He Jinbao and Matt Bild just left Knoxville yesterday morning after our first-ever, mostly successful seminar! The intensity of training was maintained at a pretty high level for most of the workshop, even if our attendance was a bit on the low side. All-in-all, though, I'm quite happy with our first stab at hosting those fine folks.
As for what was covered, it was a beautiful blend of solid foundational practices, with fantastic attention to small details, and some really new stuff: kicking practices courtesy of the Monkey System, which are completely different from essentially everything else that we've done in our trainings in the past.
I had a lot of time to think about things before and after the training sessions, and I think that the seminar itself provided me with a number of interesting topics to talk about in the near future on here, hopefully some stuff that will really help some folks out there with the training.
Probably, if anything, the only down-side to the entire ordeal was that our attendance was rather low. Recruiting for one of these things is apparently fairly difficult despite Jinbao's level of expertise. Thus, for the next year, because they will be back next year and we'd like to see a better turnout, we'll be trying to get around and introduce this art to folks via very affordable seminars.
This particular workshop seemed to strengthen our group, though, not just in terms of our training and knowledge but also in terms of numbers. Hopefully I didn't misread things when some of the folks that attended the seminar asked many very curious questions about our study group.
2 comments:
Congratulations, Jim. I know you and Bradley and Rand put a lot of work into organizing and hosting the event. In Portland they had about 10 people for their first-ever seminar with He Jinbao. Unfortunately, they were not able to get anyone down from Seattle, but hopefully with a year to work on it, that will change.
The Portland folks have a couple of "mini" study groups, one that practices 4-6 p.m. Wednesdays and Sunday mornings 9:30 a.m. to about noon, and then another that gets together every weekday morning around 8:00 a.m. The participants with each group overlap; it provides a variety of times for people to work together.
Brilliant stuff Jim congrats to you and Brad.
Must say I'm curious about the monkey kicking stuff.
Lambizzle.
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