High Brown Belt Testing

[eternaleponine]

Yesterday I tested for my high brown belt. Once again, I was the only adult testing, due to other obligations (work, a class that couldn't be gotten out of). I'm kind of used to it by now, although Amy did actually test with the group the last couple of times. This time around it wasn't so bad; when we did stuff with partners the kid I ended up

Comments

[tryslora]

Sounds like you'll be getting your black belt before me! I don't know whether to be jealous or awed. :)

The more I hear about your self defense, the more it sounds like you combine what we do for TKD and hapkido (because hapkido has specific self-defense per level, all different defenses, although the knife, gun, and stick progressions are separate for us). I need to get my practice knife that I picked out, actually. It's a metal one, but it's utterly lovely, and I've used one (Mister Mercier had one that I borrowed) and it has the best hand feel. Er. I'm waxing poetic about my knife. I just need to order the damned thing.

[eternaleponine]

If it makes you feel any better, my black belt will be just that - a black belt. We don't get the cool ones with our names on them until we get to second degree.

It's still a bit boggling to me just how different the schools are. It's like 2/3 of our curriculum you guys don't do, and vice versa.

I think that's likely the case. We tend to learn only one way to do something, maybe two (I consistently throw people off because I prefer an alternate two-hand wrist grab to the one that we're required to know), at least at first, and then learn alternates as we go. But it's only part of what we do, as opposed to being the entire focus like in hapkido. I kind of wish we had hapkido, because self-defense is one of the things that I really like.

We have one knife with a (very dull, obviously) metal blade, but it's quite small and I don't like it, because it's hard to get it away from your attacker. The ones that I like look like this one hereWe don't start learning stick defense until black belt. Usually I don't think we learn

[tryslora]

We have one knife just like that one, two sticks, and a plastic yellow gun. We still need to get more things.

We did some stick on Monday! Master Yun decided since it was a small class, and none of the regular instructors were there, he'd teach us a combination of basic defense and basic offense. My son and his friend were reminded NOT to bash each other with sticks. They both actually really enjoyed learning something that was different from their usual.

And oh yes, our schools are SO different. That seems to happen a lot. I talk to folks from other schools all the time who are like "you do what?" and we are the same. It's only when we go to AAU tournaments that I seem to bump into folks with similar focus, and even then we find schools that do point sparring instead of Olympic, and that's a big difference too.

[eternaleponine]

We have two of those knives, the metal one I mentioned, and one other that I don't even really remember what it's like because we never use it. Our plastic gun is orange. We haven't done any defense against sticks yet... although we did one with a wiffle bat once! (I don't remember it now, though... oops!)

What kind of sticks did you use? Ours are about 2' long and maybe an inch around, or a little thicker. The ones he keeps having us use are actually PVC pipe wrapped in electrical tape, but we have wood ones, too.