Here’s the link that I used to pick out my kick: https://youtu.be/gXLHXfg-Qwo. It also includes a very helpful tutorial that I will be following. After watching this video I realized that I had been missing a super important step before practicing all my kicks. I had been forgetting to stretch prior to training, and that is definitely not good. As Master Chong says in the video, stretching and warming up before training are essential to making sure you prevent injuries and perform your very best. So, before training, I stretched and warmed up. Then everything went downhill pretty quickly. I started off by learning the basic steps in order to do the first motion in the kick. My attempts at it were not the best as you can see in the video, but they weren’t as bad as my attempt at the second motion—the spin. As I look back on my video and my attempts at the spin, I realized that my arms were in the wrong position the entire time. My arms should have been more horizontal, and more spread apart to look like an equal symbol. Also, I was relying on only one of my arms to create power/force, but instead, I should have been using both arms. Then, I moved on to the kick, just for fun. My first attempts at the Cheat 900/720 were absolutely horrendous. My motions were very choppy and slow, however, today is the first day trying this kick, so I’m not that upset about it. As I picked this kick, I expected it to be a lot more advanced than the tornado, as I wanted to build my skills even more by doing a harder kick, however, I certainly didn’t expect it to be this difficult.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_cqE9MFrIt0YMtJ2cSOIK8LwEE176Ydu/view?usp=sharing

Here are my arms while doing the spin:

Here is how they were supposed to look like:

See you next blog!

Last blog, I practiced the swing leading into the kick, and that practice payed off, as I was able to do it pretty good (at least I think I did). After that, I practiced the rest of the kick, but I still had some things to say about myself. So, today I just practiced the kick again and again, determined to only stop when I felt I had actually acheived something. After 30 minutes of dedication, I did it. Well, to the best of my abilities, anyway. I was surprised to say that this kick was actually a lot harder than I thought. I did not expect it to take me this long to successfully do the kick! My kick certainly was not as fast as the tutorial, but I feel my technique and form is quite good. Also, in the tutorial, the boy did more of a crescent turning kick, but I’m doing more of a snapping one (this is on purpose), so I can see how that can make the kicks look different from each other. Now that I feel I have accomplished this task and successfully learnt the kick, I’ll be moving onto another kick. One that is harder, and more challenging for me.

Here’s the video of my successful attempt (and some not so successful attempts) at the tornado kick!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tcJlg1jeqpS6EDXrF2CbATJR0jf296lv/view?usp=sharing

See you next blog!