Today was an interesting day. We had Sensei Brien as our guest Sensei today.
Three step sparring with a twist…
Sensei had us partner up. One of us did the blocking and the other did the attacks.  We started with our partner throwing a jodan front punch. We then stepped back and did some simple drills with inward, outward and rising block.
After we warmed up Sensei had us do some different blocking movements. The first movement was stepping back and blocking with a knife hand. We brought our hand up to our ear and blocked the same way we do in the kata but instead we were in a front stance.
The next movement was similar but we brought our knife hand block around from the outside much like an inward block. The idea was to redirect our opponents punch away from us. We turned our hand the opposite way and used to back of it to redirect the punch.
The next movement was a downward palm strike block. Our opponent threw a chudan front punch and as it was coming toward us, we would do a downward type palm strike and hit their hand out of the way. It is similar to a downward block but it is more of a direct downward motion instead of a cross body motion.
We spent the entire class working on movements like these and I am surprised how quickly our hour long class went by.