Pinky and the Brain

Last night seemed hot. I was really tired. Half way through training, my wrist started hurting, my left hand index finger got hit again, and my right ankle felt like it was going to fall off! Man I’m getting too old for this shit. 5 years ago, such injuries wouldn’t mean shit to me, they’d just heal in about a week and that was that, now little injuries like these seem to linger around a bit longer than they should.

Menstuke, and I’ve kinda given up the race. Ever since sensei picked up my ‘ever so slightly uneven’ men himo, I’ve been rather self conscious about it, and have made sure that they’re properly tied every time. I’m still always one of the first two up anyway…

I’ve been told this a few times before, but it was really driven home to me by Tom during jigeiko… that my cuts are too soft. During my fight with him, I wasn’t concentrating on anything, I treated it a bit like a rematch of our UMKC championship match. Got a couple of good cuts on him, but don’t think he was going all out. Got a nice men cut on him, which he said was really well timed, and a nuki dou cut, which he wasn’t expecting, hehe. I’ve decided to throw one or two dou cuts in during jigeiko now, rather than just using plain old men all the time. Been focussing on making it look like my men cuts but then cutting dou on the down swing. Still can’t do a kaeshi dou though.

Against the other partners, I concentrated on keeping my posture straight, and trying to give my cuts a bit more oomph. I think its true that men can’t multitask, because when I focussed on my posture, I felt a bit flat footed, and my cuts were soft, when I focussed on making more impact with my cuts, I inevitably leaned a bit forward. Bah. I felt good fighting one of the juniors though. For most of the fight, I just focussed on posture and kamae, and tried to open every now and then to let him cut, or seme in for him to react and cut. Then towards the end of the fight, I started making proper cuts, and they were all landing. Hmm, didn’t realise the gap was so different, but I guess its like when I go up against Pai Mei, the gap is somewhat the same, like he can cut at will.

Eager to correct my pathetically soft cuts, I approached sensei after training and asked for his advice. He told me to improve the ‘snap’ at the end of my cut by using my pinky finger. Also need to really push off with my leg to get that feeling of a snap. Other than that, he said he’ll have to see what I’m doing during training to give more advice. I think I’ll try the pinky finger thing for tonights training, and also try to use my brain so that I'm able to do more than one thing at a time.