Went to leadership seminar again tonight. Nothing earth-shattering... a few announcements about happenings in the school, and then we practiced some of the self-defense moves... 1-13 of 28. "Self-defense" is strictly a sparring term here, and everything's following Olympic sparring rules. No grabs, holds, take-downs, throws, joint-locks, or any of that stuff. Lots and lots of kicks. (Whaddaya think this is, taekwondo or something?) After that, went to the adults-only class that's offered most evenings. I like the adults-only classes. They work us hard, and it's a high-energy class. The standards are higher and it's generally a lot of fun. I like that I can pretty-much pick and choose how much of a workout I'm going to get by which class I go to. I know that if I go to the adults class or the noon class I'm going to get a strenuous workout, while if I go to the belt-specific one it'll be a lot more technical yet less real work. And so on. I can have a little bit of control over my workouts by planning for easy or hard ones in turns.

Hi, Bernie! Good to see you. You're right - each style has a specialty and offers something different. When I was in high school, I took karate. And my teacher told me that taekwondo specialized in kicking and that if you wanted to get good at kicking (only) you should take taekwondo. I've found that my hand techniques have really suffered, my street-fighting is entry-level, but I've learned some really cool ways to kick. Since martial arts has been largely sport, stress relief, and exercise to ME, I'm okay with that mix. There's something really cool about being able to do spinning kicks at head-height... even if you'd be dead if you tried to use them in a "real" fight.