What’s going on? I’ve been pretty regular with posting here lately, I think secretly I just like looking at the new theme and want to see some words up there 😉
We did an entirely forms-based session at Tang Soo Do last night which got my brain working as much as the rest of me. For my next grading I need to be up-to-speed on every form I’ve learned already and two new ones, namely Naihanchi Cho Dan and Sip Soo. That means I’m up to eleven forms now, and while I used to be quite proud of myself for knowing every move, every transition, every part of a form. Not that I could actually do it that well, there’s a big difference between knowing and doing, but now with having so many to remember and to perform to a supposedly high standard I’m finding myself messing up or forgetting small pieces in some of the forms I don’t practise as often as I should. To my mind, these are the worst kind of mistakes to make. No two people are the same in terms of physical attributes and abilities, so it’s understandable that some people are simply unable to kick as high as others for example, but there’s no excuse for forgetting things. With a very small amount of exceptions, everyone is capable of remembering their forms, of knowing the correct sequence for il soo sik dae ryun, it’s just a case of devoting concentration and attention to detail. It’s natural to forget the odd thing or two, after all we don’t train for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week – we work instead – but regularly forgetting large chunks is indicative of not using enough of our smarts. It’s easy to tell in a lesson who is physically working hard and who isn’t, but mental work is much harder to quantify at the time. It’s only through on-the-spot testing and gradings that this can be checked. As someone who feels far more mentally able than physically, you might start to see why a lesson like the one last night (or more accurately my performance in said lesson) irks me so much.
Onwards and upwards.