Flower of Battle
Gentle Readers,
It's Saturday and here i am at work. I think I set off the alarm when I got here by not keying in the correct code. Thankfully, I didn't set it off all the way and the guard who showed up an hour later was pretty blase.
I ended up going out to the Fiore class last night. Not bad. We started working our way through the dagger plays. As is almost always the case, when things weren't working right, we took another look at the book and discovered that we were doing it wrong. There were still a bunch of things that were awkward but I think that that is mostly because of our inconsistent footwork. Without knowing where to step for a particular move or what position to step from it's hard to make sure you end up in the correct position.
Really, the way to know that you have done these things correctly is to feel as if you have complete control of your opponent with next to no effort. It's so beautiful when done correctly.
Lots of grappling and twisting but thankfully my back is not nearly as sore as I thought it might be.
Aside from the foot work, I'd really like to see us working harder on perfecting individual plays and seeing where we end up going from them. Perhaps doing a full on sequence would be fun. Certainly we are not doing these plays enough to memorize them nor to be able to see the underlying principles. There is also some contamination from the other arts that people have brought with them slipping in.
The class itself was interesting with the expected cross section of esoteric martial art practitioners. We shall see if going back fits into the schedule.
It's Saturday and here i am at work. I think I set off the alarm when I got here by not keying in the correct code. Thankfully, I didn't set it off all the way and the guard who showed up an hour later was pretty blase.
I ended up going out to the Fiore class last night. Not bad. We started working our way through the dagger plays. As is almost always the case, when things weren't working right, we took another look at the book and discovered that we were doing it wrong. There were still a bunch of things that were awkward but I think that that is mostly because of our inconsistent footwork. Without knowing where to step for a particular move or what position to step from it's hard to make sure you end up in the correct position.
Really, the way to know that you have done these things correctly is to feel as if you have complete control of your opponent with next to no effort. It's so beautiful when done correctly.
Lots of grappling and twisting but thankfully my back is not nearly as sore as I thought it might be.
Aside from the foot work, I'd really like to see us working harder on perfecting individual plays and seeing where we end up going from them. Perhaps doing a full on sequence would be fun. Certainly we are not doing these plays enough to memorize them nor to be able to see the underlying principles. There is also some contamination from the other arts that people have brought with them slipping in.
The class itself was interesting with the expected cross section of esoteric martial art practitioners. We shall see if going back fits into the schedule.