Scissors and Puppets

It’s hard to think of a more obvious push/pull motion that the scissor sweep.  You push with one leg and pull with the other, causing your partner to fall over.  Maybe what is more interesting is what one of the kids noticed today – that your arms and legs are connected, almost like the wooden rods of an old-fashioned puppet.  As you sweep with the legs, you rotate the arms.  We call it “turning the bus”.  By grabbing your partners arms and turning, you accelerate the motion of the sweep with your legs.

As the night continued, the puppet idea struck me as extremely relevant to forms class.  We talked about the mechanics of a right handed punch in the following terms:

• Right hand pushes forward
• Left hand pulls back
• The right hip is “connected” to the right hand and is pushed forward
• The left hip is connected to the left hand and pulls back

We put extra emphasis on the “pulling back” of the left hip because well – it’s a different way of looking at things and sometimes it is these different ways of looking at things (like imagining we are puppets with rods running from our hands to our hips) that helps us move forward in our training.

Check out the adults feedback here.