Poster Girl

Good Kung Fu class on Thursday night, first teaching some biu jeet, then the first char chui 2-person drill and then a short mantis 2-person thing I don't have a name for. Afterwards T, N and I went through the bokken versus pole a few times, then down to Tai Chi.

2-person pole work in tai chi, with D making me work really hard on technique (which is good, because I tend to coast a little bit when we do pole in tai chi because I know it pretty well). Plenty of focus on waist-turning and using technique and speed rather than arm strength.

Then a little pa kua, concentrating on the two new changes we've learnt (unfortunately I don't know what either of them are called, so they just have the stupid names I've made up for them in my head - "the swimming one" and "exploding monkey").

Then D called me and a couple of the others over to one side in order to take some photos of us for the poster and leaflet campaign in Derby for the new classes. So it looks like I might be the poster girl for kung fu, striking a very fetching pose with my pole - just call me the monkey king......

Reminiscing

Thursday night was a grading for the adult beginners. Around 20 grading in all, going for 3 grades - yellow, green and blue. T used all the students above these grades to help out with the teaching (well, revising) that went on during the evening - I was assigned to the yellow-to-green group, which meant plenty of work on Chang Chuan, the first proper two person set (which I think is called char chui?), Mantis San Sau, chi nar locks and the first stick set.

At the end we went back to the way beginner gradings used to be back when I was doing them, in that we all sat down and watched just those people grading going through their form. A welcome change from the more recent trend of everyone who knows the form going through it together. It's undoubtedly a bit more stressful for the gradees - but as T pointed out afterwards, if you were ever called on to use the martial arts in a real situation, that would be pretty stressful too.