So on the Advice of My Awesome Wife...
...I'm going to try to blog a little more about JKD.
Last night's class was fun, but a little frustrating. Fun in that I finally got to practice something I really, really wanted to learn, frustrating in that I kinda suck at certain aspects of the process. The first thing we worked on was what to me is a signature JKD "thing" which is a very specific destruction. A destruction, for those of you that care and don't already know, is a defensive move that not only keeps you from getting hit, it takes the weapon that was trying to hit you out of the fight. In this case we were defending against a jab to the face by falling back a step, throwing an elbow up in front of our nose and maybe trying to guide the punch onto the elbow (or maybe not, it's not that important to the destruction). It sounds tricky, but really, all you need to do is get out of the range f the punch (actually the part I was having trouble with) and put your elbow up in front of your nose. You don't have to aim, your opponent WILL hit it. And when they do it will hurt their hand a lot. It's cool. Would have been cooler if I cold tie my footwork and the gate movements together to keep it solid, but I guess that will come. I was able to do each segment of the drill individually, but tying them together just didn't quite happen. I was getting closer near the end, but I never got it down. My instinct is to use the destruction offensively and follow-up, for which I feel like I ought to stay put and lunge forward, not fall back. Maybe that's valid in certain contexts, but it isn't what we were being taught, so I was a little frustrated, but as I said, I feel like it will come. My brain GETS it, I just need the body to follow suit.
Oh, yeah and at the end of this drill, in order to get me to remember to pull back my lead foot Makoto told the feeders to take a shin kick at the leg if it was left out there. Three things happened here that were pretty cool. The first was that it was REALLY intuitive while I was feeding to follow up with that kick and I got a few good shots in while doing it, so that felt good. The second was that after we had done it this way for a while, Makoto threw in a destruction for the incoming kick as well and that was pretty intuitive for me. So much so that I really nailed one of my training partners. Not enough to do damage, since we were really only working it slow and the destruction uses his own force to hurt him. Cool feeling to get it right. The last one was having that same destruction hit me hard. I'm still limping a little today, but it's a good feeling. Really drives home that the stuff I'm learning works. If I had been swinging a full-on kick, I might have busted my shin.
The next drill was a Filipino hook, out of Kali, I think. Neat move too. A little awkward to get since it's the movement of the body that achieves the strike and not the movement of the arm. There's almost no "swing" on the punch, you just side-step deep and hard and make a tiny slapping motion as your body passes your target. The effect is startlingly powerful, but again I was having a bit of trouble on a couple of fronts. First (and this continued to be a problem, though it lessened as we repeated the drill) I kept dropping my off hand from the JKD "Gate" to the Shoto-Khan "Chambered Fist" position, which in this instance is kind of like saying "Hey, I know I just hit you really hard in the head, so why not just punch me back right HERE?" as opposed to the normal JKD thing which is "Ha-ha sucker! Whatcha gonna do now? Can't touch me, fool!(bob-bob-weave-shuffle-bob-weave-bob-deke)" The second thing, and this seems to be endemic for me, is that my footwork wasn't moving straight left to right, but was instinctively moving back on a quarter angle, which sort of force me to turn and threw my whole structure out of line. Thirdly, I just recalled that I was having some trouble transiting from gate to "Gate" to striking pose with my arms. A little frustrating, but the guy I was working this with (Ken) was AWESOME. The one time I really drove the hit home he just kinda chuckled with pleasure, shook his hand that was holding the pad out and said "Yeeeah, guy!" and nodded. Very encouraging, even though I left that drill unsatisfied.
The last thing we worked on was an evolution of the hook above, where the strike was used to drive an opponent's gate off-line, so that we could follow up with a Wing-Chun-like series of straight blasts. This one was fun and I feel like though I wasn't perfect at it, I obtained reasonable facility. When I knocked my opponent's gate off-line, I was in a perfect position to follow-up with a throat punch, followed by a shot to the jaw, followed by a shot to the temple. It felt pretty good after a class of feeling like I was bumbling around trying to break old fighting style habits and work in new ones.
