I’m not sure if it was a blessing or a curse but Oscar and I got our own private Hit Ball session this week. When there are only two players at a session you get lots and lots of attention from the coach which is a good way to improve your skills but it’s a bad thing if you feel like slacking off. I am a seasoned veteran of these feats of endurance and I knew that the only way I was going to survive this training session was to pace myself. That being said the cool thing about these sessions is that Oscar and I got to nominate what area of our Hit Ball skills we would like to work on and we did just that. This meant that the session was invaluable to us both.
We started with these drills where you had to get on your knees, fall forward and use your hands to stop yourself from hitting the ground. It was a fun exercise and it’s the preliminary to doing this from your feet. I’m looking forward to trying that. Oscar tried it from his feet but I wasn’t game. We had to do this drill without making any noise and apparently Oscar made noise. Alessandro did the drill but didn’t make any noise and I told Oscar that’s because he’s a ninja. This started a whole conversation on ninja courses, ninja qualifications and Oscar came up with a face book ninja. A face book ninja would be able to message a hundred friends at once, post in blinding speed and he came up with all of these other face book skills a face book ninja could do all the while using this movie trailer voice over voice. It was a crack up.
We also did this killer push up after we did this drill. You had to go down into the push up position and hold the position at it‘s lowest point for ten seconds, it was murder. Just try it and see for yourself.
We did this lovely corner drill where you just hit the ball against one wall and then moved to get into position to hit it against the other wall of the corner. I really enjoyed it. I found myself using my feet to stop the ball and I never normally use my feet to control the ball. I realized that we had done enough foot drills for it to start to become instinctive to use my feet and that got me thinking. How many times must you do an exercise for it to become automatic? I wonder if anyone has done any research into that.
Finally it was time for Oscar and I to go mano e mano. My strategy was the hare and the tortoise. I obviously was the tortoise and I’m not sure Oscar has read this fable. He was doing a lot of running around and I was pacing myself. I was still completely stuffed by the finish but at least I got to the finish.
Oscar came up with a brand new shot. He said he wanted to work on this and during our game he did. He called it the Hurricane Shot and just like it’s name he spun around to increase the velocity of his shot and it worked. He needs to fine tune it but once he gets it down it’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. He also experimented with a Hurricane jump shot but you really need to be good at your landings. I think he’s going to keep that one on the drawing board for a while.
So that got me thinking that maybe we could combine a little Aussie rules football with Hit Ball. If someone did a speccy off another person’s back they would either increase the height of their hit or their block, either way it’s winner winner tofu chicken dinner.
It was a great session, thank you Alessandro it’s very cool that you will still run the sessions when the rest of the team are away.
Remember if you’d like to come and join us you would be very welcome. That’s my lot, thank you for reading and I’ll catch you in the next blog.
Hit Ball down under 