State of My Arts

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