Lots of good stuff today!
Kicks….
After the warm up, we did moving forward forward knee strike and front snap kick. Then front leg toe tag and rear leg front snap kick.
We then moved into roundhouse kicks. After watching a few of our kicks Sensei Cieplik showed us a drill to help improve our roundhouse kicks.
From a front stance, put most of your weight on your front leg and lean forward. From there, pick the back leg, straight up off the floor. This helps mobilize and strengthen the hips. From the same leaning position, we did did a roundhouse kick again straight up from the floor.
Don’t turn the hips too far…
Sensei had us do moving forward with with outward block, jab and reverse punch. When doing the outward block, Sensei told us not to open our hips too far or we will not have any hips action when doing the jab. The point is, to power in the jab will only be from the arm since the hips won’t be involved if they are already fully opened.
Partner up and move to the side…
For this drill, we stood toe to toe with our partner. From there, our partner throws a reverse punch, we shuffle up, just out of the way of the punch and throw a cutting roundhouse kick. The defending partner only needs to shuffle a short distance in order to get out of the way of the reverse punch. There was no large blocking action or jumping out of the way, just a simple shuffle just outside of the punch.
Lots of kata….
We spent the rest of the class working on kata. We did Heian 1 through Heian 5, Jion, Bassai Dai, Empi and one my favorites, Rohai.
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