2022-11-14

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

Last night I introduced the class to “inside block” (uchi-uke), the last of the five “basic” blocks we need to cover. Fortunately, it’s also one of the easiest to teach. I intentionally taught shuto-uke first so we’d finish on an “easy win” and boost students’ confidence.

Later in class, while working on kata, several students seemed to be lifting their feet awfully high off the floor during turns, so I spoke a bit about the importance of reducing or eliminating extra motion. Yes, it’s necessary to pick up your foot when you move it, but you only need to lift it a bit … just a bit. After all, it takes time to lift your foot higher, and even more time to put it back again, so making the motion fast requires keeping the motion small.

Finally, we talked a bit about how you can control your speed in every direction except one: down. The speed at which you move in every other direction is controlled by your muscles, so you can choose how fast you want to move. If you want to move faster, push harder, etc. However, when it comes to moving down you’re at the mercy of gravity - your muscles have nothing to do with it. That’s why “up” is a very dangerous place to be in karate - you can’t come back down any faster than gravity will allow.