Thanks Exile and Kacey. There is more to be learned by losing than winning, usually, and good sportsmanship is among them.
That is a very...
intelligent way of looking at it, is the only way I can put it. I hadn't ever quite seen it in that light before. Yeah: when you win, all you do is what you already know and nothing challenges it, so no new information comes in. When you lose, there's a piece of reality that you had overlooked that you now have to absorb. So the real `losers', in effect, are those who are so precoccupied with winning that they never learn anything, past a certain point...
One of the things I trained while coming up through the ranks was to not let my disappointment about what I thought were "bad calls" show on my face or body language.
Now I hardly even FEEL the disappointment: I just have fun with the competition, win or lose. The only disappointment I REALLY feel nowadays is when I feel I didn't perform as well as I think I can.
With an attitude like that, very little is going to be able to defeat you, I'd say.
Exile: I use ball of the foot for breaking (although I do use instep for sparring).
That's the usual division of labour, I suspect---instep for speed, but the ball of the foot as the dense, small-area striking surface for a hard protected impact that you need for breaking. I
have seen turning kicks breaking with the instep, but it made me wince... all those small bones crashing in on that very solid board.
My focus was actually off a bit for that break: my pinky toe was almost at the top edge of the board, but I had enough "penetration" and power to snap the board anyway. And my "holders" had a nice grip and didn't allow the board to "rotate."
Ooh yeah, that's when you want good holders, eh?! Good thing you weren't up against one of those `rogue boards', the kind that you can barely break even one of with a hammerfist... every so often when I'm conditioning breaking I get one of those. When you look at them sideways, it's like there's no natural lines of separation in them at all---everything is going every which-way, sort of more like glass than wood. The chief instructor at a TKD dojang near my house, a KKW sixth dan, says that once she and a bunch of other very high-ranking BBs at some clinic encountered a board like that---passed it around, no one could break it---these are people who break five and six boards at a time with front and side kicks---and eventually they took the board outside and gave it an honorable burial, still unbroken. You just hope you're not gonna encounter one of those in a tournament.
Mostly, it sounds like you guys had a rousing good time!
