Mental Karate

Today’s class was more about the mental than the physical aspects of Karate but sometimes, these are some of the hardest classes.

Slow motion sparring….

Classes like these really make sparring fun.  Working with good people and doing slow motion sparring makes you see the openings and mentally process them unlike when you a moving full speed.  It doesn’t matter if you get hit or not, the learning in those few minutes of this drill are worth hours, even days of training to me.

Block, punch, block, punch….

For the next drill, we did a standing strike and block drill.  For this drill, partner A punches with the left hand, then partner B blocks with the left hand and then punches with the right hand and partner A blocks with the hand they punched with.  The idea is the punching hand becomes the blocking hand then the other hand punches and you go back and forth with your partner increasing speed.  This is more of a mental drill than a physical drill and it really makes you think about what you are doing as it gets faster.  We did the same drill but while moving which made it about 10 times as hard as when we were stationary.

One step sparring but different…

We finished up working on some one step sparring but not our normal.  The idea behind this drill was to not use the standard counter attacks consisting of standard punches.  We used other attacks such as elbow strikes, knee strikes, palm heel, ridge hand and other moves not just punches.  Even though it doesn’t sound like anything hard, after doing one step sparring with standard moves it make you think outside the box.  For example, a standard punch to the face can be counted by stepping back with rising block and then a front snap kick to the groin as counter.  One of my personal favorites is, as they punch, step in with an outward block, grab their punching arm and counter with a rising elbow under their chin.