Last night's class was fun, but a little frustrating. Fun in that I finally got to practice something I really, really wanted to learn, frustrating in that I kinda suck at certain aspects of the process. The first thing we worked on was what to me is a signature JKD "thing" which is a very specific destruction. A destruction, for those of you that care and don't already know, is a defensive move that not only keeps you from getting hit, it takes the weapon that was trying to hit you out of the fight. In this case we were defending against a jab to the face by falling back a step, throwing an elbow up in front of our nose and maybe trying to guide the punch onto the elbow (or maybe not, it's not that important to the destruction). It sounds tricky, but really, all you need to do is get out of the range f the punch (actually the part I was having trouble with) and put your elbow up in front of your nose. You don't have to aim, your opponent WILL hit it. And when they do it will hurt their hand a lot. It's cool. Would have been cooler if I cold tie my footwork and the gate movements together to keep it solid, but I guess that will come. I was able to do each segment of the drill individually, but tying them together just didn't quite happen. I was getting closer near the end, but I never got it down. My instinct is to use the destruction offensively and follow-up, for which I feel like I ought to stay put and lunge forward, not fall back. Maybe that's valid in certain contexts, but it isn't what we were being taught, so I was a little frustrated, but as I said, I feel like it will come. My brain GETS it, I just need the body to follow suit.
Oh, yeah and at the end of this drill, in order to get me to remember to pull back my lead foot Makoto told the feeders to take a shin kick at the leg if it was left out there. Three things happened here that were pretty cool. The first was that it was REALLY intuitive while I was feeding to follow up with that kick and I got a few good shots in while doing it, so that felt good. The second was that after we had done it this way for a while, Makoto threw in a destruction for the incoming kick as well and that was pretty intuitive for me. So much so that I really nailed one of my training partners. Not enough to do damage, since we were really only working it slow and the destruction uses his own force to hurt him. Cool feeling to get it right. The last one was having that same destruction hit me hard. I'm still limping a little today, but it's a good feeling. Really drives home that the stuff I'm learning works. If I had been swinging a full-on kick, I might have busted my shin.
The next drill was a Filipino hook, out of Kali, I think. Neat move too. A little awkward to get since it's the movement of the body that achieves the strike and not the movement of the arm. There's almost no "swing" on the punch, you just side-step deep and hard and make a tiny slapping motion as your body passes your target. The effect is startlingly powerful, but again I was having a bit of trouble on a couple of fronts. First (and this continued to be a problem, though it lessened as we repeated the drill) I kept dropping my off hand from the JKD "Gate" to the Shoto-Khan "Chambered Fist" position, which in this instance is kind of like saying "Hey, I know I just hit you really hard in the head, so why not just punch me back right HERE?" as opposed to the normal JKD thing which is "Ha-ha sucker! Whatcha gonna do now? Can't touch me, fool!(bob-bob-weave-shuffle-bob-weave-bob-deke)" The second thing, and this seems to be endemic for me, is that my footwork wasn't moving straight left to right, but was instinctively moving back on a quarter angle, which sort of force me to turn and threw my whole structure out of line. Thirdly, I just recalled that I was having some trouble transiting from gate to "Gate" to striking pose with my arms. A little frustrating, but the guy I was working this with (Ken) was AWESOME. The one time I really drove the hit home he just kinda chuckled with pleasure, shook his hand that was holding the pad out and said "Yeeeah, guy!" and nodded. Very encouraging, even though I left that drill unsatisfied.
The last thing we worked on was an evolution of the hook above, where the strike was used to drive an opponent's gate off-line, so that we could follow up with a Wing-Chun-like series of straight blasts. This one was fun and I feel like though I wasn't perfect at it, I obtained reasonable facility. When I knocked my opponent's gate off-line, I was in a perfect position to follow-up with a throat punch, followed by a shot to the jaw, followed by a shot to the temple. It felt pretty good after a class of feeling like I was bumbling around trying to break old fighting style habits and work in new ones.