Today, Sensei Cieplik has us work on keeping connection with our heels when doing our movements.

Turn on the heels and push from the hips…

We started class with the normal warm up and then started doing some basic kihon drills.

Early in the class, we started working on Heian Shodan but with extra attention to our turns.  Instead of turning using our shoulders, Sensei had us turn on our back heel into a cat stance and then push our front leg forward to finish the movement.  Turning into a cat stance does a couple of things, it makes us stay connected with the back leg and moving from the cat stance to the front make us drive forward from our hips.  This does slow the kata down for me but if makes it feel much more powerful and accurate for some reason.

We spent the rest of the class working on all of the katas trying to stay connected to the floor while doing them.  We started with Heian Shodan and when all the way to Jion.

This was one of those classes that I and most of the class won’t forget.  Sensei Noia had us train on the hill outside the dojo.  It’s more like a steep crater than a hill to me though.

If you move too fast, you will fall down….

We started out with few sprints up the hill and then a slow jog back down.  The key is to make sure that you don’t run too fast when going downhill or you will end up at the bottom.

Next came low walks, not only up but down too.  Going down is extremely hard and you have to make sure that you place your front foot in the right place, which is hard then it sounds but possible.

Next came jumping kicks uphill.  The front snap kicks weren’t too bad but roundhouse and hook kicks were almost impossible for me.

We also did jumping squats up the hill but after just a few, I ended up sprinting up the hill since me legs just would not leg me do the squats.

Basics and kata…

Next came moving forward and back with front stance and backstance doing various strikes and blocks up and down.  Getting into a low stance was almost impossible because of the steep angle.

We did kata from Heian Shodan all the way to Tekki Shodan.

Uneven kumite….

We finished up with some kumite on the hill.  Sensei told us that we could only use hand techniques since kicks on the hill would have been a little risky.

It was an awesome class but extremely tough.  I hope we do this again.

This was an interesting class.  I visited Doc Pusateri today and I was feeling really good before class.

Warm up with some kicks…

We spent a good amount of time working on hook kicks.  We paired up and starting alternating roundhouse kicks and hook kicks.  Then came combinations of roundhouse and hook kicks back and forth.  This really got my legs warmed up faster than usual.

Sweep and kick…

For our next drill, we started with sweeping the front leg to pull our partner off balance and then follow that up with a hook kick.  My partner and I both did almost the same thing.  I was having a hard time getting the sweeping motion and once my partner showed me how to do it, I ended up in close to the split position without even trying.  I have never gotten my legs that close to the splits as I did today.  It didn’t feel too good but I was able to keep going without too much pain.  The funny part is that I ended up doing the exact same thing to my partner and luckily, he wasn’t hurt either.

Take downs…

We finished up with some take down drills.  The idea was to move in like a front leg sweep but get behind our partners leg and throw them over our knee while hitting them across the chest with our arm.  The key is to get the hips to involved and use those to push our partner off balance so that they can be taken down.

These drills all worked well but all of the adjustments that Doc Pusateri did were pretty much unadjusted.