Per usual, this weekend I had Taekwondo. My expert (my Taekwondo instructor) did not reply to my email, but thankfully in class, he told me that he had seen it but hadn’t had time to reply. So after class, he helped me improve my Tornado kick. Now, you may be wondering why I’m going back to the Tornado kick after already successfully doing it, but I assure you, there are a couple of reasons why.

Remember how I said I had good news last week? I said I’d tell you towards the end of Genius Hour, however, it looks like I’ll have to tell you now. Well, I have a belt test coming up soon (February 11th). I am testing for my black stripe (one belt away from black!), and I am required to do a combination kick/special kick in the test! This is great news because I have already been practicing my Tornado kick for the past couple of months!! I will be using the Tornado kick as my special kick, and to follow it I’ll be doing a roundhouse kick (which makes it a combination kick). I am really happy that I chose to do kicking as my Genius Hour (and that our class ended up doing Genius Hour at all), as this is a huge benefit for me (thanks Mrs. Englot!). Instead of learning a kick in a month and not being able to do it confidently/correctly, I will be going into the belt test with 3 months of experience, along with confidence. Although, this does mean that I will have to drastically alter my plans. Since my belt test is coming up so soon (and so is the end of Genius Hour), I want to have as much time as possible to practice the kick that I will actually be using in it. I will not be using the Cheat 900/720 for my belt test, and I would like to instead improve and perfect the kick that I will be using in it, so unfortunately, I will have to take a pause in learning the Cheat 900/720. So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be working on my Tornado kick followed by the roundhouse kick (combination kick), with the help of my instructor. Oh, and don’t be fooled, in the past weeks of learning the Cheat 900/720, my body seems to have forgotten how to do the Tornado kick like it did before. So in a sense, I’m kind of starting a new kick again.

Here’s the video of my instructor helping me.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tTdFy6DTd1LYvyOhOAQX3_FcMO6X1ARO/view?usp=sharing

How has he helped me so far?

• The actual kick itself is the jumping-turning kick. The kick that I was doing was a jumping-front kick when I really was supposed to do the jumping-turning kick. So, he suggested I turn my hip more. He saw my mistake and pointed it out to me so I was able to see what I was doing wrong and improve.
• After I was able to do the Tornado kick decently enough, he came over and showed me the roundhouse kick and then showed me how to do the Tornado into roundhouse kick combination.

See you next blog!