2022-08-08

2022-08-08, Monday

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

We got another new student in the youth class tonight - a 9-year-old boy. That brings us up to three “regulars” and a couple of other who show up from time to time. Things are growing, and that’s good. The young lady in the youth class is just about ready to take her 9th kyu grading. We just got her all the way through Taikyoku Shodan. Now we just need to add a bit more speed and confidence and she should be all set. We’re planning to do that next Wednesday, so that gives us a bit more than a week to polish all the edges.

The adult class began with warm-up exercises, targeted kicking drills with partners, and a bit of impact work with reverse punches, front kicks, and round kicks. That seems to be working well for us, so we may make all of that just part of our normal routine. Then we moved on to reviewing the applications we worked on last week, polishing them up just a bit. There are a few we just can’t get to work (or perhaps we can and we just don’t like them). Either way, we’re going through application drills in a staged approach. First slowly, with a compliant partner, then a bit faster, then we have the partner dial up the resistance a bit to make sure the application has a chance of really working if we need it.