May you live in interesting times is often attributed as a Chinese curse; others argue for more recent and Western origins. Irrespective of the source, it's certainly held true for me in recent months!
Personal circumstances (and hurty bits) have meant that I have't trained as much as I might have liked to. I've certainly been to classes and I've gone running and I've chucked kettlebells around, I just haven't written about it much. However, I had a complaint last night that my lack of posting was leading to a lack of entertainment and could I please fix that asap. So here I am lol.
Last night was krav. Lee is back in harness after his time away, and boy did we get to know about it! We started with our usual wam up run. I took it really easy, trying to respect the hurty bits. We then moved into sprints and it took prob about the first set for my achilles / calf thing to seriously make its presence felt until I was basically chasing Saturday's £40 osteopath bill up and down the hall. Och well, I guess these things will get worse until they get better really. On the positive side though, my wrist really had nothing to say about the incline pressups.
After the pressup / situp combos we moved straight into padwork, working jab-cross-jab-elbow. We then added a 'wrenching' move to unbalance our partner, followed by a swift knee and finishing them with a cheeky wee back kick to the back of the knee.
From this we moved on to train turning / roundhouse kicks on the big shields. I bet the rugby club don't really leave their tackle shields lying around for us to use this way! Mind you, I used to watch club rugby in Edinburgh and I've seen the abuse those shields take - trust me, our kicks are *nothing* compared to what those guys do to them lol.
After some practice chambering the knee high and flicking the kick out, we moved onto some knife defence. I'm sure it's not supposed to end up as some kind of bizarre spiral dance, but that seems to be how UTP and I often end up! A couple of the guys had to leave unexpectedly early, so we turned it into multiple attackers with knives instead.
Lee picked us up on "intent" - what he meant was training like you mean it, so that the skills are hardwired in and there should you ever be unfortunate enough to need it. He was quite right in what he said, but I think that it can often be difficult for women to go in 'hard' against a partner. There's lots of reasons for this, most of them around socialisation and expectation. Men often think that it's because women are delicate and fear being hurt themselves. I'm sure that's probably true for some women but it's definitely not the case for all. I think the biggest issue is actually around not wanting to be responsible for hurting others. I know I've certainly spent an awful lot of time apologising to other people for clattering them during training, and I'm always conscious of holding back a bit esp if I'm partnering another woman. It's not necessarily always great for my training, but it's easy sometimes to misjudge the power you can put into techniques. I certainly don't want the reputation my pal had for unnecessary brutality - even the guys were scared of her.
On the flipside, I had one of the guys make a comment to me last week about how myself and his female pal always "really go for it" when we train with the guys. The way he said it, it felt like criticism in the sense that it wasn't natural or feminine or some other such thing. And that comes back to the socialisation / expectation thing. No wonder women get confused!
Ok - not quite sure how the soapbox managed to sneak in there.
It was lovely to see another friend that I used to train with at the women's class last night. I think she's planning to come along regularly which will be good. Hope her turned ankle is nothing serious though.
