1 o’clock, 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock kick

Lots of kicks and kata was the lesson for today and what a combination it was…

We started with in a horse stance doing punches. Next came horse stance with punches, then pivot to the left and reverse punch, then back to center, then pivot to the right and reverse punch.  For all of the drills where we pivot, we are turning, or supposed to, turn on our heels and use our hips not our shoulders to change direction.

For the next drill, we stepped forward with reverse punch, then pivoted to the left behind, then back to front, and then the same on right side.  For the next drill, we stepped left with either a downward block or outward block then we turned to right with the same block and then to the left again.

We started working on kicks next.  The following drill was really tough and I can’t even guess how many kicks we did because Sensei said keep going until he said stop more than a couple times.

From a standing position we did a front snap kick and a side thrust to front then to the 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock and  6 o’clock position without putting down the kicking leg.  We did the same with both side thrust kick and roundhouse kick together.  Next we did side thrust kick, roundhouse kick, hook kick and back kick.  I’m almost sure that walking is going to be an issue tomorrow.

Kata…

We finished up class working on some kata.  We did Jion and Bassai Dai with the brown belts and then we moved on to Kanku Dai with the Shodans and above.  After that, Sensei Noia told us to work on the kata of our choice doing parts that we feel we need to improve as he came over to each of us to offer advice or corrections on the parts we were working on.  The part that I spent the most time on was moving backward from a front stance into a horse stance.  This is move that gets away from me and keeps me from setting up the next move correctly but Sensei said that it looked good.