Teacher Down!

We've had a lot of activity at the school in the last couple of days.  Our main teacher fell ill on last Sunday afternoon.  He's a diabetic and went into a near coma.  He finally got out of the hospital yesterday and the doctors were concerned that he may have had a heart attack which would have created the issue.  It now looks like he's going to need an angiogram.  He said hi when we were starting class last night and looked pretty good considering.  

Class was led by an older teacher who called the work, but mostly sat down.  Very nice lady and one of the instructors took over any demonstration.  

We ran over basics, which for me is the mostly humbling experience. Everybody does the basics for their level of experience so the guys on other side of me are jumping and spinning and doing all kinds of combos while I struggled through doing punches and blocks.  Kicks were pretty tough as well.  

After we did that, it was back to working on Chil Sung (form).  I'd been thinking it was a pretty simple form for a dan test, but as it emerged judges examine how all the basics are played out in the form to tell if the student is meeting the criteria for physical knowledge.

Punches and kicks (via the SBD method) are dramatically different from what I've been doing for the last couple of years.  The idea is still to generate power and place your punch and landing all at the same time but the execution is vastly different.  In SBD we put our shoulder and hip back so the body is almost sideways.  When the punch lands, you are driving the hip and shoulder as well as the arm into the punch.  It feels incredibly powerful, but setting yourself up is massive.  Maybe that'll come more naturally in the future.  

Kicks have a similar restructure.  SBD closely looks at the form (don't all schools!) and it's all about cocking the physique and on impact forcing or rolling the hip extract all the power that can be had.

This morning I'm stiff and my back is groaning.  I'm going to take it as a sign that I did really well, hah!