2025-04-21

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

We’ve got a small rank exam schedule for Wednesday, but tonight was just like any other class. We spent the first half hour or so on kihon, though I differentiated the drills for different ranks. The next 40 minutes or so was dedicated to kata. We went through everyone’s kata at least once and those who weren’t responsible for, or couldn’t get through, whichever one we were working on simply retired to the back of the room to work on kata they did know. All together we worked on Taikyoku Shodan, Heian Nidan, Heian Yondan, Tekki Shodan, Bassai Dai, and Jion. Everyone got some homework. 😈

We even spent some time on bunkai, with the most time being spent on the gedan-uke/shuto-uchi combination at move #11 in Heian Yondan. I often remark that “karate people” are fully capable of making a kata look good, but then when you put a human in front of them and ask them to do exactly the same thing, they lose their minds. Tonight was no different. 🤣

The best part is that, after showing the application several times, and showing how what they’re doing is different from what I’m asking them to do, someone invariably says something like, “Oh, so we should do it just like the kata?” YES!