2022-04-27

2022-04-27, Wednesday

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

There were only two students in class tonight, but that meant extra attention where attention was needed. Outside block (soto ude-uke) is troublesome for most. It’s a complicated motion and most tend to drop the arm into a sort of scooping motion (not unlike move 16 in Heian Nidan). With adults, I draw an analogy to the motion of putting on your seat belt, where you reach back behind yourself to grab the buckle tab and then draw it down and across your body. That doesn’t tend to work with children though, so instead we just practice the motion over and over again in the mirror. We concentrate on the starting position of the fist and the elbow because once those two points are right, everything is right.

Kicking is another source of frustration for some, since it’s difficult to get all three necessary steps in order, and do so at speed: Knee up, snap out and back, foot down. Oftentimes the leg snaps out before the knee comes up, resulting in a “scoop kick” or the knee doesn’t come up at all, resulting in a kick that’s maybe ankle high. The only way I’ve found to combat this is simply repetition. Up, out & back, down. Up, out & back, down. There’s no secret - just repetition. Everyone eventually “gets it.”

Kata is coming along nicely as well. Both students were able to get through the gross motor motions of Taikyoku Shodan - their arms and legs end up in the right spot. They don’t have it completely memorized yet, but they remember the consituent pieces and can generally make the “shapes” required to get through it. Now we’re moving on to fine tuning and tonight’s focus was using both hands every … single … time.