2022-11-07

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

I introduced knife-hand block (shuto-uke) and back stance (kokutsu dachi) this evening. 🤯

The counter-rotation of the hips for shuto-uke is unintuitive for some students, but I have success comparing it to throwing a Frisbee. When you throw a Frisbee, you don’t just use your arm. When you want to throw it really hard, you tend to counter-rotate your hips. The same is true of shuto-uke (or gedan barai and uchi-uke for that matter). This counter-rotation improves blocking effectiveness, even if it doesn’t improve power, simply by reducing the exposed target area. Regardless, the analogy worked.

Next came explaining kokutsu dachi and that’s always a good time. “Remember everything I’ve been telling you about front stance? Yeah? Well forget that … now bend your back leg and make a stance with no width.” A few weeks ago, we discussed the oddness of stepping backward in front stance - how your hip only really moves for the first half of the motion, and they were able to liken that to stepping forwards in back stance. They sort-of bonded over their shared discomfort. Nevertheless, they eventually got that too.

With both of the building blocks out of the way, we moved on to talking about applying the block. The other basic blocks all work while standing directly in the “line of fire.” I’m not saying that’s where you want to stand, mind you … I’m just saying the blocks still work if you do. However, knife-hand block almost requires stepping off the attack line, in which case the block itself is merely “insurance”

And why are the fingers open? Because, after the block, we grab and pull the offending limb “hikite-style” as we execute our counter-attack, which leads to my old joke about why we block in karate. The white-belt answer is “so we don’t get hit”, but the black-belt answer is “to make it our turn.” 😈