June 1 Retrospective: The HKC Victory.

Of 30 participants, I made it.

The day was plenty grueling. The test consists of several major elements: the swing, the get up, and the goblet squat. The two instructors, Andrew Reade and Joe Chalakee, both senior RKC instructors, were excellent and gifted instructors, showing us a very promising finish to a rather grueling day of pushing the gamut, so to speak.

We started with an eloquently executed progression that began with the proper alignment for a dead lift. We learned the difference between the pull and the grind. (Pulls are great for metabolic conditioning and endurance, grinds good for resistance training and strength gains, lower body building.) Using sticks to keep the spine completely in alignment and the tailbone lower than the head, is an important step in attaining the 45 degree angles for training that need to be maintained during the exercises. We had a great time building the dead lift and then doing successive exercises with good mornings, dragging the kettle into dead swings and full 2-hand swings.

I had a very entertaining workout partner who had this absolutely gorgeous body, but was too stiff to perform the exercises with grace and fluidity...more proof that the perfect physique is not necessarily anatomically and functionally useful. It was also proof that most people improperly train their bodies, often missing out on the professional help that makes them safe and structurally sound. This staves off injury.

Quite possibly a million reps later, we learned a proper plank, which took me back to my early days of training where we almost clench the flutes and place our heels right next to each other, right and flowing with the natural curve of our spines, drawing everything in so tight that someone could have kicked me and I would have stayed solid. It was awesome....ly hard.

And now even more surprising was that I had been doing the get up a shadow off what it really is supposed to be, but was shown a kicksafe structure that withstood the test of any heavy force coming upon me...a triangular pyramid shape that holds strong, just like a building built on a triangular base. It made a lot more sense than what I was doing before.

Lunch came and went, but I couldn't eat too much because of the examination that was coming. They basically expected perfection, and they were going to get it.

But I was SOOOO SORE!! Oh wow, I don't think I had been fatigued like that since the marathon days...luckily for me, I restate that I was one of the 6 out of 30 who actually made it through. Everyone else had to send in a video of their corrections. Thank goodness I had been practicing.