Let the hips do the moves – 11/1/11- Tuesday Karate class

Today, Sensei Noia had us spend most of the class working on our hip movements.

To warm up, we started in a front stance doing stationary blocks with reverse punch making sure to pay attention to hip movement.  Next, we moved forward and back with outward block and reverse punch.

The following drills were real hips openers:

Moving forward and back in a front stance with inward block and the hips open, then close the hips without moving and do an outward block to open the hips again and then reverse punch with the hips closed like normal.  Moving forward with an inward block and reverse outward block, then move forward again with an outward block and a reverse outward block.

This drill almost had me on the floor.  We started in a back stance with knife hand block, then spin around 180 degree behind with knife hand block again and repeat.  The spinning motion really tests the balance.

Time to kick….

Sensei has us do timed squats.  From a horse stance, we did a squat and then a left leg side thrust kick, back to horse stance, squat and right leg side thrust kick, alternating legs for 60 seconds.

The next drill was a timed standing back kick.  We did each kick but with a pause for a second at the end of the kick.  Sensei wanted us to kick like it would break someone leg if you hit them.

Mirror image kata….

We started with Jion but mirror image.  Doing kata like this is always a challenge but luckily for us, Jion is all basics.

Next, we did kata in groups where the brown belts did squats and we did kata, then all the black belts did kata and the others did squats.  This doesn’t s0und like anything hard but brown and black belt katas are pretty long and I did somewhere near 60 squats.  I do think the brown belts had the worst of it because Kanku Dai is a really long kata.

Next, Sensei had us pick a kata and do it up to the kiai 5 times in a row.  We then finished up by doing the same kata twice but starting the second kata as soon as we finished the first one.

This was a really enjoyable class.  I like working on kata and basics around test time, even though I am not testing.  I feel that my Karate always goes up a notch whenever testing time comes around.