Today, Sensei Noia worked our minds more than our bodies.
Leave your ego at the door…..
After our warm up, we partnered up and did slow motion kumite. The idea of this drill is to move slow enough to give each person time to think before blocking or attacking and also keep moving continuously. This gives each of us time to see which attacks and blocks are effective or not without having to react in a split second like when doing normal sparring drills. The only problem with this drill is that you have a tendency to move faster and faster as you go along. We switched partners every minute or two and ended up working with 25 different people during that class.
Wrist to wrist….
For the last few minutes of class, we picked a partner, stood in front of them and put our wrist lightly against theirs. The idea of the drill is to read your partners attack before they actually attack. Once they move to attack, you feel them pull away from your wrist and block. The idea is to hit your partner and never get hit.
We did the same drill with both wrists touching. It is harder with both wrists touching, at least for me, because I had a tendency to focus on the first move that partner made and ended up getting hit with the other hand. These type of drills really help improve reaction time.
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