This week's focus is jumping and landing. Tuesday night, we had a very interesting warm up with QM of all different kinds up and down the room: forwards, backwards, sideways, monkey/kong, and create your own. We focused a lot on form which I haven't thought about as much since I learned QM movement. Our instructor for the night, P, went over the purpose of QM and the scenarios we might be in when we would want to use it. We talked about our center of gravity and stability and I think this helped all of us a lot in thinking about our QM form.
After the warm up, we moved on to our focus for the first hour: dive rolls! Dive rolls are really important because sometimes you get caught up in something and you need to be able to fall into a roll from higher up and/or farther out. Like when you're doing running rail precisions from max distance and your foot gets caught on the rail and you go plummeting towards the ground. If you don't roll properly or to the right side, you might smack your head on the ground and get a concussion. Not that I know through experience...
We had a couple of blocks set up in front of the big mat to start so we could get comfortable with the idea of diving and rolling. Then we increased the height. Once we were all comfortable with this, P wanted to simulate the tripping/falling scenario which is when we might use a dive roll. He started by having us kneel on the blocks and then fall forwards and roll to one side or the other, depending on what he called out as we fell. Some of us took too long staring at the ground on the other side, not wanting to fall which gave P an idea. He told us to line up again and just vault over the blocks. Then P grabbed a foam roller and sat next to the blocks with an evil smile. The first person started running, and P clipped their feet with the foam roller mid-vault, forcing them to use their dive-roll instincts. We were all laughing hysterically. Until it was our turn. I was so scared of getting hit that when P yelled out as he swung his foam roller-bat, I jumped right over it and rolled anyways, essentially tripping over the air. He continued his tripping method for a few rounds and then we moved the mat away and went back to tripping ourselves or falling from the top of the blocks into our roll.
We moved the class downstairs afterwards to work on some power jumps. P had a mini course set up with some boxes leading up to a gap with a tall box on the other side. We took turns experimenting with different speeds as we ran across the boxes into a cat leap across the gap. Then P would make the gap a little wider, and a little wider. I had enough space for about 3 or 4 steps before taking off from one foot and flying through the air to my cat position on the tall box. Every time I landed it, I had a huge smile on my face, pumped up for the next round. Ready for P to move it just a few inches farther away. I couldn't get enough of that feeling of flying through the air. That moment when I was just soaring - like when Dad would push us on the tire swing and it would go so high the rope was horizontal, or even higher. But instead of swinging back down with a tire underneath me, I came back to reality when my feet hit the wall and I absorbed the impact, hanging out in my cat position for a second. Then I'd pop down and get ready for the next round.
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