After a brief break following the morning classes last Saturday, we reconvened at the Haywards Heath hall for 3 hours of kung fu training.
Spending the afternoon working on extra-curricular activities, is a great enhancement to our regular training.
We spent some time working on San Zhan, the first kung fu form from the syllabus, and explored keeping a strong rooted stance with some partnered exercises. The first part of the afternoon was spent doing some light open hand sparring, using movements and techniques of the crane.
After a brief break we resumed to go through a praying mantis kung fu form. It’s a really good fun form to learn and has some very dramatic movements, as well as being practical for self defence.
After learning the form, students were given the chance to work on some martial applications before more open hand sparring, this time we added an element of excitement by sparring with crane v mantis. We later added tiger. All of this gave the open hand sparring a real edge and was great to see lots of new techniques being put into practice.
The last hour of the afternoon was spent training the Chinese straight sword, we built up from warm up exercises with the sword, to techniques, partnered exercises and finished the afternoon with sword sparring, which is always great training and great fun! – especially when sparring in teams or all against all!
