Bartitsu and the JiuJitsuffragettes

My legs were like lead in this morning's kids classes, I don't think I warmed up properly until we'd been going for about 2 hours - obviously a week off on a business trip hasn't done me much good.

We've decided to have a grading in 3 weeks time, for the kids, the kick-boxers and the lower kung fu grades. Getting these disparate groups together and grading them all within a 3 hour period will be a bit of a challenge - T and I need to figure out a plan, particularly regarding what to do with the littler kids who don't know much of the syllabus yet (and also have a short attention span!)

Went through plenty of wing chun 2-person drills again today after the kids had gone, culminating in some wing chun sparring, which I really enjoy. Then I started learning a new single person form using a stick, just the first few moves today but it's nice to have something new to work on.

Whilst searching for a suitable picture of stick fighting, I came across this, which appears to be an old form of mixed martial arts for the victorian/edwardian gentlemen.

After the class T was pondering whether to incorporate more of the 5-animal forms into the kids syllabus instead of the more modern wushu forms we do at the moment...I'd like it if it did go that way as eventually I'd get to do a sai set which I've always wanted to learn.

The bad news is that it looks like Master Wu isn't going to make it up to Nottingham on his brief UK tour next month. So if I want to do one of the seminars it looks like a trip to Southampton or Bristol will be needed.