Sensei Noia has been working to get us ready for our exams and todays class was good example.

Work those stances….

We started out moving forward across the dojo twisting our hips.  For example, we moved forward and twisted or snapped our hips into a blocking stance.  After that, we moved forward doing both a blocking stance and then a punching stance being sure to snap our hips as sharply as possible.

After that, Sensei had us work on stationary stances.  We started in a horse stance doing punches and blocks.  After that we turned our feet out into a square stance and did more punches and blocks.

One of the more different movements that we did was horse stance with double front punch, double outward block and double downward block to the sides, much like in Jion.  Sensei came around to each one of us to make sure that our stances were solid buy pushing on our shoulders or hips.  If you weren’t squeezing the floor, you were falling over.

Pieces and parts of kata…

We spent the rest of the class working on parts of Bassai Dai.  We started with the first seven moves which included a lot of hip rotation and extra focus on those parts.  The snapping of the hips from open to closed and closed to open we a good part of the drill.  After that, we moved on to the punch and block, punch and block moves.  Again, the key is to get the hips to do the work.  We then did the moving forward, triple back stance with knife hand block movements and the moving backward backstance with knife hand.  Next came the reach and grab, then the side thrust kick followed up with the backstance knife hand block.  We continued to do this for entire kata, doing two, three or four groups of movements.

Every so often, Sensei would have us do groups of groups of movements too.  This entire drill was extremely hard and taxing for me but it really made me look at my kata in a different way.  We ended class with one all out, full power Bassai Dai.

Excellent class but really hard and helpful too.

This class was torture for me for some reason.  I couldn’t turn my hips to save my life and my stances just didn’t feel correct.  It felt like my right hip was jammed into my lower back and bending low just wasn’t an option for me today.

Face your partner….

For our first drill, we got a partner and stood across from each other.  From there, Sensei Noia had one of us throw a front punch to the head while the other did a rising block.  We followed that punch to the stomach with inward block and punch to below the belt and downward block.  This was pretty good drill but murder on my forearm that my son punched yesterday when we were doing one-step together.

Make those hips work….

Sensei had us work on moving our hips.  For example, we would do an outward block, then do a reverse outward block and then another outward block all while standing in a stationary front stance.  The idea wasn’t just to twist our hips, Sensei wanted us to snap them very fast.  It was extremely hard for me to do this drill and I could hardly bend my back leg when my hips were open in a blocking stance.  This movement is a great drill for helping with Bassai Dai.

Stances in kata….

For the rest of the class we worked on stance drills with movements from Jion and Bassai Dai.  These drills were really tough.

For example, Sensei Noia would have us do certain moves over and over.  From Jion, we worked on moving from yoi to crossleg stance with low x-block.  After eight to 10 moves, we would step forward and work on moving from double outward block to high x-block.

In Bassai Dai, we worked on many of the double blocks with more focus on hip movement like earlier.  We ended up going through each move of both kata’s in groups of two or three movements.

It was an excellent class but I wish my body would have cooperated more.