My week in Martial Arts: Sept 18th to Sept 22nd

Hey All

Another good week in training! Monday my brother and I worked out a schedule for our gym work out. This is because we usually get to the gym around 5.45 or 6 depending on what time we finish work and then have to make the Karl Tanswell’s Straight Blast Gym class at 7 which is a good 10-12 minutes drive. So we worked out we are going to do 3 different exercises for each body part which consist of 3 sets of 10. This was perfect as it lasted 45 minutes approx. After the workout we went through some drills that we were taught at the Rick Young seminar held at Steve Powell’s JKD class. We also went through drills that were taught at the Krishna Godhania seminar and drilled our Eskrima stuff and what we were taught at Karl Tanswell’s the week earlier

Wednesday we went to Karl Tanswell’s class, for the past few Wednesday’s the class has been taken by an Estonian instructor called Jorgen. We did some interesting takedowns from the clinch. As Jorgen is about my size(i.e. not very tall) he told us what clinch control point(as in under hook or grabbing the head) would work best depending on what size you were, which put an interesting perspective on things.

Friday we went to Warriors Eskrima. Back to teaching! A new student Stephen showed up and it was cool to teach again. As this was the intro class I went through a variety of things including footwork, single stick, double stick and empty hand stuff. The interesting thing was that Stephen has Filipino heritage and this he told me, was one of the reasons why he wanted to learn. He told me that he enjoyed the lesson and I emailed him the list of what we did. I think I will save this list as the intro class template. It was good as he picked up the lesson pretty well.

As I was teaching and Lun was too busy training with the other guys, we couldn’t take any pictures! So I included a picture of the old “classic” pad we use to use at Steve Powell’s. The pad has “Smash the Pad!” written on it which I guess Lun put to motivate us when we were training.

I also included our Martial Arts book collection (part of it) which is a crazy mix of things. These books are there for reference really. I must admit I always found it hard to follow instructional books unless the moves presented were very basic. 2D photos never could catch the full motion of the more advanced moves unless they were really good photos coupled with good explanations. Plus nothing really beats being taught at an actual class where you can experience everything first hand (although DVD’s, videos and good books are excellent references).


At the weekend I went to Wookie Hole caves in Somerset with Elaine. It was fascinating to walk around, especially the inside of the caves as pictured. Elaine also showed me how to play the piano too, so the deal is that if she teaches me to play the piano I will teach her what I know in Martial Arts!

A special mention to James who writes this blog which is a cool blog all about swords. He asked me for a link exchange via my email at kiteskrima@yahoo.co.uk and if anyone else would like one please don’t hesitate to drop me a mail.

Thanks for reading and I promise more action pictures next time!
Kit!