2025-04-14
Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.
I had a student ask me if I had a copy of the kihon combinations I had them perform during class, and I directed him to the rank requirements document I keep online.
Since that document shows all of the requirements for each test, it shows not only what students should be working on now, but also where that’s going to lead in the future. For example, students are responsible for soto-uke when testing for 8th kyu, but then it gets incorporated into increasingly complex combinations until it’s finally part of a four-move series, like this:
gyaku-zuki"] N --> O["Soto-uke/
yoko-empi uchi
in kiba dachi"] O --> P["Soto-uke/
yoko-empi uchi
in kiba dachi/
uraken"] P --> Q["Soto-uke/
yoko-empi uchi
in kiba dachi/
uraken/
gyaku-zuki in
zenkutsu-dachi"]
Because karate is more like math than history those skills build on each other. That’s why it’s important to know how it starts, how it progresses, and what the goal looks like.
How the kihon requirements build on each other is fairly complex, and I’ll probably write a full blog post about it in the near future, but taking a look at it has led me to remove some redundancies in my requirements, which are already reflected in the version linked above.
