Are you sure you want to make me that open-ended offer?

Thursday Kung Fu.

I continue to be able to produce insanely low tabletop horse stance during the warmups. Knees hurt, yeah- but what's new. It's got to be the BJJ. I've always had pretty strong legs, but tabletop horse for any significant length of time has been beyond me before this summer. SK mentioned the other day that he was really noticing (while CN was trying to do takedowns on him during the sparring on Tuesday) a BJJ-inspired difference in his core strength and general takedown resistance. It's interesting to see how one MA bleeds into another (pun intended).

Some kick drills, some hand strike drills. One of my choices was the Mantis finger-poke. SK got out his Sharpie marker again and dotted his palm for us to use as a target. Once again he declined my suggestion that his throat would be a much better target. JB forgot to cut her fingernails, so she was trying to not poke too hard. SK said to her, "If you actually draw blood, I'll give you a dollar." I raised my hand and called, "Wait a minute..... what if any parameters are you placing on this offer?" Amid general laughter, and SK's glower, Nemesis asked me, "How bad do you want a dollar?" "It's not the dollar I really want; it's the blood."

After that, we reviewed the basic knife defenses from last week. Also, some basic stick/club defenses. As we rotated training partners, it was interesting to see how your defense had to change when you got to JB- a foot shorter than anyone else. After facing off against the big guys, I was subconsciously relaxing a little when I got to her... and then found to my consternation that her attack angles were all radically different due to her height- what was a straight-in stab for the others was an upcut coming from her- which required a whole different defensive technique. Between that and her abnormal flexibility (which allowed her to keep cutting me even when I thought I had her well pinned), she was getting more blade into me than anyone else in the class had.

I still need to work more on making my defensive technique and my counter ONE step instead of two.

JoE was not there tonight, so I couldn't ask him to help me with Southern Mantis. I should have asked a teacher for forms help, especially since this was the last Thursday for Gods know how long that we had CN... but my focus was feeling really scattered and I didn't think I could concentrate on that effectively. So I worked on mirror forms. Five Animals and Leopard Three were mostly okay, so I only did them a couple of times. Little Red Dragon, Five Points, Leopard Fist- smoothed out some rough spots in those and repped them several times apiece. Then I started working on Bung Bo, and got some good progress done there, I think.


Another photo from July's Revolution. That's Professor Carlos- a guy you want to try to keep away from your toes.