look at it that it is any better than it was before.  But it is, and that’s all that really matters.

Health

Beginner Class:We had around 8 or so students this week.  I started them off with ho shin sul (self defense) from wrist grabs.  At the white/yellow belt level, we’re more concerned with teaching escapes than we are with teaching joint manipulations.  We moved on to basic techniques moving up and down the floor.  Finally, we spent the remainder of the class working on poomsae.  4 of the students are still learning the first form (Tae Guk Il Jang), and we had several others working on different poomsae.  I primarily worked with one of the students on her 4th form (Tae Guk Sa Jang).  Good solid basics class.

Intermediate class:Boy, you can tell when it is summer, because the classes are hit-or-miss for attendance.  We had 3 this week.  All females, as it turned out — 2 mothers of teenagers, and one aged 11-12.  We did a fairly quick warmup, then I let them choose what they wanted to work on.  The most senior wanted to work on problem kicks, which we had done the previous week.  But it was good work for all 3 of them.  We worked back kick, back side kick, and back hook kick.  The primary issue with the hook kicks this week was that they weren’t continuing the hip motion through the kick, which was bleeding away most of the power and leaving their kicks short of the target.  I was trying a few different drills to help them keep going with that hip.  Finally, I worked one that seemed to help.

Normally, a back hook kick is designed to hit a target that is right in front of you.  In partner work, the holder will hold the focus paddle nearly head-high straight in front of the person doing the kick.  Instead of that, I moved the holder 90 degrees.  So the kicker might have a left leading leg, and be kicking with the right leg, the body rotating clockwise so the back faces the target briefly.  I moved the target so that the paddle was held on the right side of the kicker — so the kicker has to turn 270 degrees instead of 180.  They were leery of the drill to begin with, but they started to get the hang of it.  Then I had them do the normal hook kick, which seemed much easier to them at this point, and there seemed to be some improvement there.  We’ll see how they continue with their kicks.

Finally, we spent 15 minutes going over poomsae.

One final note — one of the women was accidentally wearing her teenage son’s dobok top (they got mixed up in the wash).  During warmups, I had them doing a few variations of pushups.  I was doing the pushups with them, and the one woman kept adjusting her uniform.  I decided to do my pushups sideways to the class, rather than facing them so that I wouldn’t be looking straight at her.  At the end of class I asked her if she was wearing her son’s dobok again (last week they swapped tops right before class).  She told me that yes, that was the case, but the story was even more interesting.  She forgot to pack a sports bra (she came straight from work), and was actually wearing a strapless bra under her oversized uniform top.  She was hoping we weren’t going to spar.  Heh.  I think she’ll have the right equipment next week.

TKD, Teaching

 Hi Pete, it’s not just beginners that have trouble with the side kick! I still have a lot of trouble with that one too. I don’t know if a karate side kick is much different to a tkd one but I just cannot get my foot horizontal when I thrust it out to the side – my toes always point slightly upwards at an angle. Any tips how to get the foot shape correct? — SueC

Apparently, everyone relates to the side kick!  Side kick is one of my favorite kicks.  Now, I’m sure there are stylistic variations that come into play.  TKD kicks are taught waist-high or higher, which alters the focus/body positioning/intent relative to shin stomps and knee kicks.  So the following is biased towards higher kicks.

Within a couple of degrees, your toes point in the same direction as your knee.  So if your toes are pointing upwards, so is your knee.  We’re going for a side kick where the knee is pointed to the side or (preferably) angled down slightly.  Now, the femur and knee are obviously connected to the hip (I feel a song coming on).  The position of the hip is normally the root cause of a toes-up side kick.

Exercise #1 – hip roll: Stand in front of a chair, bar, kitchen counter, or whatever, facing the counter.  Lean towards your support, putting both hands on it, and letting one foot pivot up — the more you lean, the higher your leg goes.  The toes of your foot should be pointing basically at the ground at this point — you leaned forward and your foot came up without changing the orientation of your body.  Now, release your hold on your support with the arm on the same side as the raised leg.  Allow your torso to rotate until you can look over the top of your upraised foot.  As your torso turns, allow your hip to follow your shoulder, rather than twisting your spine.  You should notice that as your hips come around, your knee and toes stop pointing towards the floor and are now pointing sideways, or angled downwards a bit.  If you continued rolling your hip past that point, your knee and toes would begin pointing upwards.

Exercise #2 - effect of base leg:In exercise #1, the base foot was pointed 180 degrees away from the direction of the kick.  This is classic TKD, but (as far as I know), not really emphasized in other styles.  Try standing sideways to your support, one hand holding on for balance.  Raise your kicking leg up straight to the side.  I find that doing it this way puts a lot more of a muscle strain on the hip.  The higher I raise my leg, the more my torso moves forward, so that my head is no longer in a line with my foot.  If you try pivoting that base foot in different positions, you’ll find that at the one extreme (toes pointed away from the kick as in exercise #1) that the hip has a much greater range of motion than at the other extreme (toes pointed towards the direction of the kick).  If your base foot toes are pointed toward the kick, there is no way to really turn the leg over into a good side kick position.  Well, okay, I’ve seen a couple of hyperflexible pre-teen girls do it that way, but that kick is almost entirely devoid of power.

A lot of details are more situational.  If you’re kicking low, you don’t need to pivot the base foot or roll the hip over as much.  If you’re emphasizing speed over power, you probably won’t roll the hip over as much, either.

 <– This is not me.  But it is a good side kick position.  Hip is fully committed.  Base foot is pointing away from the kick.

