My week in Martial Arts: June 12th till June 16th

Hi All

This week I have been mostly affected by Hay Fever. So I didn’t get to as many lessons as I did the week before.


Had a nice weekend as I travelled down south to meet with Elaine. We went to the city of Bath which was a great place. We walked around Pulteney Bridge
. It’s very nice at night time and is one of Bath’s best known constructions. Yes I have deviated from the world of Martial Arts again, but reminding people that there are lots of cool things to see in the UK.

Monday, my brother Lun and I went to the gym. We did a good set of weights and practiced some stick work. Lun took some pictures of me while I was practicing a few double stick drills. Capturing the action with a standard digital camera doesn’t quite work as well as the digital camcorder as some of the photos ended up pretty hilarious. The one serious one was a posed one of me shown above doing a roof block (which I still thought was funny).
I will put my goofy pictures on a Christmas special of something in the future.

Tuesday had the hay fever so couldn’t make Capoeira.

Wednesday we were going to go to both Steve Powell’s JKD Class and Karl Tanswell’s Straight Blast gym. But we only managed to go to Karl’s because our Dad's phone wasn’t working so we couldn’t stay out too late. We did a load of stand up boxing drills in Karl’s emphasising on footwork. Zoning off against each other(for example moving to the left or right but keeping the boxing stance). My brother’s elbow was hurting him however but he carried on to the end. It was a great lesson and very energetic.


Thursday again went home due to hay fever.

Friday went to Warriors Eskrima class. My brother and I will now alternate weeks for teaching. This will allow us to train in our regular sessions. I found it a good work out and interesting session. We did some live knife vs empty hand sparring. The object of this was to control the knife hand and use the knife against the opponent.

It was a great drill but my only gripe is would I get in trouble if I used the knife against the attacker. The return/counter attacks are designed to kill or maim. In a real situation I would run away if someone tried to attack me with a knife. But sometimes you may not have a choice to run as I can tell you from personal experience (which I will go into detail in a future post).
In my opinion my main objective was to grab the knife hand and for the most part I did. However I will take it more seriously next time as my brother reminded me of the personal experience and that will make me drill knives with a completely different mindset. We also initally drilled knife attacks with the attackers with helmets on so full contact counters could be applied.
The helmet didn't last long however as the visor cracked.(Well what would you think twill happen in a stick class. We also did other drills such as one which involved smacking a stick against focus mitts. Lun was teaching William the amarra and other level 1 drills. It’s cool that William has been consistent.

Hopefully the rest of the beginners class will come down next week providing there is no World cup football on TV. To
Chris and LGM. hope to see you guys at Steve’s next week. As always thanks for reading and enjoy the pictures.

Keep training
Kit!