Bad teaching

Iaido practice was a little...different last night. Most of the people in our dojo are students at the university here, and I guess they are still at their parents' homes around the country. At least, Hannes and I were the only people who showed up for practice last night, and Hannes only came after being talked into it. Trying to teach one person is very rewarding, but also very tough on the one being taught... I did try to spend some time on my own iai, but still I think I was a little too much. Whenever this happens again, I really have to remember not to overdo the teaching... :|

Week before Christmas practice

Two posts in one day. Yay, go me! ;P (Oh well...it seems to be past midnight. Whatever.)

Anyway, tonight was the first practice with both the "newbies" (although technically they're not newbies anymore, as they are all yonkyu now) and the "old people". It went really well, I think. Since it's the holiday season practices don't have to be as serious, but I happened to put together something pretty tough anyway. We did some warming up, then a bunch of cutting exercises: the one cut per step one, cutting in sonkyo, really low turns and cutting dwarves (no offense, short people! ;). Then we went through all twelve kata in a quite fast manner before focusing on mae, ukenagashi and soetetsuki.

In mae we played a little with slow-motion, mixed speeds and normal speed. Then we got a clock out and timed the kata to around 35 seconds. We talked some about where to take you time and where to not take your time, to build zanshin. I could spend the entire practice on just mae, so I had to force myself to move on.

For ukenagashi I tried to show with bokken what the attacker is actually doing, as I wanted to make people understand how short the parry (spelling?) moment actually is, and why the cut is slightly diagonal. They looked pretty puzzled, which hopefully means that they understood my point. ;) After that I let them practise in a more traditional way, with me moving around helping them out with a few pointers.

I then realized that time was running out, so I threw in just a little bit of soetetsuki before going back to doing all the twelve kata in order, but this time without any hesitation or annoyed faces. That actually seems to be working a lot better for them than for me, which I hope is a sign that it is a good way to train for gradings, competitions and such.

Back to blogging (?)

I really need to improve my blogging habits. Although, truth is, I am not only a lazy blogger, but have also been a pretty lazy budoka during the fall, which has of course meant less to blog about.

Still...lazyness counted, I have missed out on writing about a lot of stuff.

Kendowise I have been really lazy. Things to do with iaido (not practising though...more like administrating) have occupied a lot of my time and kendo always loses that battle. I had a little incident with my foot a few weeks ago, which hasn't exactly helped either, but now it seems to be getting better (went to see a physiotherapist a few days ago and got some tips). I actually did some kendo earlier today to make up for all missed sessions and got the usual remarks on going in too close for do (in harai-do this time), which I really need to stop doing.

Iaidowise there has been a lot of administration as I said, with the word "administration" representing everything about iai that is not practice itself. This also includes teaching, because I have to have full attention on the others, so that there is no time for my own training. Luckily, we are getting another session each week next semester, and I will not be the one teaching. Hooray! Time to practise! I really need this as I REALLY need to qualify for the national team next autumn, and I also need to practise for nidan (although these two things are actually the same ;).

I went to a seminar with René van Amersfoort in Gothenburg again, but I still haven't written anything about it here (no need to look), and to be honest I don't think I will. I have tried to implement some of the things that he said into my own training though, so the seminar wasn't a waste of time. ;) The monouchi problem is still there, so I don't really need to mention that. I have been working a lot with my noto (trying to get it horizontal) since the seminar, and it's improving, but still a long way from good.

What else? The newbies from the last semester graded for yonkyu last week and they all performed a lot better than I had expected. Where do they learn everything? ;) I guess René was right: teaching newbies is easy. ;)

Got to go now...and got to blog more often...