Training Camp Day 1

I just finished my first day of Cuong Nhu International Annual Training Camp.  For an overview of this event, see this post I wrote last year.

I decided to do grappling training for the first two sessions. Grappling is best done when you are fresh, and as someone pointed out, grappling on the first session is best because nobody's gi has had the time to get really sweaty and nasty.  At the end of the second session, we did free wrestling and the instructor ran the gauntlet of four students who were once high school wrestlers. He defeated all of them, but was barely able to move afterwards.

In the evening, we watched the tests for upper rank black belts.  The main parts of the test are board breaking and a demonstration.  A good demonstration is like a fight scene in a martial arts movie, and people always like watching them.  Board breaking requires the candidate to break five or six sets of boards in a short period of time, and is equally impressive to watch.  There is a lot of audience participation on these, because each set of boards requires two to four people to hold them. Knowing how to hold the boards properly is a skill in and of itself, and I am pretty good at it, so I ended up holding boards for most of the candidates.

Two of my teachers were testing for higher ranks, and both of them did extremely well on the demo and breaks.