This class was torture for me for some reason. I couldn’t turn my hips to save my life and my stances just didn’t feel correct. It felt like my right hip was jammed into my lower back and bending low just wasn’t an option for me today.
Face your partner….
For our first drill, we got a partner and stood across from each other. From there, Sensei Noia had one of us throw a front punch to the head while the other did a rising block. We followed that punch to the stomach with inward block and punch to below the belt and downward block. This was pretty good drill but murder on my forearm that my son punched yesterday when we were doing one-step together.
Make those hips work….
Sensei had us work on moving our hips. For example, we would do an outward block, then do a reverse outward block and then another outward block all while standing in a stationary front stance. The idea wasn’t just to twist our hips, Sensei wanted us to snap them very fast. It was extremely hard for me to do this drill and I could hardly bend my back leg when my hips were open in a blocking stance. This movement is a great drill for helping with Bassai Dai.
Stances in kata….
For the rest of the class we worked on stance drills with movements from Jion and Bassai Dai. These drills were really tough.
For example, Sensei Noia would have us do certain moves over and over. From Jion, we worked on moving from yoi to crossleg stance with low x-block. After eight to 10 moves, we would step forward and work on moving from double outward block to high x-block.
In Bassai Dai, we worked on many of the double blocks with more focus on hip movement like earlier. We ended up going through each move of both kata’s in groups of two or three movements.
It was an excellent class but I wish my body would have cooperated more.
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