Posted 11:07 PM by spitgirl
AM I INVITING BRUISES?

And weapons week continues in the hankido club. Today's advanced topic was club defenses, something completely new to me. So let's go through this afternoon's workout. Having given a pint of blood yesterday, I thought I would be fine for an intense workout. But my legs felt like wood after the fourth set of stairs, and I was starting to feel light-headed at one point. I finished, though, trailing Lucille by thirty seconds, which wasn't that bad for someone who still had a red needle stick in her arm. I sat out the second set but did two sets of pushups for the team in the third set (and a FANTASTIC set of 10 they were each time, too).

So, on to the interesting stuff - the clubs. Take a PVC pipe, wrap a little foam wand on the end of it, and voila, you have a weighted wand that looks surprisingly like the iodine-soaked Q-tips they use when they clean your arm to take blood. (I notice the little things.) So we spent about half an hour whacking at each other with the clubs, and I came out with a few conclusions.

1. I will never win with a brute force attack.
2. Vertical attacks are different than horizontal attacks.
3. Forward body drops hurt (your knees) if your feet don't go off the ground.
4. Training with light piping is so awesome! I think training with real clubs will humble me fairly quickly.

Some of the things we learned:
1. Against a two-handed horizontal attack, you can block the near arm and step in. Probably the easiest.
2. Against a one-handed out-to-in attack, you want to do a down block to control the club and get to the outside, then do your technique (elbow break/arm bar, wrist technique)
3. Against a one-handed in-to-out attack... well, I haven't figured this part out yet.
4. Using a club, you don't want to advertise what you're going to do. Use small circles centering around the wrist.
5. Remember that your attacker is not limited to one strike.
6. Be Very Very Afraid of Raymond. Even though everyone admits he's the nicest black belt in the club, he's just so eerily accurate with almost everything he does.

It might be interesting to get some lengths of PVC pipe and get some interested people into my backyard to just play around with techniques. (I'm sure John Woo would be interested.)

In other news, I ironed my uniform today in preparation for my test tomorrow. Let's see how it goes...