2024-10-02

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

In tonight’s youth class we talked about where you should be looking during kata, and why. If you’re learning a brand new kata, and you’re following along with someone else, then you should be watching that person. But then, once you’ve learned, it, you should be looking at the bad guy.

Unfortunately it’s really hard to get children to understand this when most of them have (thankfully) never had to deal with a bad guy. Consequently, they’re always looking at me, even if I’m just standing there watching them do the kata. So tonight I talked about it in terms of brainpower. If you’re spending brainpower looking at me and worrying about what’s going to happen if you make a mistake, that’s brainpower that you could have been using to avoid making the mistake in the first place! That seemed to help. 🤷

The adult class spent the first half on yakusoku kumite, and I everyone is making good progress. The main issue seems to be controlling the distance and orientation to the attacker when setting up for the counterattack. (i.e. In sanbon kumite, #1 and #2 are fine, but people have trouble stepping close enough to strike back after #3.) I told them next time we’ll change the drill so you can only counterattack with elbows, forcing them to stay close.

Then we moved on to kata, doing the same “kata gauntlet” I described last time. This gives me a good opportunity to spend a little time with everyone, so I think we’ll continue. Near the end of the night, we ended up working on an application of move #9 in Heian Godan (the transition between the downward “X” block in fists and the rising “X” block with open hands). I teach that as an application of what Judo calls “yubi gatame”, essentially a hyperextending finger lock.