Sparring, sweet sparring...

My Karate school has an intramural team tournament coming up in a week from Sunday, so Monday night sparring classes for adults have focused on tag-team strategy.

Needless to say, the fighting gets pretty intense, but with some goofy moments as well.

I did extensive taping of our class this past Monday:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F44D11BC0DF6CA18

Check out #5 at 6:25 - the slide kick that was more slide than kick
Check out #6 at 5:30 - Ouch...

The tape of ground work was for the woman in the video. She, along with my instructor, are competing this week at the East-West Open, a "Martial Arts Olympics" held annually in St. Petersburg, Russia. Since some fights at that event include grappling, she's receiving a cram course in basic ground defense. I shot this so she has some study material to review.

Best of luck to both of them!

For Thursday's class we had a guest instructor who was well-versed in one of my favorite torture techniques, the slow-count kick. As a warm-up, we did a lot of stationary work, simply holding stances and fine-tuning them . Then we did slow-count kicks.

While working slow-count kicks, I idly remarked that it'd be interesting to combine stances with slow-count kicks; She took me up on the concept, and we did just that!

So imagine this for a strength exercise:

1. Begin in a fighting stance.
2. Rotate hips forward, squaring yourself up, then bend your rear leg and slowly squat until the rear knee touches the floor.
3. Raise up from the floor slowly and execute a slow-count front kick with the back leg.
4. Lower the kicking leg forward into a fighting stance on the opposite side.
5. Repeat, marching across the floor and back again. Slowly.

I hated it, and loved hating it...

On a side note, big thanks to Black Belt Mama for the free book. Should make for interesting, light reading before bedtime.