Dojo Rat has in interesting post about Obama having practiced taekwondo.
Between martinis I had to take a crack at searching too (I did not search too hard). I found this blog post:
The Washington Post’s political blog “The Sleuth” offers a unique portrait of Sen. Obama, martial artist:
The Illinois senator…took taekwondo classes in the early 2000s at the schwanky East Bank Club, whose membership includes everyone who’s anyone in the Windy City.
We tracked down Obama’s former instructor, David Posner, a financial capital planner who taught taekwondo at East Bank for eight years and still practices and teaches classes at another “dojang.” He remembers his famous student as “very disciplined, very diligent.”
…Posner couldn’t remember exactly which color belt Obama attained, but said it was a mid-level ranking
My hunch is the campaign is leaving it out because it portrays him as taking lessons at some posh dojang. Probably wants to avoid the whole Kerry rich guy image thing…
Anyhow, an interesting side-note here but Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has a black belt in judo and also studies sambo.
Meanwhile, our president falls off segways and has problems with doors.
I continued teaching supplementary material from boxing and kung fu last night in our advanced hour. The boxing went really well though I am pretty rusty. Sabum has the basics down so now we will continue to drill. The boxing she gets because it’s similar to taekwondo only with hands.
Kung fu drills are much harder because they are mostly soft and she’s spent a lot of time in taekwondo.
I taught her chi sao and lap sao (noted in previous post) and also taught her something called the snake and palm drill. I’m not sure if the latter comes from traditional wing chun or if it was an Americanized exercise that was taught to the person who taught me. The aforenoted video shows something called hubud which comes from Kali/Escrima. It looks fun but I’ve never done it before and cannot find a slow version of it to learn from.
Anyhow, chi sao and lap sao went pretty good for the first time out. Lap sao was close enough to what we do in TKD that she picked it up fast. Chi sao we both struggled with. In particular, sabum wanted to blast the strike or grab like you would with a taekwondo hard block. So, we’ll have to work on getting her to flow and re-direct. I need to work on that too.
Here’s the snake and palm drill from a basic pattern:
Attacker throws center line chest punches or grabs
Defender palm blocks attacker’s right with a right
Defender palm blocks attacker’s left with a left
Defender snake blocks attacker’s right with a right
Defender snake blocks attacker’s left with a left
You just keep cycling through this pattern until you get a rhythm going
The snake block is nothing more than moving your right wrist in a clockwise small circle and blocking with knife edge. The left wrist moves counter clock wise in the same manner. While the palm blocks move the punch across the opponent’s center line the snakes move the punch to the outside of their center line. It’s a snake in that you sort of roll your hand in a small circle under the punch or grab. At advance levels the palm blocks can become traps while the snakes can become grabs and strikes.
The next step to varying this drill is to throw unannounced low, middle, or high center line punches or grabs. Until we get the pattern down I’m keeping it at chest level for now.
The ultimate goal will be to make it so we can flow from chi sao to lap sao to snake and palms seamlessly. That’s going to take a lot of work so we shall see. Adding the Jeet Kune Do clinch drill might also prove useful but we only have so much time. In our second advanced class hour we continue to work on taekwondo stuff and really can’t sacrifice another hour.
Still, this is good supplementary training.
In our beginner’s class we did rolling and falling again and also introduced the students to the ripcords for kicking strength. I think I strained something rolling or from one of the weighted boxing drills. The inner part of my right tricep burns so I had to resort to Tylenol this morning.
Wed. night sabum is out so I get to teach. I think the whole night will be sparring drills so that should be fun.
