The fine line...

We now have a ten week period in front of us in which we want to get ready for a bout that's important to us and having been to the bootcamp with Swede and Loony I have a much better view on which "old" things we can improve on without getting into some new stuff. Let's not run before we can crawl, sort of. Well.. we can crawl, quite well, but let's be the best at crawling efficiently, beautifully, powerfully and perfectly balanced before we start running.

So five days ago we had our first real training of the new year. Badass had booked the hall for two hours which I love. Two hours is just perfect! You can focus on individual physical training (fitness and strength) as well as have time to do some team or tactical training. But since we were going to focus on "crawling" first we didn't do much tactical training this time. I had set a challenge to myself: design a training that would make everybody feel like they wanted to either die or punch me in the face but still design and execute it in such a way that EVERYbody would participate from start to finish (and thus feel great about accomplishing that). Judging from this post by MADicken, a declaration of love from Badass and the posts on Facebook, I succeeded. Yay!

This first period within the 10 week period will be a tough one. We have to improve our derby stance. We have been lazy and assumed it was only the freshies that needed to get lower, but we all need to get lower (me most of all).

This on skates, with your arms close to your body comes close to derby stance.

To be able to hold this form, you need a super strong core, so the training was directed both at training the core sections individually and doing drills in this position (to train all the muscles involved at once and to train the movement memory). Of course you need the thighs and the ass as well, but those tend to get trained by regular non- specific skating training anyways without noticing ;).

I was so proud of all that were there. Everybody fought to the end. It's nice to succeed in creating a training that dances on that fine line of wanting to die an early death vs completing.

Tomorrow is another two hour training... I wonder what I will come up with now...