Shotokanplanet.org

This is a log of my journey to Shotokan Karate Shodan and beyond.

Archives for February 2009

Modified 3-step sparring – 2/10/09 – Tuesday Karate class

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This was an interesting class.  Sensei Noia had us work on some modified one-step and three-step sparring drills.

Many of the drills were fairly simple but complex.  I know that sounds strange but it was just that.

We started with our partner facing us, they would step forward and throw a front punch and we would step back and block.  The first block was rising block, followed with inward block and  then downward block.

After a few times, back and forth, with the blocks, we moved to block and counter attack.  This was straight forward but then Sensei Noia mixed it up a bit.  He had us do the same drill but with a counter on only one move out of the three.  We could counter on the first, second or third move to suprise our partner.

Block and punch…

We spent the rest of the class working on the block and punch drill.  This is the drill where you block with the hand that you punched with.  This is a drill that gets much harder as you do it faster.  It normally ends up in one or both partners laughing too.

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

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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.

Keep one foot in the ring – 2/7/09 – Saturday Karate class

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Kata…

Today, we started with kata.  Sensei Gatch took us through Heian Nidan, Jion and Bassai Dai.  Sensei wanted us to focus on our foot work and stances with attention to the position of our back foot in our front stances.

Keep your foot in the ring…

Sensei Plocharczyk took over for the second half of the class and had us work on some sparring drills.  One of the more interesting drills was an anchor man type drill where the anchor man has to keep one foot inside a hula hoop on the floor while the others attack.

Conditioning…

Sensei Plocharczyk came up with some interesting conditioning drills.  We gave each of us a basketball and had us doing different drills with it.  We started with pushups on ball.  We put one hand on the ball, did a pushup and then switched arms and did another.  Next was pushups with both hands on the ball.  Next came a plank where we held our arms out and held the ball trying to keep our balance and our back straight.  We finished up with a modified wrestlers bridge where we had to balance one foot, with a bent leg, on the ball and only had our shoulder blades and the foot touch the ball.