Saturday 28 November 2009

The weekend of the seminars

My weekend started early. I've taken Friday and Monday as annual leave, just so I can get some 'down time' and some time to do the exciting stuff like housework, grocery shopping etc.

Anyway, my busy weekend started Friday night with MMA class. My friend has a fight coming up in February so we spent the first hour and a bit working on our conditioning. We warmed up on the heavy bags, then moved on to sets of kettlebell exercises (two handed swing, single arm swing, single arm press, squats, single arm row and snatch) interspersed with active recovery. then we moved onto some medicine ball situps, the plank and leg raises. Then it was into the general class melee to work some kicks and for my friend, to work on her ground game.

A fun class.

Today was the krav maga self-defence seminar. This was a 3 hour session (brilliant value for £20!!), which started off with a light warmup. And it was a light warmup which was a pleasant surprise. I remember the last seminar starting with a much tougher warmup. Mind you, that was maybe a mental thing - I was prepared for a tough time, so maybe I was in the right zone for dealing with it.

We had a far lower turnout today than previously, with the ladies by far the more numerous. Lots of familiar faces from our usual weekly classes, plus some newbies brought along by the posters etc. The session started with the usual pad work, drilling footwork and palm heel strike jab / cross combinations. Then we started adding in some hammer fists, elbows and knees before moving on to work front kicks and 'stomp' kicks.

Having acquired some 'combatives' or striking tools, we then moved onto 'situationals', looking at defences against grabs to clothing, wrists and hair, bear hugs and chokes. A fun and useful day with a goodly number of new bruises thanks to the assorted mistimings and general clonks dished out by all. Was v glad when we finished though - I was tired and hungry.

Z Health seminar tomorrow. Have heard some mixed reviews of this, so it will be interesting to see what it's like.

Combat Conditioning on Tuesday night. That will just be hard work!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Avril,

    Sounds like one of those tough but enjoyable seminars. You know it's been good when you pick up a few bruises! I have a nice new bruise on the top of my foot from the seminar I attended yesterday - we were doing defences against kicks to the head on the ground. I was doing the kicking and my partner was executing the defense techinque without realising that she had her elbow on my foot and was leaning with her full weight on it - that was pretty effective - ouch!

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  2. Hi Sue

    Ouchies! I once had an instructor who liked to stand on your foot when he was demonstrating on you. He used to drive all his weight through the ball of his foot onto the top of yours. It really hurt! Effective but painful lol.

    That same instructor used to teach us some harimau silat, which is largely ground based, so there was a lot of work on defending against kicks whilst on the ground. In some attacks, you would 'pass' the attacker's leg and then attack their supporting leg. If you failed to pass the kicking leg, it could be nasty for you. If you passed the kicking leg successfully and went for their supporting leg too forcefully it could end up nasty for both of you, esp if they fell on you!

    Interesting system, harimau.

    Avril

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