Assisted kihon and kata – 8/2/11 – Tuesday

Since I enjoy kata so much, today was a really enjoyable class for me.  Sensei Noia had us work on kata for almost the entire class and added a couple of twists to our training.

First half of one kata, then second half of four more…

We started doing Heian Shodan once.  After that, we did Heian Shodan again up to the first kiai.  From there we started from the first kiai in Heian Nidan, then from the first kiai in Hiean Sandan, then Heian Yondan and Heian Godan.

After our kata warm up, we worked on some kihon.  I like to think of these types of basic combination’s as ten-no-kata.

We started moving forward in a left leg forward front stance with a front punch, then stand up with a straight punch and then step back in to a right leg forward front stance and front punch again.  We did the same drill as above but this time, when we stood up between front stances, we did a double punch.

Assisted kihon and kata….

We partnered up and did moving forward with various block and strikes but after each move our partner would check to see if we were doing them correctly.  Our partner checked if our draw hand was tight against our side, if our back leg was straight or bent depending if we were punching or blocking.  They would push on our shoulders to see if we had connection between our upper and lower body or push on our arm to see if we were using our upper back (latissimus) muscles when doing a rising block.  The best part about this type of drill is you can feel if your body is using the correct muscles or not.

For the next drill, we did our belt rank kata (Kanku Dai for my partner and me).  Kanku Dai is a very long kata to have each move checked and holding and squeezing all those muscles is a workout in itself.

We finished up class with two kata’s on our own trying to do them using the corrections and get the feeling that we had when our partner was correcting us.

This is one of my favorite type of class since we get immediate feedback on whether or not we are doing our moves correctly.