When Is A Brick Not A Brick?

When It's A Training Tool... (Read to the end...)

When Your Student Says "I Know This Kata" It's always fun to say, "GREAT! Teach it to me!"

My answer, when asked if I know certain Kata, will usually be along the lines of, "I can do it, but I wouldn't say I KNOW it."

Our Green Belts need to be able to execute the Kata Seiunchin for their Blue Belt grading coming up in March. The version we do begins with hands open level with the knees as you step to shiko dachi. They rise up to the throat area and close to fists before returning to knee level. That was the first bit they missed. 🤨 

So it turned out that they really didn't KNOW the Kata as much as they thought they did. It was a great night, as we started going over the Kata they had to perform for their previous gradings to see if they had been keeping up the standards or improving on them since performing them to achieve promotion... 

We followed up with high pressure, low speed sticky hands drills, showing them why going slower is better for learning and training purposes. 

This post has turned into a bit of a long one as I didn't manage to get it out last week.

So continuing on, this past Monday, we decided to step the senior kids outside of their comfort zones.  We currently don't have any Goju Ryu training tools known as Chishi, so we brought in some house bricks. Starting off with different exercises like push ups and renegade rows with bricks firmly in hand and moving on to push ups with cross shoulder taps and deep squats lifting bricks, one in each hand, to shoulder level with straight arms.

Next, we stood the bricks on end, lifting them by using our middle finger and thumb only, while crossing the hall in shiko dachi and holding the bricks out at knee level but clear of the knees. Moving forward then back across the hall and when that was complete they laid the bricks flat and picked them up again across the face of the brick and did the same thing across the hall and back doing their best to keep the brick horizontal in their hands.

We finished off the week with drilling the pressing block move to back fist drill against a straight chudan tzuki, moving from coming in slow to the attacker trying to actually punch the defender and the defender moving to different areas off line and swapping between left and right punches and also left and right defences.

All in all things are coming along nicely...

I am a huge fan of questioning everything. 

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