I had a full four hours dedicated to
hapkido training this weekend and, for me, it was a chance to reconnect a bit.
For long periods of time recently, forcing myself to train has been a bit of a chore. It’s nothing to do with hapkido or any sort of falling out of love with it either. For the past three years, I’ve simply faced huge additional demands at work and that pressure has squeezed my free time elsewhere, and it’s affected pretty much every aspect of my life, from my family to my writing, and from my pool playing to my fledgling attempts at learning BJJ.
I have, however, managed to retain some type of weekly hapkido training schedule and my progress has maybe not been spectacular but it has steady.
So this weekend was a time to spend a precious four hours in the dojang with my teacher and my fellow students and it was hugely enjoyable. It involved basic principles such as nailing down the fundamentals of base and balance, some work on retaining hip integrity during roundhouse kicks, and some work on employing one technique to open up others.
On the last point, we took the principle of the standing armbar and hyper-extending a joint and employed it with a thumb lock from a handshake to a kneebar from several takedowns. We even played with a rolling kneebar at one point.
We also did some sensitivity drills. This involved running through a series of wrist locks to defend wrist grabs, then repeating the exercise wearing blindfolds and executing the wristlocks bereft of the visual stimulus.
It was solid training time and a chance to reconnect mentally as well as physically with a lot of hapkido principles and techniques. It was like catching up with an old friend who’s always about but you haven’t properly seen in a while.
It also reminded me that, after about 13 years of training, I should be much better at this by now. But I'm still managing to be an OK black belt and, at 46, I’m still training and learning and, with pressing time demands elsewhere, I’ll settle for that. For now.
For long periods of time recently, forcing myself to train has been a bit of a chore. It’s nothing to do with hapkido or any sort of falling out of love with it either. For the past three years, I’ve simply faced huge additional demands at work and that pressure has squeezed my free time elsewhere, and it’s affected pretty much every aspect of my life, from my family to my writing, and from my pool playing to my fledgling attempts at learning BJJ.
I have, however, managed to retain some type of weekly hapkido training schedule and my progress has maybe not been spectacular but it has steady.
So this weekend was a time to spend a precious four hours in the dojang with my teacher and my fellow students and it was hugely enjoyable. It involved basic principles such as nailing down the fundamentals of base and balance, some work on retaining hip integrity during roundhouse kicks, and some work on employing one technique to open up others.
On the last point, we took the principle of the standing armbar and hyper-extending a joint and employed it with a thumb lock from a handshake to a kneebar from several takedowns. We even played with a rolling kneebar at one point.
We also did some sensitivity drills. This involved running through a series of wrist locks to defend wrist grabs, then repeating the exercise wearing blindfolds and executing the wristlocks bereft of the visual stimulus.
It was solid training time and a chance to reconnect mentally as well as physically with a lot of hapkido principles and techniques. It was like catching up with an old friend who’s always about but you haven’t properly seen in a while.
It also reminded me that, after about 13 years of training, I should be much better at this by now. But I'm still managing to be an OK black belt and, at 46, I’m still training and learning and, with pressing time demands elsewhere, I’ll settle for that. For now.
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