Columbia Shorin-ryu

Been slacking off on the training updates. Here’s the summary for the last 3 nights.

Taught all 3 classes tonight. Nothing but stance training. Lots of sweat and shaking legs. Not much else to say about it.

Tuesday nights class was all partner training with the bo. Really focusing on getting down the 1st 3 drills and learning what it feels like to make solid contact with the bo.

Last Thursday night I taught all 3 classes as well. 1st class was basics with partners. The whole second class was dedicated to partner training with the bo, and the 3rd class was black belt kata.

I started my student off last night with front, side, and round kicks on the heavy bag. This was followed by 4 different types of elbow strikes on the heavy bag. Then on to every kata he knows. Afterwards, we focused on partner training with the bo. We did about 50 reps of 3 different drills. It’s amazing how sore the hands get when you actually make contact continuously with the bo.

For the second class, we simply went through the Shotokan kyu rank kata syllabus. We started with Taikyoku Shodan, all 5 Heian kata, and all 3 Tekki kata. We did this for about an hour and 15 minutes. There was a fair amount of explanation between repetitions due to folks just learning the kata; but it was more than enough to work up a sweat.

Tonights training started with front, side, and round kicks on the bag followed by a kata run through. Afterwards, we focused on knees and elbows on the heavy bag. After that we worked on partner drills with the bo. We practiced the attacker moving forward performing overhead strikes, while the defender moved backwards performing high blocks.

I think the focus for the first part of this year is going to be on elbows, knees, and application of the bo techniques.

Folks seemed interested, so here’s tonight’s pretest workout…

Started with 10 minutes of calisthenics. Next was 100 punches in shiko-dachi. Then 100 stationary front kicks in zenkutsu-dachi. Next was 100 rising block reverse punch combinations in shiko-dachi. Next was 100 stationary side kicks from hesoku-dachi. Next was 50 oi-zuki forward elbow strick backwards combinations in shiko-dachi. All techniques were full-speed, full-power. After the basics, the kids did the kata Fukyugata Ichi 10 times full-speed, full power.

After the yellow, orange, and blue belts tested, there was another 20 minute workout of hard calisthenics. Then Sensei dismissed those who had already tested. I think customer satisfaction was 100% tonight.

The test itself went quite well. I was very happy with everyone’s performance; and a little surprised even by a few of the kids.

Tuesday night marked my return to the dojo after a two month absence due to a crazy work schedule. We worked on building muscles required to do round kick. We started with very slow, six count basic round kick. After many repetitions of that, we added folding chairs to the mix to ensure we weren’t cheating. We finish by doing full-speed round kicks over the folding chairs.

After round kick training, we focused on doing kata in a way that combines the concepts of Yoga with Karate. We performed the kata Fukyugata-ichi holding each posture (including the intermediate steps) for 30 seconds before moving to the next. This caused us to take about 22 minutes to perform one iteration of the kata.

In the words of one of the students, “Owwwww”.