Stances, kicks and more kicks

We started this class moving forward in a front stance, cross leg stance and back stance all the way across the dojo to get the legs warmed up.  We didn’t do any hand movements because Sensei Noia wanted us to concentrate on our lower body.

Warm the hips…

For the next drill, we moved into a horse stance and did punches and double punches.  Still in horse stance we pivoted to left and punched, then we pivoted to right and punched.  This drill really opens up the hips and forces us to turn from our heels.

Time for kicks…

Now that our hips are warmed up, it was time to do some kicks.  We started in a ready stance and  alternating front snap kicks.  Still standing, we did front snap kick to the front, side thrust kick to the side band back kick to the rear.  We then did the same three kicks but we added a roundhouse kick at the end.  We spinning back kick to end of those four kicks next.

Next, we started in a horse stance, stepped across and did a shuffle up side thrust kick.  Still in a horse stance, we did step behind with side thrust kick.

The kicking torture, I mean techniques, continued as we moved to the wall of pain.  We stood next to the wall at a 90 degree angle and placed one hand on the wall. From there we brought the leg, away from the wall up into the start position of a side snap kick then tilted our hips up and down and after two times we did a side snap kick.  The idea behind the double tilt was to get the hip motion needed to execute the kick correctly.  We did those a few times and then we did single side snap kicks starting with our kicking foot on the floor.

 We finished class doing some kata, We started with Jion and Bassai Dai and then we picked the kata of our choice where i did Sochin and Gojushiho Sho.