Focus on the stances

Much like last week, stances are the focus and class today was a good indicator of what we need to improve on.  With all of the stance work we have been doing, I have been seeing a lot of improvement in my stance endurance.  I can hold a stance longer now than ever before and I feel as if my I am more grounded because of it.

We started class with partner drills and pads.  The first drill was in a horse stance with single punch, then double punch and then triple punch.  Next we moved into a cross leg stance doing the same punches as above and then into a cat stance with the same punches.

For the next drill, we moved into a front stance and did front punch along with reverse punches.

The next drill had us moving from stance to stance still punching the pads and our partners.  We started in a cross leg stance, moved backward  into back stance with knife hand block and then back into a cross leg stance with reverse punch.

We finished up the partner pad drills with front snap kicks but we had to pay attention to hip extension on each kick.

We spent the rest of the class working on kata.  Sensei had us do Jion once while he counted out each move and then two more times on our own using lots of power and very fast moves on the turns.  We then did Bassai Dai once and then a kata of our choice twice which was Gojushiho Sho for me.