Roundhouse Renewal

Teacher called me up yesterday afternoon and let me know that he had taken ill and might not be able to do the whole class.  This was ironic because I had just finished telling him that I'd made a poor choice of drinking all night in conjunction with my wife's birthday and was miserably hung over at work. 

So class wouldn't be the best of the best by both of our reckoning.  By the evening, and a big dose of ibuprofen, I was able to rally and get to class early and warm up.  The class only consisted of Cherub, Beard and myself so I didn't feel any pressure to be super awesome.  However focus was off due to the previous evening's activities.  Long story short, I ended up kicking Teacher in the crotch with a poorly controlled roundhouse kick.

Although that didn't make him particularly happy he also didn't get upset either, but it did move him to focus on my roundhouse kicks.  So, for the next 30 minutes we spent a lot of time retooling my roundhouse kick. 

For the last how ever many years I've been doing the roundhouse in such a way that I can place my toe anywhere I want it, but it delivers zero energy.  So the work began on creating the "whip".  As we do with certain strikes (shudo in this case) the effort begins at the shoulder, then elbow and then hand.  I literally crack the whip with my fingers being the point of contact.  The trick is being very relaxed until the moment of impact.

So to translate this to the kick I had to break each part of the kick down and make some rather large (at least in my mind) adjustments.  In the end the kick starts now from the shoulder twist, to a torso twist, leg in position and then finally whipping into the target.  Although that took a half hour to sort out I saw an immediate change in power transfer and the impact on the water dummy was pretty impressive.  

Teacher ended up leaving class early; looking rather horrible and I finished class with kata work.  Both of them are working on Sa Dan (number 7), but I don't feel totally confident telling them what to change.  I mostly focused on stance, and some other refinements.