Archives for January 2008

Another great class.

Sensei Gatch split the class up into groups. He took the green belts and Sensei Plocharczyk took the purple belts and brown belts.

Sensei Plocharczyk had us start with kata. The gym was extremely cold for some reason so doing the kata was a good warm up. We all started with Heian Shodan, Heian Nidan, Heian Sandan, Heian Yondan, Heian Godan, Tekki Shodan and the he had my wife and I move in front to do Jion since we were the only brown belts in the class. Sensei gave me some good advice and said that I need to keep my draw hand tight and when I move into the first horse stance right before the end of the kata, I need to show more power.

After that warmup, Sensei had us put on our pads and get a partner. He wanted to teach us some ground based self defense movements since we do not work on them too often. We started with some moves from various positions. We started standing and our partner would put us in a choke from behind. We then had to break out of the hold, turn around and attack before they had a chance to attack. We did that from a couple of different positions such as kneeling and on our backs.

Next, we started out on backs trying to keep our partner from scoring on us by using our legs or by getting up to our feet. We also worked on some movements where we would use our legs as scissors to take our partner down. Sensei Plocharczyk also talked about safe distances being both far distance and “ground” zero where you are pretty much hip to hip with someone.

It was a really good class and I feel that I learned a lot from it.

Even though I was training at home and the gym while I had the last week off from class, I felt really good when class started. I was glad to be back and looking forward to getting in a good workout.

It was an excellent class tonight.

We started with a little different warm up than usual. Then came some low walks, twisting low walks and then a bunch of kicking drills. The twisting low walks are something that I want to add to my home workout. We did, moving forward, double front snap kick and double roundhouse kick to get the blood really flowing. Instead of doing the normal stretches, we did some dynamic stretching.

Next came the hard part. Sensei Noia has us get a partner and a resistance band. He had our partner put the band around our hips and while moving forward, in a front stance, our partner would hold the band to give us resistance when moving. We must have done over 30 reps of that one movement. Next came the same thing but in a horse stance. I had a really hard time doing the horse stance against resistance. Then, to make things even harder, Sensei had us do the same movement but with the addition of a slow side thrust kick. The only way to do the kick with the resistance band is to drive off the stationary leg.

I really like classes like these where we work heavily on our conditioning.