Ten-no-kata and kata – 4/29/09 – Wednesday Karate class

My neck and arm felt better during this class but still not 100% but it is improving.

Ten-no-kata…

Sensei Bajic worked us hard today.  We spent a good amount of the class working on ten-no-kata movements.  We did the back stance with double block from Jion and then stepped into a front stance with a front punch, from there we moved into the back stance with double block again and kept doing the movement in a square pattern.  We then did a similar movement with back stance, knife hand block with a front snap kick and nukite.  From the front stance we nukite, we started the movement over again forming a square pattern.

Remember all of your kata…

Sensei had us work up all the way from Heian Shodan to Bassai Dai.  I would guess that we did all of those kata in maybe 10 minutes or less and it was taxing on the lungs.

After we did all of the katas, the brown belts each found a spot on the wall and did a kick to the front, side, back and then a roundhouse while the black belts did their kata.  We then switched and the black belts did the kicks while we did our kata.  We swithced places four times

Kicks are tough – 4/28/09 – Tuesday Karate class

My left arm hasn’t improved much since the weekend and I was told that it could take about three months for my power to return.  If I have any thing to do about, it will be a lot sooner than that.

The warm up wiped me out…

It was little cold in the dojo and Sensei Noia made sure that we had good warm up.  We started jogging back and forth, then came butt kickers, walking leg raises both front and side, and sideways shuffle across the dojo.

Time to work…

Sensei had us start with one-step sparring.  We went through all six attacks with our partner.  Front punch to the face and to the stomach, front snap kick and side thrust kick to the stomach, roundhouse kick and spinning back kick.  I need to work on the standard counter attacks and getting my punch closer to my partners face.

Kicking drills came next.  We started with front snap kick to the front and side thrust kick to the front.  Next was front snap kick to the front, side thrust kick to the side, back kick to the back, roundhouse to the front and then come down in a front stance with reverse punch.

Next, we worked on roundhouse kick to the front with side thrust kick to the front and come down in a front stance with reverse punch.  After that, roundhouse to the front with side thrust kick to the front and come down with reverse punch.

Kata drills….

After that, we did a front snap kick and then came down into a front stance with sanbon zuki like in Jion.  We then spent the rest of the class doing the block and reverse block movements from Bassai Dai.