darren_stranger | relax, and make it snappy

Greg set us an aim for last night's session: "To achieve SNAP without effort".

Accordingly, the focus was on trying to get more power through relaxing, rather than strength (which tied in with what we'd found with that backfist on Saturday).

We started in horse riding stance, feet parallela and gripping the floor (Darren stop leaning back). We went over basic centre punches, first slowly, then a little faster but still without force, then concentrating only on putting power into the punching hand, ignoring the pulling hand, then finally concentrating on the pulling action and trying not to put power into the punching hand. As planned, that last version produced the most snap in the punch, highlighting what Greg wanted to illustrate. A couple of sets of punches like that, kihap each time and trying to concentrate on the pulling hand only, thenwe split into pairs to watch each other go through punches - five body and five face - to see what we could see. Rob spotted that my body punches are starting from the ribs, not the hip.

Then Greg had us all sit down and close our eyes, picturing ourselves doing lower, body and upper blocks with perfect relaxation and snap, before standing up to do the same blocks for real. Getting that relaxation is the difficult bit (even in my mind i was tense) and i'll have to work more on it.

A brief discussion of ki and kihap followed. Responses on "what's a kihap for?" included a focus of energy to increase power, increasing your confidence (and decreasing an opponent's) and one i hadn't heard before: to make you breathe (to get past that 'rabbit in the headlights' paralysis, as Greg put it). We also did a ki exercise - rubbing hands together, then rolling a ball of energy between our palms, forst one way, then another, getting bigger, then pushing in and out like a concertina, to feel the energy between our palms. Then the palms are placed against danjung to store the energy away, with comparisoins made to the actions junbi seogi (noting that fists finish in front of danjung, which i hadn't thought about before).

Moving along, we were asked to revist the problem technique that we'd nominated a few lessons before (which i'd changed four times before settling on knife hand block) and make a mini pattern of that move and those before and after it in the pattern in question. I'd actually been doing that, having made a little kicking pattern of the middle rung of Taegeuk 8, which i was having trouble with, but this time i decided to use the first rung of Koryo (something i've also done that way before). We paired up again, to watch each other's mini-pattern and offer feedback. Then we reformed as a group to go through a couple of examples, focussing on kicks. First was the front kicks from Sipjin, starting from bawi milgi and focussing on the pulling back of the hands (also using bawi milgi as the turn). Then it was the coming forward ine of Taegeuk 4, from swallow strike to knife hand block, focussing again on pulling the hands back with each kick.

Next we went through Taegeuk 8 step by step to fine-tune technique. Some points to come out of that were that the stance for the wesanteul makki isn't quite front stance, but has both feet parallel, then what becomes the front foot in the next front stance doesn't move too far (a point i had wanted to clarify from a class or two before) and also that in the back stance to front stance transition on the last rung, the front foot comes straight forward, with the turn of the back foot making the width - something i had forgotten and was not doing.

We then went through Koryo in a similar way, and i had trouble relaxing in the wind-up to the knife hand blocks. I need to learn not to try so hard, which is not easy. The top end we spent quite a bit of time on, going over the shape of the side block, the height of the target punch, the pulling in action with the side kick, and the downwards block / elbow strike combination. I did notice that doing th the outwards knife hand strike in a more forwards than round motion halps me not jar my elbow so much, so that's a help.

The last part of the class was for free pattern work, though i ended up spending it teaching Pyongwon to someone, which i didn't mind as it's going to take a lot more than twenty minutes practice for me to start getting the hang of not trying so hard.

Finally a brief discussion listed the next three stages of the side kick exercise - level five: extending a standing side kick shape with support of a bar (but not along a wall like level four); level six: full side kick with support of bar; level seven: free standing side kick.

Two more sessions to go. I'm going to miss it.

Still, i've got lots to practise.

Edit - trying earlier to get that relaxation thing happening, i found that, instead of trying to relax from the shoulders down, i actually got better results by thinking about relaxing from the face down. It seems to make some difference psychologically. Worth further investigation.

Edit the Second - practising tonight, i realised that making too wide a stance on the last move of Taegeuk 8 actually makes it harder to get power in the backfist strike. Wrong angle of the torso, perhaps. I also noticed just how much pulling in the tummy and holding the head high can "lift" a pattern (in both a physical and metaphorical way).