Holy shit you don't allow yawning either? You're the only other person I've ever seen who enforces that. I used knuckle push-ups as the consquence in my classes. Mind you we trained outdoors, so if they had to do it it was either on dirt, or the sidewalk. lol
Man I had days in my class simply dedicated to increasing the pain threshold. That was the beautiful thing about having an upstart class outside the scope of parental regulation. It was almost like Fight Club in all honesty, but this was way before that movie existed.
No parents in this Country "get it." Which is funny because it translates to how a lot of these guys approach their training. In traditional training injury is injury, you just deal with it. You do what your instructor tells you or leave. Your a TKD guy, you ever heard the story of Tan Tao Liang and John Liu? John was one of those students whose parent came to Tan's school and BEGGED him to let John live and train with him (no Father I guess). John saw Tan's kicking ability (Tan can hold his leg up in a standing split as easily as you or I could hold our arm up, and still today even though he's older), and said he would endure any pain to be able to kick like that. So Tan forced him into the splits and broke both his legs. Couldn't walk straight for about 2 years but when he finally healed he had amazing elasticity. John went on to get a victory over Chuck Norris in an open competition, and this was in Chuck's prime.
here's a couple of reference pics. This is Tan:
http://www.firstuniversal.clara.net/sing-lungs_files/flashleg.gif
Here is John Liu:
http://www.kungfufilms.nl/images/John_liu_a.JPG
Kids hear this kind of training today and say shit like "Oh my God that's SOOOO unnecessary, no reason to ever do that, just spar and learn a little Muay Thai and your kicking will be good enough" and all kinds of other things. It's not about wether or not it was necessary, it was about that John had a goal and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. Tan could only show him how he himself got there, and it worked. Can't argue with results. Same was true with myself and my Satanic training methods. My class only met once per week (we were all young and in school at the time), so sessions were 5 hours long and broken into segments intensely focusing on one thing or the next. We even had "class discussion" at the end where everyone sat down and offered their perspectives on the day and where they would like to see their training going. My students weren't the best-skilled since we didn't have enough time to really refine technique and conditioning together, but they were tough as nails and not a lot of local Dojo guys wouldn't spar them under our conditions, which was no pretective gear, full speed and power. Ahh, old school.
