2022-06-01

2022-06-01, Wednesday

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

Two students showed up tonight, one of whom took a kyu exam last week. I presented him with his new belt and a feedback form, outlining what he did well on his test, as well as areas for improvement. I think this is important - verbal feedback is good, but it’s very easy to forget. That’s why I give verbal feedback on the day of the exam, but prepare written feedback as well. Because of this, I hold off on announcing results right away as well. I’ve always belonged to clubs who give out results and belts on the same day, and I agree with that too. However, I’m just starting out so I’m going to try something different, perhaps teaching a bit of patience along the way. I’m not talking about weeks and weeks of waiting here - I’m just talking about waiting a couple of days so I can be very intentional about the results and feedback I provide.

After our little “award ceremony” was over, we got back to training. We’ve touched on gyaku zuki, insofar as it’s the final technique in yakusoku sanbon kumite, but tonight we practiced it on its own. We spent a lot of time discussing how and why to make hip rotation. The lesson boiled down to two major points: 1) If your stance isn’t wide enough - at least hip width - you can’t fully rotate your hip forward, and 2) If you don’t bend your back leg, you can’t fully rotate your hip back.

We started with gyaku zuki by itself, with the other hand just sort of reaching forward, but soon moved on to combining gyaku zuki with age uke and gedan barai. Since I stress rotating the hip back while blocking already, it was easy for them to add the block to the reverse punch. With the last few minutes of class, we touched on soto ude uke, just talking about the basic motion.