So what idea, way of teaching, drill, etc. did you pick up from your instructor that you use, Exile?
Well, he is very, very big on a few things that I've found very helpful:
(i) both set and `free' kick combinations to build flow into your movements and smooth weight shifting from move to move. He has us do, e.g., a rear leg sidekick coming down on and shifting weight to the kicking leg, followed by a slide side kick executed by that same leg, followed by a rear leg sidekick using the
other leg, followed by a back kick. On this cycle, one of the legs kicks three times and the other one only once, but the back kick `resets' the order so on the next cycle rear-leg-sk/slide-sk/rear-leg-sk/bk, the leg that got off easy on the previous cycle now has does most of the work, and so on. We do chains of these up and down the floor, and other combinations too. After a bit of this, we have to come up with own `freestyle' versions, with smooth flow and good balance, and minimal repretion. This is, I've found, a great drill for learning balance in weight shift.
(ii) He's also very big on slow, realistic-style kicks for balance---a full six-count on, say, side and turning kicks: from fighting stance, lift into chamber, pivot, strike, return to chamber, pivot back and lower into
fighting stance, reassuming as near as you can you initial position. And on the strike part especially, go slow, and `freeze' if you can for as long as you can (in this as in all parts of his teaching, he demonstrates very carefully before he asks you to do it yourself). Ideally, you should be in balance at every point in the kick and capable of holding any position for several seconds at least. This is a wonderfully hellish exercise: it really hurts, builds good balance and great leg strength---I'm really bad at it on my left-side rear leg side-kick, reasonably OK on the other side. One of the great things about this exercise is that students who do it carefully begin to realize just what it is that they're doing wrong with their kicks---they can
see, in the most literal way, when they're not getting the striking surface right. With a lot of students, a front kick, a turning kick and a side kick don't look that different, and the striking surfaces are all in the same part of the foot. Doing this exercise, they begin to realize just how different a snap roundhouse and a side thrust kick really are in terms of body dynamics and point of impact. He's a pretty relaxed guy with the white and lower-color belts, but he makes it clear that all these kicks are different, and have different applications, and you had better become very aware of the differences and execute them accordingly.
(iii) we do air kicks for balance, pad/mitt work for accuracy and bag kicks for power and impact. He emphases a lot of reps and the value of alternating sides in bag work---left-right-left-... attacks for turning kicks---and also alternating sets of rear-leg kicks and front leg kicks of the same kind, e.g. turning kicks with the rear leg for a set of 10, then with the front leg for a set of ten, then...
I don't want to give the misimpression that kicking is all or even most of what we do, but training kicks seems harder and less intuitive than training blocks and punches for people. Last time, though, we spent quite a bit of time training for accurate and
hard backhand fist strikes. We do quite a bit of SD, with knee strikes and elbow strikes, and a lot of emphasis on closing the distance and counterattacking as a `defensive' strategy.
And on another point, one thing my instructor does which I try to emulate is
try to push people a bit outside their comfort envelope in terms of effort without demanding more of them than they can give. He manages to coax a huge amount of effort out of people in class this way. It's a subtle ability to push people just enough more than they want to go, but not so much more that they give up... he knows exactly how to do this; I think it takes years and years to develop that teaching ability.
But heaven help you if he thinks you've been slacking off working on your poomsae!
