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:

1. Poor mechanics — the whole technique is a bit suspect.
2. Poor distance — the student is either too close or too far away from the board.
3. Poor focus — the student misses the center of the board.
4. Hitting the board instead of hitting through the board.
5. 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.

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.

I managed to escape unscathed, but it was a near thing.  Our instructor pulled out a shinai and was whacking people with it when they moved too slowly.  I was isolated at one time trying to change up my double front snap kick motion.  One of my habits when I’m concentrating on things is to bounce a couple of times on the balls of my feet to get myself to relax and rebalance my body.  Well, that found no favor, to put it mildly.  I was told, “Don’t bounce!”, then I’d do the technique (poorly) and resettle myself for another attempt.  And I started bouncing again.  I think I was told 4 times not to bounce, and that was definitely shinai-worthy, though I didn’t get smacked.

One of the things that proves to me, though, is that it’s tough to concentrate on several things at once.  And also that Practice Makes Permanent.  Do not practice thoughtlessly, or you’ll train your body to do thoughtless movements.

One thing about Tae Kwon Do is that it historically hasn’t been a unified art.  There were a number of different schools (or “Kwans”), and each did things their own way.  The Portland school is descended from Chung Do Kwan, which does some things a bit differently than we have done them in our school.  So when we go out there, we get our techniques tweaked.  But since not all of the instructors go on these trips, we’ve been getting less consistent in our own teaching from instructor to instructor. 

I think dealing with these discrepancies is going to be a big thing going forward.  Some instructors might resist change to the point of leaving the dojang if we change.  Others might possibly leave if we don’t change.  I’m not sure how this will all shake out, but hopefully there will be minimal casualties.

And on Tuesday, my wife and I are closing on a new house.  It is close to our current house, and consequently close to the dojang.  Much nicer and roomier, and just fits us much better than the current house.  We’re looking forward to moving in.  And I’m using the whole packing/organizing thing as an excuse for why I haven’t posted recently.

My back is in much better shape after numerous chiropractor visits, and I’ve been training regularly.  This week I’ve been fighting a cold, so not as much training.  BJJ is the first thing that falls off my schedule when I’m feeling a bit under the weather.  At the dojang, there have been a couple of promotion exams recently, including a junior black belt promotion.  I ran a plyometric-type of class last Saturday, and I felt that for days.

My weight ballooned a bit over the last couple of months, but it is back down to around 200 now, though I still want to drop that a bit further.  I’ve added a 15 minute workout in the early morning during the week: 5 minutes on the bike at a fairly heavy resistance level, followed by 10 minutes of lifting, ab work, stretching, or whatever else I feel I need that day.  That’s been working fairly well for me.

So, that’s my recent martial arts life in a nutshell.  Moving and such will keep me fairly busy over the next couple of weeks, but hopefully I’ll sneak in a couple of posts between now and then.

Last night had a takedown drill: you “win” if you can lift your opponent’s leg or if you get double underhooks.  After that we did a guard pass/sweep drill.  Win, you stay in.  I was trying to pass a purple belt’s guard, thought I just about had it, then he swept me.  I must have landed funny, because it hurt immediately.  I tried stretching for a little bit, then went back in (trying to pass a black belt), and of course got swept.  I was done for the night.

I figured I wouldn’t be able to make it in to work today, so I slept in a bit.  I picked a local chiropractor almost by random, as the last chiropractor I went to is around 25 minutes away.  At the appointment this morning we naturally discussed how I came to be injured.  So I told him about BJJ.  And he says, “Oh, I’m friends with a guy who trains there.  Do you know ____?”

My response?  “He’s the !&*@# who did this to me!”  Okay, I didn’t speak in punctuation, and I didn’t even say any naughty words.  The sweep was clean, and I’m still befuddled as to how exactly it caused my back to do this.  But I’m still kind of boggling at the coincidence, as I don’t live in a particularly small town.

