Sensei didn’t have us do many drills today but we did a lot of movements.It’s about us not I…..

Sensei had us spend a lot of time doing his form of jumping jacks today.  Most who take his classes know of this drill but I will try to explain it in detail here for those who don’t.

You start out in a front stance with your reverse hand out.  For example, left foot forward and your right hand out in a revese punch.  From there, you do a front snap kick with your right leg, reach with your left hand, put your kicking leg back down behind you and throw a reverse punch with your right hand as your kicking foot hits the floor behind you.  When we do this drill, Sensei wants all of us to do it as a group in sync.  This drill is about us not about I.

With the body…..

For our next drill, from a front stance, we did knee strike, turn 90 degrees and step down.  Then the same but with a front snap kick after the knee strike.  The same again with a block during the turn and then with a reverse punch as we stepped down.  The key to this drill is to use the hips to make the turn and not the shoulders or to do it with the body.

For the next drill, we started in a back stance and then moved forward into a front stance with a front punch and then back into a back stance to start over again.  This drill really opens up the hips.

Next, from a front stance, we did a front leg front snap kick followed by a rear leg front snap kick and then a triple punch.  The key to the triple punch at the end was to not twist when doing the punches.  Also, the first punch goes to the face, I like the throat, and the second an third punches go lower but to the exact same spot.

We spent the rest of the class working on some partner drills.  We have practiced this drill before but it seemed to work better today.  For this drill, one partner was standing upright in a relaxed ready stance, the other partner stepped in to punch and the standing partner moved to the side that the punch was coming from, blocked, punched the rib area and stepped past the punching partner.

When Sensei did this drill with my son, Donald, he ended up standing about two feet behind Donald.  The idea is to get out of the way of the punch and block it, hit the attacker, step past them and get behind them to attack again if needed.  It is a fast moving version of one-step sparring that we often work on.

One other thing to consider is the amount of power on the punch to the ribs.  You have one person moving in a punching and another person moving past them and hitting them in the floating rib area.  I would assume, if executed properly, the attacker would be in some serious pain with some broken or really sore ribs.

Even though we didn’t do a lot of drills in class today, we did have a lot of time to get a good understanding of the drills we were working on.

Sensei Noia made the focus of this class almost entirely about Jion.  Jion has never been my favorite kata, I go up to the first kiai with everything and it seems to go downhill from there.  Spending a class working on Jion is something that I need more of.We started in a horse doing front punches then double punches and finally triple punches.  From the same horse stance we moved into alternating front snap kicks and then side thrust kicks to the front.  After just a few side thrust kicks, I am sure that my horse stance didn’t look much like a horse stance any longer.

All about Jion….

For the next drills, we turned sideways and started in a horse stance.  From there, we did moving forward with one two palm strike for each count.  Then then two, followed by three palm strikes for each count.  Next came moving forward with the dropping strike once, then twice then three times for each count.  We did a lot of these and spend a good amount of time on only these moves.

After that, we did the first move of Jion at least 12 times, then came the first three moves of the Jion for another 12 or so and finally a couple more sequences of moves up to the first kiai.

This doesn’t look like much in typed text but my legs were certainly telling a much different story afterwards.

A little more kata…

We finished up class with Bassai Dai and a kata of our choice.  I ended up doing Kanku Dai.

I really believe that kata specific classes like these help a great deal but we do not do them often enough.  Either way, it was a good class and I liked it.