My week in Martial Arts: November 21st to November 25th

Hi All

Monday morning, I was about to travel into work, car breaks down luckily in the garage. Thursday night about to leave work for home, car breaks down yet again, who says lighting doesn’t strike twice! Apologies again as I did not have chance to update my blog during the week. The silliness of my car breaking down twice prevented me from doing mini updates I planned, doh!

Having said that, it was another good week of training, despite the cold weather. Tuesday I went to Capoeira , we had two new people joined and I helped Danny Henry train them. Well when I say helped out I mean Danny taught them and used me as his demonstration partner! It was good though as we teamed up with the beginners and therefore it gave me a chance to help them with their technique.

“Your stand up is improving, both of you” Karl said as Lun and I walked into the changing rooms after a good training session… “You look knackered but it’s coming along” he added. Yup Wednesday was Karl Tanswell’s class . We did some sparring near the beginning of the class I was being boxed out by my taller opponent, but my foot work was good, however I gotta keep that guard up against taller guys as they have longer reach. Although it was good to get a compliment at the end of the lesson as maybe my technique improved as we went along. For the rest of the lesson we broke down several moves and put them altogether at the end of the lesson and then we drilled it by some more sparring. It’s a great way of learning.

Going back to being boxed out, I still maintain it’s good to train and spar with different training partners. Naturally people enjoy sparring or partnering their closest friend or in my case my brother. However it is beneficial for everyone to swap around as if I didn’t swap partners I wouldn’t realise I needed to fight differently against a taller opponent.

As I write this Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (or the Chinese Connection or Ching Mo Mun) depending on where you are from is on Television here in the UK. This is simply an awesome Kung Fu film remade countless of times on Hong Kong Television and was remade as Fist of Legend with Jet Li which I also enjoyed. Unfortunately they are showing the dubbed version of this great movie. Although I prefer films shown in their natural state, I understand the fact that a few of my friends enjoy dubbed movies as they feel that subtitles get in the way, but dubbed movies especially from late 60’s and 70’s sound terrible! They dub the actors with a weird generic accent that isn’t exactly American one or English. It’s a bizarre combination of English, American and Australian accents. Having said that I am still going to watch it, as Bruce Lee doesn’t really talk when he is kicking ass and its great Friday night viewing!

Anyway back to the week of training! My brother and I couldn’t make it to Steve Powell’s JKD class although I read on fellow student Chris's blog that Steve Powell is back teaching, which is great news. Speaking of blog’s my brother Lun has updated his please take a look as there are some cool pictures on there.

“Yeah I thought we have bit of a change tonight” Simon our Eskrima Instructor told me during Friday’s Warriors Eskrima. class, this time I remembered to bring my Digital Video Camera. It was more of a technique night tonight which was cool. We did some empty hand work which consisted of counters and takedowns and some stick take down techniques.

Usually our lessons are quite intensive as in sparring and smacking our sticks on hand guards which is why Simon spoke of the change tonight. In addition we did close contact controlled free style sparring called Palakaw (note to self must write a Martial Art glossary!) and did counters to the 12 knife attack in our system. We also had a new guy join us which was cool. All in all a good night of training and a very enjoyable week in Martial Arts overall.

I have several articles lined up that I will hopefully get to write! Enjoy the pictures and thanks for reading.
Kit!