Saturday Karate class – 5/3/08 – Hard work.

Sensei Plocharczyk always give a hardcore class and today was no exception.

We started with an intense warmup. It included a lot of basics. We started in a horse stance and did our punches and blocks, then we moved into a front stance and did our block punch combinations. I know that those do not sound like any ouverly hard but we did all of the movements with no rest in between. It was one movement right on to the next for over 10 minutes.

Sensei then gave us a little rest. Time for some pushups. Sensei had us get into the top part of the pushup with our arms fully extended, he then had us go down and hold one inch from the floor for 20 seconds, next we pushed back up to the top and he had us go down half way and hold for another 20 seconds. It was absolute torture and I could only handle three of the four reps. My arms totally gave out on the last rep.

Next, out for kata. Sensei had us go out in groups by rank and do our own rank kata. Sensei told me that I need to watch my toes, the way they are pointing when moving from the back stance to the horse stance in Jion.

It was a great class.