TKD

Free Martial Arts Ebook – Student’s Guide to Surviving a Traditional Dojo

This is a fairly quick plug for Ikigai’s eBook, linked to above.  It is quite nicely done.  It is 95 pages long, and I didn’t find anything in there I disagreed with.  It definitely has a Japanese slant, but most of the traditions hold for the Korean-based arts I’m most familiar with, which isn’t surprising, considering those nation’s tangled history.  There is a lot of great advice and background information in the book, so take a look at it if you haven’t done so already.  If I have a criticism, it is that I think it might be a bit overwhelming for someone who has never trained in martial arts before — sort of an “Oh, gosh, how am I going to remember all that?” response.  But I think anyone with enough enthusiasm to read through the book should realize they’ll learn this stuff as they go, and this book can be used to provide a framework for understanding what is going on.

Matt, if you’re reading this, I think you’d do a great job at writing a “beginner’s guide”, as more of a time-line progression: how to choose an art, what to look for in a martial arts school, what to expect in your first class, etiquette, moving up the ranks, becoming an advanced student, etc.  A good chunk of the information would be the same or similar to this ebook, but just arranged a bit differently.

Links

I had thought I’d work on basic skills this week, but instead I focused on “problem kicks”.  For the beginner class, I did a side kick clinic.  The most common issue with side kicks from beginners is that they are still rotating as they kick.  The result is a kick that is much more like a roundhouse kick than anything else.  So the trick is to get the students to finish their rotation prior to kicking out, making sure their bodies are aligned correctly, ensuring that they are hitting with the heel while turning the ankle inward, and they rechamber their leg after the kick.  So there’s a lot going on — it is definitely the toughest of the basic TKD kicks to do well as a beginner.  The class made good progress, though, so it was time well spent.

For the intermediate class, the most common problem kick is the spinning back hook kick.  The tornado arc kick is often an issue as well, but I focused on several varieties of hook kicks.  The thing I was trying to instill into the class tonight was rotating the torso to get the spine all twisty before putting the feet in motion.  The students at this level mostly rotate all parts of their bodies at the same rate, which limits the amount of torque you can get on this kick.  I like to try to work on these types of refinements relatively early on so they don’t end up practicing a kick a certain way for a couple of years and grooving patterns of motion that will be tough to break.  They worked hard on this tonight, with mixed success.  I also worked on front leg front hook kicks with them, but emphasizing throwing the body forward a bit as the leg is extended out — kind of just skooching forward.  Not a sliding advance, just a small body movement to gain a few inches.

TKD, Teaching

I’ve been sticking with the P90x workouts I detailed five weeks ago.  I have been happy with my results so far.  The weights and reps have been slowly increasing.  I haven’t measured my biceps or other parts of my musculature recently, but I think there’s been improvement there.

By far the most encouraging thing about my workouts, though, is the stability of my shoulder.  I’m no longer feeling any slippage or crunching of scar tissue in my AC joint when I do pushups.  Wide grip pushups are relatively easy, while military-style pushups are more troublesome from a strength standpoint than from a stability standpoint.

My left side is still lagging behind my right in a lot of the exercises.  It is especially noticeable during bicep exercises, which is a little surprising (I’d have expected a bigger difference in shoulder exercises).  The right side of my back is a bit weaker than my left due to the muscle paralysis that I’d gotten nearly two years ago from Lyme disease.  Last week those same weakened muscles were spasming a bit on me, so my shoulder blade wasn’t quite working the way it should.  The spasming has relaxed, and things are good.

This past Wednesday during TKD class, the instructor pulled out the stopwatch for 2-minute max pushups (and situps).  I was able to do 70 full-range pushups, though a couple of them were a bit sketchy.  This was at the end of class, and it was also at the day after doing a couple hundred pushups as part of my Sunday P90x workout.  Not up to the 90+ I could do a couple of years ago before these shoulder issues took me down, but it is definitely a sign that I’m making good progress.

Training

Finally, a post.  Things are going well in my life and my training, but I just haven’t gotten around to posting in a while.  So here’s a bit of a recap.

When I teach, I generally am teaching the subjects that resonate the most with me at the time.  This week, it was rolling and falling.  The beginner class was pretty small at seven students, so we pulled out some of the mats and worked on rolling and falling.  Two of the students were white belts who had never done it before, and several others had only done it once.  I’m not sure if my instructions on soft rolling are improving, or if the new students were just naturals.  On the surface, they didn’t appear to be naturals, so maybe I can feel good about my teaching.  After rolling for a while, we worked on side falls, which also went well.  Finally, we worked on takedowns from a padded baton attack.  The students attacked the black belts and got practice falling safely.  Then we reversed rolls and had the students take the black belts down so they could begin to feel how to off-balance an opponent.

The intermediate class this week was primarily run by the secondary instructor for that class.  The Wednesday Hapkido class overlaps with the intermediate class by 15 minutes, so I let him do the warmup so I could stay for the full Hapkido class.  He was having so much fun running class that I let him stay with it for most of the rest of the class.  He was running a lot of moving kick/punch drills.  I took over the last fifteen minutes for 1 minute max pushups and situps, then for some kneeling wrestling takedown fun, and finally a few minutes on doing a scissors sweep from guard.  I might be adding some more ground work in the coming weeks.

The previous week, I focused on forms and one-steps.  The week prior to that was a high-rep upbeat class with a lot of kicks.  Spinning back hook kick is a common trouble spot for most of the green belts, so I think there’s a good chance I’ll focus on that with them soon.

TKD, Teaching