New rolling drills! Courtesy of Hugh and Martial Science...er...still not sure exactly what to call it. Anyway. The interesting contrast between how he was trained and how we used to train at Ko Sho is in the further development of rolls - the basic idea is the nigh exactly the same, but in these new drills specific attributes are trained one by one. The trick with the old Ko Sho way of teaching is that it would just be the basic technique, and then any furthering of attributes lost the basic technique in (sloppily) straining for the attribute - with these, if the basic technique is not maintained, knotted shoulders and faceplanting results.

-for timing, there's rolling past a sword swung back and forth and low to the
ground, and then up and down in a vertical plane, then an alternation of the two; seems mind-numbingly simple, but can be annoying, initially
-for distance, the roll is done past an object that is moved a little further away each time; we were surprised at the distance we could achieve, more than we thought possible
-for height there's jumping over a sword held horizontally (Hugh could do chin-high gracefully), and conversely there's extending and...well, morphing a roll to fit under the same, held lower and lower; for the former, like the distance drill it's great for teaching controlling the initial contact with the ground with the arms held at a proper 45 and flowing into the roll, and for the latter, it starts to teach deciding how and when to contort the body, for example by elongating and yet keeping the roll tight
-for diving, there's leaping through a 'window' composed of two swords held horizontally; again, it's interesting to learn to consciously decide when to shift the body's form, this time in mid-air
--of course, with any contact with the obstacles in question, there's a recquisite ten pushups, natch

So, basically, that's a whole lot of new (and yet old, in a sense) skills to develop. Which is totally awesome. It really is interesting to see how much every single one of those drills is practically ninety percent mental, as we could all do the individual things fine....it was just the fear/hesitation/not believing in ourselves that would hinder us, and it was obvious that was the only issue.

Random trivia of the day, from wiki - the native mammal fauna of Puerto Rico consists exclusively of bats! Of course, upon further reading, it's revealed that there were other little thangs like rodents and such that are now extinct, but imagine taking that statement entirely wrong and picture Bat Island. Like King Kong, but with wings. Or Hitchcock's Birds, but with fruitbats stealing your mangos. Why yes, I am that badass at coming up with ideas, thank you.