2022-10-19

2022-10-19, Wednesday

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

I had another great question in class tonight: “How do we know where to block?” The question came up during yakusoku kumite, so my first answer was, “because your partner is telling you where they’re going to punch.” 😄 But seriously, it’s a good question. Unfortunately, the real answer lies somewhere between “experience” and “you can’t … that’s why you need to keep your hands up.”

This turned into a slightly longer discussion about the importance of establishing a non-threatening “fence” with your hands, that can be used to transition easily into mid-level or upper-level blocks, and the importance of situational awareness and de-escalation skills, before circling back to the topic of the blocks, themselves. Karate has dozens of blocks, but most beginners learn the same five to begin with: age-uke, gedan-barai, soto-uke, uchi-uke, and shuto-uke. Three of those are mid-level blocks, leaving one each for upper- and mid-level. That’s enough to offer variety without having too many choices. From there, it’s a question of what can be taught vs. what has to be learned on one’s own.

How to form the blocks is something that can be taught. In fact, we spend quite a bit of time on it. However, when to use each block is something that can’t really be taught … it has to be learned through experience. That’s why we teach beginners the shape of each block, and have them make each block with an exaggerated motion, as big as possible, to be sure that they understand the principles of body mechanics and power generation for each. But then, at a certain point, we cut them lose with free-sparring and let them lean which blocks work best against which attacks, and how that differs with the relative size and speed of the opponent.