Hit the pad, hard – 2/9/09 – Monday Karate class

Sensei Brien was not feeling well, so Sensei (Mr.) Noia filled in for him today.

Kihon…

Sensei Noia started us out with some kihon drills.  We did the usual moving forward with blocks and punches along with some back stance drills.  After that, Sensei had us work on Heian Shodan but with extra attention to our trasition moves and the postions of our feet and bodies.  For example, when moving from the last front stance with front punch, in Heian Shodan, he wanted us to move quickly into the back stance knife hand block, keeping in mind the movement of our feet and the angle that we ended up in.  The idea was to minimize our feet movement and maximize the spped between stances.

Hit that pad…

I really enjoy the classes where we hit the pads with our partners.  We spent a good amount of the class working with the pads.  We started with reverse punch but with extra attention to our hip movements.  It’s easy for most of us to punch from our upper boides, even with some good power, but doing the punch from the hips adds so much more power.  We also worked on hammer fist to the pad.  Again, a little hip involvement adds more power, much like the reverse punch.  The other movement that we worked on was Kage zuki, hook punch.  This was an intersting movement to do with a partner since we were in so close.  Most of the power comes from pulling the draw hand back since there is little

This was an excellent class and it felt really good.  I hope that we have a few more classes like this one in the future.