Work those stances – 10/27/09 – Tuesday Karate class

Sensei Noia has been helping us prepare for our upcoming rank examinations and tonight was almost exclusive stance training.  Sensei started class with a long warm up and stretching routine.

Stance, stance, stance….

We started out in a horse stance with front punch, then double punch, then triple punch and rising block.

After the horse stances, we started in a back stance with knife hand block, we then turned and did another knife hand block, then turned again with knife hand block and stepped forward into a back stance with knife hand block.  Sensei wanted to make sure that we were shifting our body as we changed from one direction to the other.

Next we started in a back stance with a knife hand block and moved into a cross leg stance with a low x-block then stepped back into a back stance with knife hand block.

One of the moves that I liked most tonight was starting in a front stance with a downward block, then pivot on both heels to on and angle behind into a front stance with downward block to the front then pivot back facing forward and reverse punch.  The key to block after the pivot is that your body is facing the corner behind you but you are downward blocking an attack from the front with your head facing front.  This is move similar to the one in the kata, Empi.

The next drill was front stance with downward block, move into cross leg stance with downward punch, then step backward into front stance with downward block.

We then worked on back stance with knife hand block, pull back into cat stance with low knife hand block, back to back stance with knife hand block.  The key here is to pull the front leg back from the back stance into the cat stance and to make sure that the back heel turns from 90 degrees in the back stance to 45 degrees in the cat stance.

Next came stationary cat stance with front leg front snap kick.  After that came stationary cat stance with punches.

We finished up with one kata.  The kata that we are going to do at our exam.  Even though my legs were like jelly, my Bassai Dai felt pretty good overall.