November 14th - Hapkido

Had an early morning class today with 2 other students (Anand and Greg).  Anand requested that we work on some striking of the pads today so I tried to work that into my plan as I drove to the Dojang.  For a warm-up I had them do some of the forward and backward rolls with a low profile that we've been doing in Jiu-Jitsu lately.  Then we did several rounds of the Bas Rutten workout where I call out numbers and say sprawl or back fall and they try to keep up.  I participated in some of this but kept my sprawling to a minimum. 

Our next exercise was to work on defense against multiple opponents.  I usually like to have at least 4 people for this but 3 will do.  I grabbed a kicking shield and a couple of hand pads and handed them out.  The person in the middle is the defender and it is their job to move around the room and strike the pads as they come into range.  The people with the pads are trying to touch the defender.  So it can be quite cardio intensive.  The best strategy is to try to move so the attackers get in each others' way.  So going in between is not always the best idea.

For the second round we removed the hand pads and had the attacker be a grappler instead.  This added a different dynamic as the grappler could tie up the defender and allow the attacker with the pads to get some shots in.  It seemed like some good lessons were learned by everyone and there was a short discussion about multiple attackers and what not to do. 

We ended the class with some roundhouse kick defenses.  I built off of the basic Hapkido kicking block to finally doing a throw spinning sweep kind of technique detailed in the video below that I made back in 2008.  I'm glad I've lost some weight since then.