Great class.

We started out with some sparring. My wife didn’t bring her pads today so we ended up doing one-step sparring. I could not believe it was me doing the one-step drills. I was able to move so easily and effortlessly, I shocked myself. I was able to get myself far out of the way, very quickly and finish up with great focus and power. Having my hips working the right way made a huge impact on this drill.

After that, we broke up in to groups and Sensei Noia took the 4th and 5th Kyu’s for kata. We spent the rest of the class working on our kata and he had us go through Tekki Shodan. I found that I was doing a couple of my moves the wrong way, doing certain blocks with two hands instead of one and needing to get lower in my stance, and now have some work to do but this class was very enlightening. I do know that I need to focus more on bending lower in my horse stance but this will come with time since I can go lower than ever before.

With rank testing only a couple months away, I am glad that I was able to see my mistakes now and still have time to correct them.

After a week break from class we started back again today.

I have still been visiting the club chiropractor and he has really made a lot of progress with loosening up my hips. He gave me some more stretching exercises and some pressure points to dig in to as homework. I have only seen him three times but I feel I have made more progress in those few times that I have in that last few months. Not only have my kicks improved buy my balance is improving too.

During class, we spent most of the time working on basics and footwork. Sensei had us work on simple drills like moving forward with reverse punch. The hard part is that he wanted us to move our feet and legs very quickly. Even though my hips are much more flexible, I am having to learn the movements all over again. I am not complaining about it but it is not the easiest thing for me to do.

We also worked on double reverse punch with two steps and jab, reverse punch, step reverse punch and kick combinations. My coordination needs some work but after a drills, I was able to get it.

We finished up with some shifting. We were shifting both forward and backward across the gym and I was doing well until my right calf cramped.

Overall class was good and I am glad to be back training again.

Class was tough.

Many basics and a lot of kicks. We did more kicks than usual for some reason. Doing the kicks was good for me since I wanted to see how my hips were working and although I was able to kick higher, they are not spectacular. I know that it’s going to take some time, since I only had one session with the doctor, but I did feel an improvement and my balance is much better for some reason.

We did rear leg, front snap kick with reverse punch followed up by front leg front snap kick with reverse punch and then the same punches but with roundhouse kicks instead. We also did, from a horse stance, side thrust kick and side snap kicks. My horse stance was down lower than before and my butt was tucked under like it should be for the first time that I can remember. Even Sensei Noia made a comment that my stances looked good.

Sensei Cieplik made a comment when I was doing my side thrust kicks. In the dojo, there is railing on the walls and he made the comment that “the wooden railing is good but it is not going to become stainless steel”. The reason that he said it was because he knows that I cannot kick very high, yet, when doing side thrust kicks but even though the wood (my ability to kick at the height I am kicking) is good but don’t try to force it higher (stainless steel level) if it’s not meant to be. The point is, my kick is good when it’s low so he wants me to realize that it’s good enough even if it’s not at head height.

After that we did some more basics and I was particularly interested in doing back stance with knife hand block. Since my hips were working and I was able to tuck my butt under, the stances felt much lower than before to me. I was able to move much faster when going from one move to the next. Even doing that same move but adding the spear hand strike felt much better.

The “move on” comment from Sensei was really interesting and even though has said it before, it stuck this time. He said, to one of my friends in class, that if you are having a hard time doing something, just “move on”. You can always come back to it again but don’t dwell on it if you just can’t do it at that moment in time. There have been many classes where I felt I didn’t understand anything that day or couldn’t do a certain movement when I should have just moved on not dwell on it for the rest of the class or even longer. The point is, don’t dwell on it, you can always come back to it again.