2022-07-13

2022-07-13, Wednesday

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

The youth class saw the same “usual suspects” this evening, the 13-year-old girl and the 6-year-old boy. The boy has a pretty good attention span for his age, but getting used to being “karate serious” is going to take some work. The girl is coming along nicely and, rather than working on gross motor movement, I find more and more of our time is spent on fine tuning things like plantarflecting the ankle on contact with mae-geri keage and timing the straightening of the back leg to coincide with the end of punching techniques. We’ve still got a few issues memorizing Taikyoku Shodan, but nothing practice can’t fix.

Tonight’s adult class got a new student - a gentleman who earned his shodan back in the late 1980s and hasn’t trained since. We spent the class on a laundry list of kihon and kata, getting a sense for which rusty spots need polish and which holes need to be patched. In general, the skills are still there, much like riding a bicycle. It may take a while to regain speed and confidence, but overall I’m quite pleased.