Posted 10:55 PM by spitgirl
So, it's been an incredible weekend for martial arts. On Saturday, Kenny and I went down to Monterey with Chris Peterson to attend a jujitsu seminar at the sports facility there. It was a nice enough facility, but not quite enough for the 30-odd people who were there. Professor Willy Cahill was the first to teach, some basic wrist escapes and then wrist escapes into throws techniques. I didn't have time to write down notes, so I'm probably missing a lot of stuff. But we're talking the basic concept of balance breaks. Professor James Muro talked about lua, the Hawaiian art of Making People Really Wish They Hadn't Engaged You In Combat, with open hand versions of everything they did with weapons. One of the weapons on hand was a dense wooden dowel with a long string laced through it, that could be used for crushing as well as for strangulation. Hardcore. Chris taught last, and taught some finger locks and fingerlocks into other techniques. (Darn it, I -knew- I should have written stuff in my journal right after I got out of class yesterday, but I didn't want to do that while in the front seat of Chris' car - I get carsick if I do that.)

Today in hankido we started out at 1:30 with an advanced workout for browns and up, working on pressure points and some timing things with keeping our hands up. Of course, we had Chris Peterson again as our learned teacher (it was just the scheduling thing that had him doing two of them back to back). I learned more about the high-low drills that he has us do on occasion and why they're useful. We worked on a minor outer reap into pressure pointage, and then he showed us a bunch of parlor tricks, including one where you could cross your fingers and put them on the cross-kidney point in order to withstand more pain. It didn't work for me for some reason. There were other ones, including resisting a wrist technique by sliding your foot forward, and countering that with a slight touch to the kidney point in the arch of the foot.

The 3pm workout started with a card workout. I'm not going to go into details, but imagine a deck of cards and it being the hardest workout we do in hankido... and you'll get the idea. We then worked a little bit on throws, thinking about two major concepts - there are only two kinds of throws. The first kind is where you get everything as close as possible for the throw, like in a hip throw. The second kind is where you are a part of a wheel - I guess this is more the aikido concept.

After the throws, we started working on flying kicks - specifically, double side kicks and double front kicks. I don't quite have the double front kick down yet, but the double side is starting to look okay as long as I don't worry about the landing. Dr. Link even told me I had at least one good one! I got a good case of whiplash from one where I didn't land on the pad correctly. And then my bruised knees were starting to bother me, so I sat out the last three minutes of class. Woot. Advanced class tomorrow.