Here is the plan. I had to consider the ability, and athleticism of the competitors I am training. After those two major points were considered, we put a plan into high speed and got to work.
All 4 athletes are in terrific shape. Their strength is good, and so is their cardio conditioning. Two of the althletes are newer to competition than the others. I was worried that this would disrupt the flow of the training, but found very quickly that our greener athletes are stepping up in a huge way.
The toughest thing to develop in a Taekwondo athlete is timing and recognition ability. Physical conditioning is easy. Getting the student to recognize an attack simply by the beginning movements of their opponents hips is the tough part. Therefore, we did nothing but hogu drills and sparring the first day.
Hogu drills have a few functions to develop: 1. Conditioning the rib cage. 2. Developing range management. 3. Developing recognition ability. For this group, it was #3 that I was interested in. One example of our hogu drills is the simple round kick attack followed by the back kick counter attack. We drilled the most common attacking scenarios with the most appropriate counters. We did this for 1 hour.
The next hour was all sparring. I wanted the group to get in lots of sparring to sharpen timing, and reinforce recognition ability. I know the group only has 7 days to prepare so if they were going to get banged up from sparring, I wanted it to happen 7 days out. This would allow them enough time to heel. Fortunately, everybody walked away 100%.
Day 2 was heavy drilling. We worked the paddles, the hogus, the shields, and the bags. The workout was pretty gruelling and left everyone soaked:)! We finished with 15 minutes of sparring. I rarely opt for no sparring since I believe that timing is something that can be lost quickly. A short sparring segment allows everyone to keep their rhythm.
Respectfully,
Master Richardson
