Today, I felt good.  I had a vist with Dr. Pusateri, my chiropractor and he did some good stuff to me today.  I seem to learn something new every time I see him and after I leave his office, my body feels like it’s made out of steel.

Because I was feeling good, I asked Sensei Noia if I could work off to the side since I didn’t really want to get hurt sparring again.  I ended up doing kata with my wife for about half of the class.

Sensei Noia brought some of his striking pads with today.  He had two large pads for some kicking and punching drills.  We did roundhouse kicks, punches, and elbow strikes for close to 20 minutes.  While I was holding the pad, Sensei Noia gave it five or six solid roundhouse kicks.  It was as if he had a tree trunk for leg.  While most the others kicked and some of them can kick really hard, I was able to hold the pad without moving too much but when Sensei Noia kicked it, I pushed backward even though my stance was pretty well grounded.  I realized that he was using his left leg and his right leg is normally his powerful one.  It’s always impressive to see how effective your Sensei’s Karate is but feeling it makes me see his power on a whole new level.

We also did some punches and elbow strikes to the pads and I ended up bending my right wrist.  I do not do enough pad work and I really need to punch things instead of just working on the air.  I also think I need to improve the strength of my wrists.  My forearms are strong and decent sized but my wrist are small and I think they need some hard work.

I am really looking forward to the warm weather so that I can start working outside on the makiwara again.

We started class with a little different warm up. We did the normal front snap kicks but instead of 10, Sensei Cieplik had us do 15 with each leg. Next, we did front snap kick with back kick.

This class was different than any that I remember before. Sensei had us doing movements that I don’t remember us doing in the past. I am trying to list all of them here but I am not sure if I can remember all of them.

We did a knee strike with a back kick. This movement was different because, in order to do it correctly, we had to bend the stabilizer leg and retract the hips after the knee strike to make the back kick effective. Starting the back kick from the knee strike finish position makes the movement feel much more powerful and pushing off the stabilizer leg seems to generate a great deal of force. It was enough force to make the stabilizer leg move backward when executing the back kick.

We also worked on a movement that consisted of reverse rising block, jab and reverse punch. This movement really made me think in a different way. Doing the rising block with the back leg behind really slowed down my movements since I had to think about doing it that way. The movement did feel very powerful since the hip rotation from the reverse block to jab and back to reverse punch caused the hips to move a great deal.

We did a move where we put our leg out like a roundhouse kick, pointing to the front and pivoted on our back foot across the floor. We then did another move with the same pivot but we did the full roundhouse kick to the front.

Another interesting move was getting into a lunge position, with the back knee on the floor and the reverse hand out. From there we stood up, did a front snap and came back down into the same starting position. I was only able to do a few of them because my knees were hurting.

Sensei also talked about some interesting Shotokan history. He said that the Tekki Katas, Tekki Shodan, Tekki Nidan and Tekki Sandan were once third, second and first kyu katas. What was happening is the students front stances were

Sensei had us do something with our kicks but he wanted to hear the gi snap.  He wanted us to move with enough speed to get the pop sound when doing front snap kick, side thrust kick and back kick.

We also did a couple of conditioning exercises.  The first was from the squat position, we would put one knee to the floor and then bring it back up to the squat position, then repeat with the other leg.  The next move, which I really found useful, was stand in a bad stance, such as the the back foot pointing the wrong way and the front foot pointing to the outside.  From that bad stance, Sensei told us to compress or squeeze from the inside of our legs and pivot on the heels to put our feet in the correct place.  The compression makes the feet come into the correct position with relative ease.

We also worked on, for lack of better words, wrist flicking techniques on blocks.  The idea is to turn the hand at the wrist while doing blocking techniques.  This little flick seems to add a lot of power to the end of block.  I have been trying to do this for some time now.

We finished up class with some kata.  We did Heian Sandan, Tekki Shodan, Jion and Bassai Dai.  Sensei had us think and try to apply the flicking movements in our kata.  I always like it when Sensei gives us little things to add to our kata that makes them better.

Sensei also gave us a little history.  I hope that I am recalling this correctly.  He said that the Tekki katas were once third, second and first kyu katas.  Tekki shodan was for third kyu, Tekki Nidan for second kyu and Tekki Sandan for first kyu.  The problem was that spending three full ranks in a horse stance was hurting the front stance, back stance, one and three step sparring and kumite for those students.  Instead, two blackbelt katas, Jion and Bassai Dai were given to the students to allow them to prepare for their upcoming Shodan examination and promotion.

It was a great class!

We started out with a really good warm up from Sensei Plocharczyk.  He has us do more dynamic movements and it seems to help my hips for class.  He had us do a lot of hip rotations, torso movements where we bend at the hips and rotate out uppers bodies around, side, front and back leg raises along with neck and hand stretches.

Since testing is coming up, Sensei Noia had us work on some basics.  He started us in a back stance and had us move forward with knife hand blocks.  We spent most of the time that we worked on our kihon in a back stance.  We did moving forward, knife hand block with spear hand and the same move but we added the front leg front snap kick.  One problem that Sensei Noia found is that I am turning on the ball of my foot instead of my heel.  When moving from the back stance to front stance with the spear hand, my power was almost nothing since I am turning on the ball of my foot which is causing me to move backwards and away from the strike.  It’s just another detail that I need to fix.

After that, Sensei split us into groups for kata.  One advantage of belonging to such a large Karate club is that we have a large group of instructors and assistant instructors.  Because of this, we often have a different Sensei explain the same idea a different way.  This is a great deal of help to me since there are times when I “just don’t get it” but if I hear the same thing explained in a little different way, it clicks.  For the longest time, Sensei Noia told me to tuck my butt under when in a horse stance but I never understood how to do it.  One day, Sensei Plocharczyk said to push the knot of my belt forward when in a horse stance and from that point, I understood.  It’s not that either explanation was right or wrong, the result was the same but it was just said to me in a different way that I could understand and apply.

Tonight was one of those moments.  We were working with Sensei Buss and he said something that helped my Jion a great deal.  When turning from the horse stance with palm strike to the back stance with double block, he said to turn or pivot on the heel.  I have been turning on the middle or even the ball of my foot when doing this for as long as I remember.  I know that Sensei Noia and Sensei Gatch have told me to how to do this move many times over but it didn’t sink in until now.  Sensei Buss also explained that I need to use my hips to bring my body around and to stop the movement before falling over backwards.

Great class.