A purple haze perfectly describes how I feel. I’ve completed one conference presentation and have one more to go. I’ve been stripping and scraping a damnable deck between projects. And I just got back from a half day Kung Fu seminar. To top it all off and I’m feeling pretty run down. I hope I’m not getting sick.
Anyhow, the seminar…
Sigung came down to the Land of Corn Dogs to give a full day of training. I could only attend half-a-day due to other commitments. Considering that the afternoon was an advanced form, if I had to miss something it was best I missed that. Though I am sad that I missed the group photo. I am also slightly disappointed that I missed the soft techniques that he was going to cover before the form.
The morning had Sigung covering seven or eight hard techniques along with his own self-created fighting set that incorporates the techniques. I got the set down but it’s rough so I hope we get to practice it more in our school. Favorite strikes from the set would be a Mantis-style uppercut, a Mantis-style hook, a Mantis-style long fist hammer strike, and a nasty hard elbow break that comes after you bind/twist the defender’s arm. (a very little Qinna here but it’s very effective) We ran through each individually in line drill form. Then we put it all together in the two-person fighting set.
Time it took Sigung to figure out I had training in Tae Kwon Do? Approximately 15 minutes! He noticed immediately that I’m not rotating my hips enough and fighting too square. He surmised that I moved like someone from Tae Kwon Do or Karate. He was right. Over 20 plus years of teaching and he’s taught more than one Tae Kwon Do or Karate student so he can spot them a mile away.
Later on he called me up to the front to be the practice dummy. My thoughts? “Oh crap! He’s gonna make an example of the Tae Kwon Do guy.” So I was mentally preparing for something bad. The bad turned out to be something good. He showed us how the Mantis-style hook can snake around a hard block. The hook is like a TKD or Karate ridge hand only you strike with a back fist knuckle.
Done stiff like a ridge hand can lead to a hyper-extension of the striking arm as you impact any hard block. (I used both a cross palm block and an inside middle block) The trick is to bend the arm and wrist slightly. When you do this you avoid hyper-extending your arm when it hits and you also curve around the block and can still hit the person in the temple. From the same block he first stiff-armed it and came about two inches short from my temple. The second time he curved his arm and despite my standard TKD block he still hit my head!
Lesson learned and it was a good one.
Humorous moment of the day is when the entire class went for lunch at a Chinese/Korean restaurant. We were in black pants and school shirts. The looks on the faces of the local Corn Dogs was priceless. I think some of the dinners feared we were going to lay the smack down on them!
All-in-all a very good seminar with much to digest and refine.
~BCP
