2025-03-12

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

Tonight the adult class spent the whole night reinforcing what we worked on Monday - distancing and angles in yakusoku kumite. We started with “vanilla” one-time attack drills, with the defender stepping back and off to the side a bit. Each partner did it five times in a row. (To be clear, it wasn’t five-step sparring - it was one-step sparring five times in a row.) This helped reinforce getting the right distance and angle with this particular partner. Then we rotated to switch partners, which changed the distance, and did it five times again. This continued until we had exhausted all permutations of partners. Then we switched it up so you could only counterattack with elbow strikes, which drastically changed the distance. People who normally had trouble getting close enough to counterattack with a punch really had to get close to strike with and elbow.