2022-03-16
2022-03-16, Wednesday
Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.
In the first class, we spent most of our time with kihon, as you’d expect in the first couple of weeks of a new class. It’s hard for beginning students to coordinate foot and fist when stepping and punching or blocking, so that took a good deal of time. We start by breaking the techniques in half. On the first count, students bring their feet together without moving their arms - effectively giving their feet a “head start.” Then, on the second count, they finish the step and move their arms into the final punching/blocking position. We do that a good number of times before having students do the entire technique (both “halves”) without pause.
Students often continue to have trouble synchronizing hand and foot, but there are several ways to remedy this. One is to have them count the first half to themselves. In other words, instead of counting “one” for halfway and then “two” to complete the technique, I’ll just count “two” every time and have them count “one” to themselves, in their heads, at the halfway point. Another good way is just to tell students to delay moving their hands until the very end of their step - until they just can’t stand it anymore.
Having now practiced all of the necessary kihon, we ended the evening working on the first four moves of Taikyoku Shodan. Both students did pretty well, though one had the usual problem of trying to alternate hands to block with the wrong (left) hand for move 3. I solved that by having them switch hands and put their right hands on their left shoulders immediately after punching on move 2.
For the second class, I had two students, a yondan and a brand new white belt (albeit with a bit of training years ago). This class spent a lot of time on kihon as well, starting “from scratch” with how to stand, how to make a fist, how to do alternating punches, etc. It’s often hard to keep the whole class challenged when there are vastly different skill levels involved, but the yondan was an extremely good sport and pitched in to help with plenty of explanations.
Kata went extraordinarily well. As I said, the new white belt had trained in something before, so he was a bit less awkward than the average newcomer when it came to turning on the rear foot during kata, etc. I had only anticipated getting through the first four moves, but ended up getting through the entire kata. I was impressed.
We ended the evening with a bit of yakusoku gohon kumite. The difficulty synchronizing hand and foot isn’t limited to just children and, once given a “live” target, even students who can get foot and fist synchronized during line drills tend to “rush” the hand. We spent quite a bit of time refining this timing before finally calling it a night.
