2023-02-20

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

We made a lot of progress on Taikyoku-shodan in the first class tonight. We continued on last Wednesday’s lesson of remembering the “rules” (see below) and then spent quite a bit of time going over the 270° turn. First we broke it into several steps and exaggerated the movement for the sake of clarity, then we sped things up and shrunk them down until the turn looked pretty close to how it should. Towards the end of class, we managed to get all the way through the kata.

We began the second class with the promotion of my senior student to junior 8th kyu. Her test was excellent, with the exception of her kiai which continues to be a challenge (but we’ll get there). From there we moved on to some kihon, with emphasis on pushing the hip forward while punching. Then we moved on to a standing drill, blocking followed by reverse punch, with all four of the basic blocks normally executed from zenkutsu-dachi. We talked about the importance of keeping the spine aligned vertically, capturing all the rotational force rather than allowing it to escape along odd paths by leaning. Finally we worked on kata, and spent a good deal of time working on heel pivots. I’m of the opinion that heel pivots are mechanically simpler than pivoting on the ball of the foot, so I use them in most places. The keys here are to keep the weight on the heel and keep the center of gravity over the axis of rotation.