I had an off and on busy weekend. I had black belt candidate class on Friday night. We started the class by skipping (I kid you not) forwards and then backwards across the floor. Think this is easy? Give it a try. After skipping for a while we then switched to skipping by bringing our knees up high on each skip...very tiring. We then did all of our katas full powered flowing from the end of one to the beginning of the next.
We also worked some self defense. Son and I had a group of three with the third person being someone who's going for his 3rd degree black belt. This guy has multiple medical problems so it is amazing he's still with karate. The down side is that he's really not all that good and we can do more than him. The idea is that he's given his belt based on doing the best that he's capable of doing.
After that we had a short physical fitness test...one minute of pushups and one minute of situps. The situps are done by having sit/hold down your feet. You start in the up position and go about half way down before coming back up again. I almost never feel it in my abs, it is more of a workout of the hip flexors.