2024-08-26

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

Last night set another attendance record with 17 students across both classes. That’s great considering I also had at least five people who didn’t show up. Given the dearth of advertizing, I’m really pleased with the program’s growth.

To celebrate, we did all kumite drills, all night long. Here they are, in order:

1. Without partners, all students begin in sparring stance and execute techniques down and back across the floor. (This is just a warm-up exercise.)
2. Students pair up. “Side A” does the same as above. “Side B” moves backwards, keeping ahead of their partners, but close enough to be able to touch each incoming technique with their lead hand. The goal is for Side B to stay close enough to provide a good target for Side A, while practicing the hand-eye coordination required to intercept each incoming technique.
3. Same as above, but this time Side A executes only one technique at a time and Side B must counterattack (with whatever) after touching each of Side A’s attacks. The goal is for Side B to intercept side A’s techniques while remaining close enough to land a counterattack each time.
4. Same as above but much slower: This time, in addition to intercepting Side A’s attacks and counterattacking each time, Side B tries to maneuver into a position that makes it difficult for Side A to attack again. It’s best for groups to abandon lines and spread out around the floor as though practicing free-sparring for this drill, because doing it well means Side B will be shifting all over the place.
5. Next do “normal” yakusoku ippon-kumite. After having to do everything above, students should find this refreshingly easy, but the point should still be for the defending side to get off the line of attack and end up close enough to land a counterattack each time.
6. Same as above, but this time all counterattacks must be with elbows only. This forces the defending side to stay close and move farther off the line.

To recap, the skills we’re trying to improve are:

• Hand-eye coordination in intercepting incoming techniques.
• Staying close enough to the attacker that we can land counterattacks of our own.
• Learning how to make combination attacks difficult for the attacker by manuvering off the line of attack as part of our defense.