Sensei Noia gave us another excellent class today.  He was giving everyone who needs to test some last minute tips and tricks.

Warm up that caused cramps…

Sensei Noia had us start out with a couple of laps around the dojo.  Next, he had the black belts on the front line doing push ups, the 1st and 2nd Kyu’s on the middle line and the third Kyu’s on the back line.  For 30 seconds or more, the first line did push ups, the middle did sit ups or crunches and the back line did mountain climbers.  After the time was up, we switched lines so that we all did all three different movements.  By the time I got to my 40th crunch my abs were cramped like crazy.  I was certainly warmed up though.

Kata, kihon, kata, kihon and so on….

After the warm up, we started with Heian Nidan.  After that we did Heian Shodan, then Heian Sandan, then Heian Yondan, Heian Godan and then Tekki Shodan.  Doing all these kata’s in a row is always a good workout and today was no different.

Next, Sensei had us work on some kihon drills.  We did four movements, moving forward or backward, in a different stance each time with a block or punch.  For example, we did front stance with front punch, then back stance with knife hand, then horse stance with double outward block followed with cross-leg stance with low knife hand block.  We then followed that up with the same drill but we added a punch to each movement that had a block.

The next drill was moving forward, two step, with a different block and punch combination each time we stepped.  For example, moving forward with downward block and reverse punch along with rising block with reverse punch.  Another was moving forward with inward block with reverse punch and then outward block with reverse punch.  This was a really cool drill.

The last kihon drill that I recall was moving forward two steps with a block punch combination then turning with a downward block and reverse punch combination.  It was very hard to keep my stance from going to wide while doing this drill for some reason.

Back to more kata.  We did Jion as Sensei counted.  Even though this kata is all basics, it is still really hard.  After that, we did Bassai Dai as a group while Sensei counted out each move.  After that, we did a kata of our choice.  I did Heian Sandan since I want to work on that kata again and one final kata, I did Heian Godan to totally exhaust myself.

Sensei Brien spent the class today, giving the rest of the students who need to test some last minute polish.

Lots of kihon…..

We worked on a lot of basic kihon drills.  We started in a horse stance doing punches and blocks.  Next we did kihon drills, moving forward with front punch, triple punch and various block and punch combinations.  We also worked on moving forward and backward with knife hand block, front snap kick and spear hand.

Sensei then had us work even harder.  We did movements such as moving forward with front snap kick across the entire dojo and back.  I counted the movements and it turned out being over 50 movements.  We also did back stance with knife hand block.  One of the hardest drills was moving forward and backward doing roundhouse kicks while we held our hands on our heads.  This was an extreme core exercise and my abs felt like they were being squeezed.

It was a great class but one that I should have sat out of since I hadn’t recovered from my exam yesterday.

Have you ever had a class where you worked so hard you thought your legs were going to fall off?  Today was one of those days.  Luckily, my legs didn’t fall off but it was close!

Even the warm up was hard…

Sensei Noia has us start running from quarter line to quarter line and then doing squats at each line.  After that came low walks to make sure we were all warmed up.  It worked.

Move very slow but with perfect form…

We started moving very slow with front stance and different blocks.  We did downward block, rising block, inward block and outward blocks.  After that came front stance with front and reverse punch.  We then moved on to back stances with various blocks.  We a lot of repetitions and held our stances for what seemed like a a long time between moves.

We followed this up with a drill where when Sensei counted, we did a different stance each time.  For example, we started in front stance, moved to cross-leg stance, then into back stance and finished with horse stance.  This was extremely hard for some reason.  The part that made it progressively harder was Sensei started counting and we did one move per count.  After that we did all four moves for each count of one back and forth across the dojo.

We finished up class with kata.  We did our belt kata and then Sensei gave each of the 1st Kyu’s a Heian kata or Tekki Shodan to do.