2025-04-09

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

Last night’s class was largely reminicent of Monday’s. After 30 minutes of kihon we spent most of the remaining time going over the same wrist-grab escape/takedown from Heian Shodan and Tekki Shodan. Students needed more practice. After all, learning to swing a bat is one thing, but learning to hit a ball is another. By the end of class we’d done plenty of repetitions, with different partners, and spent some time discussing the advantages of different stances, differnt elbow positions, etc.

We also spent some time talking about wasted effort. One example of this is stomping the floor while executing technique. For example, stomping the floor at the end of oi-zuki means spending energy to direct your foot into the floor when that energy would be better spent directing your punch into the target. Said differently, you’re moving mass downward when it should be moving forward. Likewise, excessive noise while breathing wastes energy. Breathing noise is caused by friction that can’t help but reduce air flow.

I explain this by comparing it to an incandescent lightbulb. Yes, they produce light, but they also waste so much energy creating heat that someone came up with the Easy Bake Oven. We want our karate to be more like an LED bulb. Yes, there’s always going to be some inefficiency, but most of our energy should go towards our primary goal, rather than trying to come up with uses for the waste byproducts.