January 2009

It’s the end of week 20 of my Black Belt preparation. The weeks are ramping up as we come off the summer timetable. Last week included assisting a class on Monday night, a technical class on Tuesday night, Lean’n'fit on Thursday night and 2 1/2 hours of various training on Saturday morning.
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I attended my second Tailwalker training walk on Sunday. We had four starters from our total twelve participants. This was one of the hardest walks in our training schedule; from CP2 (Lysterfield Lake) up to CP3 (Grants Picnic Ground). This was 13.5klms each way, with a gain of about 400m (most in the last 6klms). The day started out cool (16c) and we had pleasant weather up to the top, but as we came down the warmer weather kicked in (about 27c) and it was very hot.
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I’ve always been interested in how people learn things and how I teach to that. I spent many years in the Army and much of that time was devoted to teaching and learning. From early years on the parade ground teaching drill to later years with officer training and teaching classes of cadets tactics and other skills.

The army approach to instruction is very formulaic; there was a set way to teach a class, lesson, skill etc. and you don’t dare change the approach until you really understand why it’s done that way and what the benefits are. You learned very early on the impact of specific phrases or approaches to presenting material that would be the most effective vehicle for students to consume. There were always exceptions and you had to know the signs that indicated students weren’t learning the material and have some other approaches ready to go.
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Ahh the aches and pains of the morning after a hard night at training. Last night was my first “Lean and Fit” class, which focuses on cardio and muscle strength. I was amazed at how much strength I’d lost over the break. Prior to the year ending I could do roughly 35 pushups (knuckles, elbows in) and 80 situps in one go, last night I struggled with half that number. I know my starting point for the next twenty-off weeks.
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Last night was my first night back at (Bushidokan) training. It’s only 22 weeks (roughly) to the Black Belt grading, and about 10 weeks to the candidacy tests (whether we’re allowed to go for Black Belt this time around), so it’s time to start getting into it.

We’re on a limited summertime schedule so last nights class was a mix of all ranks from white to almost black, run by the senior non-black belt student (Jeff). This meant revisiting some basics and a bit of fun. It was sweltering in the dojo so it didn’t take much to start sweating. We did cover some of the ground defence stuff, which is an area I need to put a lot of practice into.

It was interesting to see how the body shaped up after a break over Christmas. Whilst the cardio seemed pretty good with the walking/riding I’ve done over summer, the notice the strength seems to have lost it’s edge; a long bout of pushups and core strength exercise beat me. Time to start the push-ups and sit-ups, as well as getting back into the lean and fit classes.

I also had a bit of residual stiffness, particularly in my shins, from the trailwalk training walk on Sunday. I can see balancing martial arts and trialwalk training will be a challenge until I achieve a reasonable level of fitness. The two are suppose to complement each other, not cancel each other out!