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.
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.
posted by Caroline at 00:05
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