2024-04-03

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

Everyone seemed to be dragging a bit during kata training this evening, and seemed resistant to my requests to “go faster” or use “more power”, so I hauled out the rebreakable boards to make a point. Say what you will about the relevance of board breaking, but it does provide an objective measure of impact. They either break, or they don’t. I explained that it’s easy to get complacent during kata training, because there’s nobody there to hit. And since you’re not really hitting anything in kata, it’s hard to get a feeling for how hard you would be hitting if you were hitting something.

I gave everyone a go at breaking a board. Some succeeded in breaking one, and some didn’t, but everyone got a sense for actually hitting something, and that’s all I was really after. Once we were done with the boards, I related this back to kata training. I explained that those who were able to break the board needed to maintain at least that level of power when practicing kata, and those who weren’t able to break the board needed to use more power. Sure enough, now that they had a “yardstick” against which to compare the level of power they needed to produce, the level of engergy during kata performance went way up for the rest of the night.