More Pivoting

Never miss an opportunity to rework an idea. Never milk an idea so hard you burn out on it. Never be afraid to change the drills behind the idea while leaving the idea itself intact.

Which means back to pivoting for the kids at Lewis. Instead of pivoting in Mo Yee Do, they got to work on pivoting for their kicks. We went through four kicks today: knee kick, front snap kick, roundhouse kick and side thrust kick. The lovely part about doing them in that order is that build nicely.

Knee kick becomes the chamber for the rest of the kick. The shuffle up and chamber is the same for the latter three kicks. And finally, the pivot is the same for the roundhouse and the side thrust kick.

Why pivot? Because without it there is much less power to a kick. Imagine a pitcher throwing a baseball without moving his lower body. No doubt they could throw the ball, but how much slower would it be? Removing the pivot from the roundhouse or the side thrust does the same thing: it takes away the ability of the hips to swing through.

For conditioning I stole Sifu Kyle’s baseball game. You take 4 “bases” (cones, focus pads, whatever) and assign one kick to each base. The students have to do 3 of the specified kick at the base in order to move on to the next base. If they get all the way around then they score a run. If their kicking form suffers, they get a warning. If it continues, they get an “out” and must start their current run over again. The object is to see how many runs they can score in 5 minutes.