Archives for February 2009

This was a really helpful class.  Sensei Cieplik shared some things with us that I never really understood until now.

Close your eyes…

After our warm up, Sensei had us work on some extra kicking drills.  We did front snap kick, back kick and roundhouse kick.  The new twist was to do those movements with our eyes closed.  When our eyes are open, we could can see our balance because we were able to see the floor (horizon) in front of us.  Once our eyes were shut, we had us us our other senses to keep our balance when throwing our kicks.  This combination of kicks is one that we have been doing for ages but closing our eyes took it to different place.  Out of the eight to ten times that we did it, I had my balance twice.  It was certainly one of the harder drills that we have worked on in class.  One of the hardest pasts we making sure tha we were facing the correct direction when we did each kick.

Find your target and focus on that point…

This is something that we have worked on before but not as intensely as we did today.  When we were doing our kata, Sensei had us focus on seeing a specific target when doing each movement.  For example, when doing the moves in Heian Shodan, we turn our eyes in the direction of the attacker, then our head turns and we are to focus on a specific point.  I have done this before but I never really thought about the focus part until he told us to concentrate on it.  This made the kata fell really different and more intense.

We spent some time using the same concept in Jion.  The focus in Jion felt eaiser since the kata is almost entirely made up of basic movements and the foucs on specific points is almost natural.

The main point that took away from this is not only to imagine an attacker when doing our kata but also focus on a specific point on our imaginary attacker.

Sensei Noia had us work on some focus mitt drills today.

Focus on the pad and don’t hit your partner…

We started with a focus mitt on each hand.  The drill was for us to put one pad in a punching position and the other pad in a kicking position.  For example, the first attack was a reverse punch to the stomach area and the second was a roundhouse kick to anywhere from low, side stomach to high to the side of the head.  As we did this drill, we needed to get progressively faster when moving from attack to the other.  After a while, we mixed up the movements from punches to double punches and kicks or double kicks.

Side by side hook kick…

This drill was different than any hook kick drill we have done before.  We stood facing forward, shoulder to shoulder next to our partner.  From this position, one of us threw a hook kick to our partners stomach.  I would have never thought that this drill was possible since I don’t recall ever seeing it before.  It seems that it would work well in close quarters self defense.