That's me with a back kick through 3 boards
We had a couple of students last night who had difficulty with their board breaks. When students have trouble with their breaks, it is usually a combination of one or more of the following factors:
- Poor mechanics — the whole technique is a bit suspect.
- Poor distance — the student is either too close or too far away from the board.
- Poor focus — the student misses the center of the board.
- Hitting the board instead of hitting through the board.
- Hitting the board with an incorrect hand/foot position.
Last night, the number 5′s resonated with me a bit. One teen had some issues with a palm heel thrust, and eventually bruised his hand and tweaked his wrist and elbow. His mechanics were a bit off as he didn’t chamber back far enough to give his arm a good distance to travel. But one of the other things going on was that he was hitting the board with pretty much his whole palm.
With a palm heel thrust, you should be hitting with the heel of the hand (which would be why it is a palm heel thrust and not a palm thrust). But you also want to turn your wrist so that you are hitting primarily with the palm heel just on the pinky side of your hand. It is kind of like doing a bellyflop into a pool: if you hit the water with a lot of surface area, you barely penetrate the water and it hurts! But if you dive in and pierce the water with a dive, it is a whole different experience. So a successful break is a dive, penetrating through the water. An unsuccessful one just kind of slaps the surface.
I see this a lot with palm heel thrusts and side and back kicks. On the kicks, you need to hit with primarily the heel. Plenty of board failures on side kicks come about because the whole foot is distributed evenly across the board. The heel allows you to drive through the target because of the smaller surface area.
TKD
It has been a bit of a busy last month and a half. We moved in the early part of May, from a 4 bedroom house into an even larger house. So, packing and unpacking and getting things arranged for the house have taken some time. We now have a nice, big 10 kW solar array installed on our back roof generating a significant portion of our elecricity. And somehow there’s still a lot more to be done, as I’m sitting here typing this in the office and there are 4 boxes of stuff staring balefully at me. The moving interrupted my training a bit. So did yet another bout with poison ivy this week that caused my right eye to swell halfway shut.
When I get busy, the first thing to get dropped is BJJ. It was getting to the point where I was questioning whether I should continue taking BJJ, or if I should just drop it. I do really enjoy it, but I have been stalling out in my progress, a result of averaging fewer than two classes per week. I was invited last month to test for my purple belt, which I declined — I barely feel qualified to be a blue belt. The invitation was extended purely on the duration of my training, not on my ability, I’m sure. I started just over four years ago, though I’ve been unable to train for a number of months in that span due to a variety of injuries. But the BJJ schedule has recently changed so I can take intermediate classes on Mondays and Tuesdays in addition to 2 hours of open mat time on Thursdays.
Last night was a gup promotion exam with eight students testing for ranks between yellow belt and black stripe red belt. As a group they did well, though as always there are many areas of improvement. Testing nights usually inspire me as an instructor, though it is usually because I see so many things I know I need to spend more time teaching rather than because the level of TKD is necessarily inspiring. Last night was no different. I think punching combinations and focus on kick placement will be an emphasis next week.
BJJ, TKD, Training
