Excellent class.

We did a lot of drills including a couple of new ones. Interesting move; step forward downward block, switch feet, downward block with reverse punch. It wasn’t very hard to do physically but mentally it was extremely hard. Another new move was front leg front snap kick, rear leg front snap kick, put the leg back behind and reverse punch.

We worked on some turning drills. The idea was to pull the front leg into a cat stance and turn on the heel then push out the front foot. It’s another thing that sounds really easy in type but hard to execute. The idea is to squeeze the glutes and tighten the core. To explain a little more, use the glutes to pull the front leg back and then tighten the core to stabilize the stance. Sadly, I don’t recall ever doing that before and I am going to lot of repetitions to get that move down better.

One other move, that felt good, step half way into a front punch but throw a jab and then finish stepping and follow up with the front punch.

We finished up with a few Heian Shodan. Again, the idea was to turn on the heels and pay more attention to attacking with the legs instead of the arms.

Weight workout: More to come…

Good class.

We spent much of the time working on basics. Our Sensei felt that our punches were not well focused so we spent the entire class working on good focus.

We had our parnter hold our thier finger and we had to punch at it. The idea was to punch without hitting it but also have our partner make sure that we were accurate. The next drill had our partner hold their hands in a circle and we had to punch and not hit their hands on the way in or out or we would have to do pushups. There was a possible 300 pushups tied to 50 punches and out of all the punches, I only had to do nine pushups. Luckily, my punches are pretty accurate from all of the one step sparring drills that I did in the past.

We then finished up with pushup torture. Our Sensei had us do 5 sets of 10 pushups. The first was hands close together in a triangle, next was arms wide apart, next was hand at our sides, and then we 10 each side of one arm up high and the other low. I did a lot of tricep work that day at the gym so the pushups were a little rough. We also some dynamic lunges and a little ab work to round things out.

Weight workout: More to come….

I worked with my wife on Jion today.  I did all the moves up to the first kai eight times.  Even doing just those few moves is very tiring.  I am putting a lot of power behind those moves and it feels great but I am going to have to really work on my conditioning if I ever plan to use that much power throughout the entire kata.  The kime in Jion feels much different than in other kata for some reason.  At the end of each move, my body is tensing much different for some reason.  The two moves before the kai, the rising block and front punch, feels like it could stop a truck.  My Sensei’s told me that Jion would be a good kata for me and so far, I agree.

I also did a slow motion Heian Shodan, like Sensei Noia suggested.   Doing each move slowly and holding the stances for three seconds each really makes me focus on my stances.  I am also considering doing the kata with some extra weight so that I can strengthen my legs even more after they begin to feel easy.