Hit anywhere but very slowly – 7/29/11 – Friday Karate class

Sensei Brien told us that he was going to do things in class this session that are unconventional and that we haven’t done before.  Today we did just that by spending the entire class working on something that I do not remember doing in any class before.

Hit anywhere you want….

Sensei had us get a partner and told us that we could hit any part of our partners body.  This included kicks and strikes below the belt to the groin, knees, ankles and feet along with attacks to the neck and throat and some joint locks too.  The idea behind this drill is to prepare us to think about how we would react if someone attacks an area that is normally off limits during regular kumite drills.  This puts things in a different perspective.  Unlike one-step sparring, where we have done similar drills like this, we were moving around like when we do free sparring.  I have always mentioned to others, when talking about self defense theory, that the knees make a good target, especially when the attacker is larger than me.  I also like the throat and eyes as another good target.

I did this drill with six different partners and each one had a different attack that they favored.  One went for my eyes on almost every attack, another aimed for my knees and another tried to get me into joint locks every chance he had.

It was a new and good experience to work on areas that we normally do not work on and I am looking forward to doing it again.

Crazy hands kumite – 7/22/11 – Friday Karate class

Sensei Brien had us work on something new today.  We did a some sparring work that I don’t remember doing in the past and we spent the entire 90 minutes working on it.

Crazy hands kumite…..

We started out in a fighting stance and with our front hand, we made the shape of a figure 8 on the air.  We did this with both the left and right hands and then both hands at the same time.

The idea behind this concept was to keep your opponents mind busy on your moving hands and to keep them moving at all times.  When doing a block, you blocked and then went back to the figure 8 pattern, when you punched, you punched and went back to it again.  Keeping the constant motion when doing blocks or attacks was hard at times because I wanted to stop after every attack and reset.  Another interesting part of this was it almost totally masks your kicks.  You could also use one moving hand to block and the other to attack at the same time or do many attacks in a row.

When we started working with partners, being the offensive opponent seemed to work better for me than we I was being the defensive opponent.  I am not sure if the others found the same though.   It was some really good stuff but it needs to be practiced with a partner to be able to improve at it.