2022-05-02

2022-05-02, Monday

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

The first class was a bit rough tonight and the students were really struggling to keep going for the full 75 minutes. I think it’s time to move forward with adjusting class times. I’m going to propose shortening the youth class by 15 minutes and adding that time onto the adult class.

Regardless, the class went pretty well and the students’ skills are progressing as I’d expect, given that we’ve only been at this for a couple of months. One student can get almost all the way through Taikyoku Shodan without assistance, and he may be ready to test later this month. The others are still coming along, but need a bit more work. (Don’t we all?)

We spent a lot of time on outside block (soto ude-uke) tonight, trying to eliminate the tendency to block the attack downwards instead of sideways. Two techniques I use for this are: 1) Have them actually block something: “Air blocking” is fine, but it’s hard to get a feel for pushing an attack to the side without actually doing it, so I either punch at the students myself or use a pool noodle to poke at them while they practice pushing the attack sideways. If that doesn’t work, I move to the next level. 2) I have them stand up straight and make a finished outside block with both arms at the same time (imagine the first move in the Goju-ryu version of Sanchin). Then I poke at them with a pool noodle and have them block without moving their arms, solely by rotating their waist side to side. That isolates the sidways motion of the block and, once they’e mastered that, we add the movement of the arms.