Slow but perfect form – 11/24/09 – Tuesday Karate class

Have you ever had a class where you worked so hard you thought your legs were going to fall off?  Today was one of those days.  Luckily, my legs didn’t fall off but it was close!

Even the warm up was hard…

Sensei Noia has us start running from quarter line to quarter line and then doing squats at each line.  After that came low walks to make sure we were all warmed up.  It worked.

Move very slow but with perfect form…

We started moving very slow with front stance and different blocks.  We did downward block, rising block, inward block and outward blocks.  After that came front stance with front and reverse punch.  We then moved on to back stances with various blocks.  We a lot of repetitions and held our stances for what seemed like a a long time between moves.

We followed this up with a drill where when Sensei counted, we did a different stance each time.  For example, we started in front stance, moved to cross-leg stance, then into back stance and finished with horse stance.  This was extremely hard for some reason.  The part that made it progressively harder was Sensei started counting and we did one move per count.  After that we did all four moves for each count of one back and forth across the dojo.

We finished up class with kata.  We did our belt kata and then Sensei gave each of the 1st Kyu’s a Heian kata or Tekki Shodan to do.

Work on what you need to work on – 11/23/09 – Monday Karate class

Sensei Brien had us work on our exam preparation again.

Work on what you need to fix…

This was an interesting class today.  Sensei Brien had us work on some kicking drills as other kihon for a warm up but then he had us do something very different.  Sensei told us to work on kihon that we need to improve.  I had more than enough things to work on but this was a really neat concept.  I worked on moving forward with front, side and back kick, moving forward and back with inward block, elbow strike and backfist and moving forward double roundhouse kick.

One point that Sensei made about doing double kick movements is for us to keep the energy going from the end of the first kick to the start of the second kick.  As the foot touches the floor, after the first kick, we should be getting ready to throw the second kick.  The idea is to have the movements flow together.

Next, we worked on kata.  Again, Sensei told us to work on the parts of the kata that we need to improve.  He gave me some excellent advice for the end of Bassai Dai.  Sensei told me to use the draw hand to imagine blocking a punch and then strike with the knife hand block.  This gives the movement a whole different feel.  Instead of hopping into the last move, thinking of the block gives the movement direction and makes it feel move focused and rooted.

It was really different and I got a lot of out of it.