Training update from last week – arm conditioning!
It’s a bit belated, but oh well – better late than never!
Last week’s training went well – put in as much effort as I could on the night and really felt good afterwards. I love it when you have a training session, your gi ends up getting soaked through all the persperation, you feel knackered, but you come out of class on this crazy natural high. Gotta love it 🙂
Anywho, the theme of last week’s session was two-person drills – one blocks, one attacks, swap arms, then swap sides. I was a bit unco at first (I get the feeling this is a personal feature rather than something I’ll eventually get over :P), but eventually I got into the rhythm of things and it went well. The cool thing is that the session ended up being a good way to start working on conditioning the arms, in particular the forearms. I remember in the school I used to train at before my current one that Jyastin-kun and I used to go full-on with blocking and striking drills, and it used to be a regular thing going to work the next day sporting bruises all over my arms. I must have gotten out of practice though, as I was struggling towards the end of it to put in the max effort on each block knowing what was coming 🙂 It’s taken my nearly a week, but I’ve finally come out in a weak bruise on my right forearm, so there wasn’t even much to show for the pain 😛 Ah well, gotta toughen up and start working on this – my forearms used to be able to take much more punishment than this, so hopefully Sensei will start doing this regularly.
Aside from the frills, we also did kata – I’ve asked Sensei to start being very particular with my form so I can work on the small details to really round it out – I let my age-uke slip a little higher than usual (a bit of a goju habit I think), so I’ll be paying attention to that, and my stances as there’s bound to be a grading coming up, and I’m keen to push myself hard to try and make it, and do a really good job at it. I’d feel disappointed if I went to a grading but only kinda slipped through with an average record, I want to push to really achieve a strong grading. Otherwise I don’t really think there’s much point at all.
