Thursday, March 08, 2018

Two Stubbed Toes

In preparation for tournament Reed has declared, as he put it "selfishly" that we are going to work on sparring drills for the evening so he can get squared away for this weekend.  After work on drills for the last month I kind of felt motivated about getting back in the ring, as it were.

The blackbelt meet up, where we normally work on our specific rank items, in my case katas, got dumped for a night of test kitchen.  By this I mean we did all sorts of tests to see how we can punch faster.  We are all sorts of fighters and by this I mean we have people springing on their feet to people, like me, who stand aloof until it's time to go.

The thought was that bouncers have a faster launch so we timed and compared as much as possible and we couldn't get a conclusive measure.  People who do this more often than others work their bodies as much as possible to get an advantage.  However, I was able to close the gap when we had and experienced person go flat footed and have me bounce.

I should note that bouncing in this case is not going up on toes, but dropping a bit.  You still get the mechanical advantage of movement to movement, but not burning calves.  This worked out great for me because I'm a sloth fighter. 

During regular class we did drills to warm up and then we did a gauntlet style round robin on Reed and Daniel.  They never left the rings and the rest of cycled through fighting them continuously. 

The new rules for this tourney are based on half-points and full points.  This was an adjustment while I was judging, but by in large it makes for a longer more interesting match.  Full points are awarded only for a kick in the head, knocking an appointment off balance or knocking your opponent down and following with a punch.  While we didn't have any clean attempts I went for a lot of head kicks that got spoiled because I was too slow. 

Then the inevitable occurred while sparring Daniel Sensei.  I jammed my left big toe on his shin.  It didn't bother too much, but last night the ache set in and walking around on my heels this morning because neither of my big toes is working.  Cripes, what a predicament.

You get a sense of how I'm walking at 1:20ish.  But you'll want to watch the whole thing to see how that guy got that walk.



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