It’s all about Jion – 6/28/11 – Tuesday Karate class

Sensei Noia made the focus of this class almost entirely about Jion.  Jion has never been my favorite kata, I go up to the first kiai with everything and it seems to go downhill from there.  Spending a class working on Jion is something that I need more of.We started in a horse doing front punches then double punches and finally triple punches.  From the same horse stance we moved into alternating front snap kicks and then side thrust kicks to the front.  After just a few side thrust kicks, I am sure that my horse stance didn’t look much like a horse stance any longer.

All about Jion….

For the next drills, we turned sideways and started in a horse stance.  From there, we did moving forward with one two palm strike for each count.  Then then two, followed by three palm strikes for each count.  Next came moving forward with the dropping strike once, then twice then three times for each count.  We did a lot of these and spend a good amount of time on only these moves.

After that, we did the first move of Jion at least 12 times, then came the first three moves of the Jion for another 12 or so and finally a couple more sequences of moves up to the first kiai.

This doesn’t look like much in typed text but my legs were certainly telling a much different story afterwards.

A little more kata…

We finished up class with Bassai Dai and a kata of our choice.  I ended up doing Kanku Dai.

I really believe that kata specific classes like these help a great deal but we do not do them often enough.  Either way, it was a good class and I liked it.