morgothan’s kung fu repository

Below is the response of my instructor to the question of how well he thought I did yesterday. He names a few students in the school so I replaced there names with [Student] or [Instructor], as I do not know that they would want there names posted, however the rest of the message is left unchanged.

You did fairly well last night. For a little while during the fight I
was focusing more on not getting hit by you because you were hitting
with a closed fist and I didn’t feel comfortable with your level of
control. I think that your workout prior to our session was a large
factor as far as your control was concerned. Your technique is pretty
good, especially for someone with only a couple years of training under
their belt. There are probably only a handful of people in the school
who I feel would have an advantage over you. Besides Sifu, [Instructor] and
myself I would say that [Student] (when he is around) is pretty good. [Student]
isn’t bad, but I haven’t worked with him in a while so I can’t really
comment on how I think he feels. Believe it or not, [Student] is
actually a pretty good guy to play with too. He’s tense, but has
remarkable control.

So, I’d say the biggest thing to work on would be to relax, but that’s
really what I tell everyone. It’s a hard thing to learn on your own
because if you are anything like what I was like in my first few years
then you probably feel like you ARE relaxed and you wish people would
stop telling you that you aren’t. Once you start to relax you will find
a couple of people that you will fight with that will seem tense to you.
Then you start to get an understanding of what it is like to relax to
your opponent’s movements. Aside from that you’ll need to integrate the
right-hand side of your body into your fighting. Inexperienced fighters
will be eaten alive by your left, but if you come up against someone who
knows what they’re doing they will pick up on the fact that you fight
heavily left-handed rather quickly. You started to adjust once I
pointed it out, so that’s good. It’s just something to be cognizant of.
You’ll notice that every time you went to deliver a right hand to the
head early on I would have a hand waiting there for you.

But all in all you did well. You could definitely take most of the guys
in the shaolin classes…