I’m doing much better tonight than last night, though transitioning from standing to sitting and vice versa is kind of tough, and doing something like tying shoes is almost beyond my capabilities.  Of course, I still went in to teach TKD tonight.

It turns out that he has been a near-Olympic class speed skater.  This series is a fairly fascinating foray into the seamy underbelly of speed skating.  I just wanted to type “seamy underbelly”, though it turns out that not everything is quite copacetic there.  But the really interesting part to me is the psychology of someone pursuing a goal through significant obstacles.  He spent five and a half years pursuing the goal, and never made the Olympic team.  But he considers his pursuit a success.  He figured from the start that he could live with failure, but he couldn’t live with never giving it a try.

The first installment in the series can be found at: No Regrets Part 1.

Good luck with recovery, Matt!

Considering that I have been injured a number of times, from my separated shoulder to broken toes to cracking skin, broken noses, and dislocated ribs, getting hurt hasn’t been a rare occurence.  And that’s aside from the wrenched backs, sore hamstrings, bruises, and abrasions, and the other normal results of training.  And on top of even that, working out hard at anything is difficult and tiring and painful even (especially?) when you’re doing things right.

I was thinking about this following class tonight.  The beginner class struck a nerve.  Most of the time I’ll do the complete warmup with the class, pushups and cardio and whatever else.  So I’m doing the cardio part of the warmup: jumping jacks, then feet front and back with arms doing the jumping jack movements, then legs front and back doing reverse punches.  Over half the class stopped to take a break as I was just getting going.  Then pushups were lousy.  There was a general lack of effort and just quitting rather than pushing to their personal limit.  Believe me, they were nowhere near their limit.

So I was thinking about the black belts I train with.  All of them are a bit nuts.  We have 3 black belts who have had their hips replaced, and trained before and after surgery.  Everybody trains through nicks and bumps and thinks nothing of it.  It is just a part of what we are.  And what we are is kind of crazy.  Frankly, the best martial artists I’ve encountered have been even more nuts than I am.

So I think that anyone who seriously pursues martial arts needs to be a bit nuts.  If you aren’t a bit nuts, you will quit, and most likely within the first year.

Here’s to being crazy!

The dojang, though, is still going strong.  His widow has been running the dojang since then in an administrative position, and has been helping out as a secondary instructor.  The classes are still going strong, run by dans of various ranks from first to seventh.  Quality of instruction has remained high, even as there have been some changes.

Our school has been converging with the way our parent school teaches techniques, due to our Hapkido instructor, who trained for 30 years at the parent school, having taken over the Hapkido and children’s programs.  His wife, a 3rd dan, is doing a lot of the operational work in the Tae Kwon Do program.

I’ve still been training and teaching regularly, despite my dearth of posts.  We just came to an agreement on the sale of our house, the process of which has been my primary (lame) excuse for not posting.  I’m planning on posting more regularly again.  Right now, though, I’m off to BJJ training.

At this point, I don’t normally notice my shoulder any more.  I do what I need to do without issue.  I do tend to have my shoulder and neck muscles locked up a bit on that side, but other than that, things are good.  I’m still careful with it when doing BJJ, because some of that stuff can do bad things to healthy shoulders.  I’m comfortable with doing everything in TKD and almost everything in Hapkido.  I haven’t done Kali in a while, but that’s more due to lack of interest (and time) than it is due to my shoulder.

Strength in that arm is good, but it definitely isn’t as stable as my right arm.  It is hard for me to tell how much of that is due to the fact that it is my non-dominant arm, how much is from my 20-years removed surgery, and how much is due to this surgery.  I’ve been playing with my new kettlebell a bit, and I have a tough time stabilizing it when trying to do kettlebell windmills.  I think that means it is a good exercise for me to do.

Wife-of-State was able to feel one of the surgical screws in my collarbone through my skin at one point recently, which is a bit freaky.  I’ll try to have a picture up for you at some point, but we’re going full-bore on getting our house ready for sale so that I don’t have much time.  In fact, it will be cutting into training time.  But, hey, moving things around is good exercise, too.