2022-03-14

2022-03-14, Monday

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA

Only one student showed up for the first class, and he hadn’t been there since the first week, so he got a private lesson, reviewing the basic basics: how to make a fist, how to make front stance, how to step and punch, etc. He did a really good job, and I told him so. Yes, karate lessons build on each other, and if you miss class it can be hard to catch up, but I figured since he was the only one there it made more sense to make him feel good about being there. Who knows? Maybe that’ll make him want to come more often. We even spent a few extra moments going over the dojo kun (in English), making sure he understands what it really means instead of just becoming “that thing we say.”

The second class was small too, so we spent time reviewing what we went over last week before moving into Heian Sandan applications. We started at the beginning and worked our way through the three empi-uke/uraken combinations, with some moves having several applications, depending on the attack. For instance, the initial uchi-uke, followed by alternating double blocks, can be applied as a cross-side wrist grab escape and elbow break, an escape from a same-side single-hand lapel grab, or a nasty and effective defense against mawashi-geri, starting with a block and resulting in a knee crank that turns the attacker around backwards. Likewise, the elbow-supported nukite in the first half of the kata can be used to escape a cross-hand wrist grab that exposes the attacker’s back, or as an effective escape from a double lapel grab by attacking the suprasternal notch.