2025-05-07
Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.
We spent most of last night’s class working our way though the different stages of sparring drills, starting with yakusoku ippon kumite and almost making it all the way to free sparring. Here’s how the drills progressed:
We started by reviewing pre-arranged responses to the following seven attacks:
- oi-zuki jodan
- oi-zuki chudan
- kizami-zuki jodan
- gyaku-zuki chudan
- mai-geri keage chudan
- yoko-geri kekomi chudan
- ushiro-geri chudan
Everyone had several chances to defend against each attack, with the goal being to get comfortable defending aginst each one. I have a “go-to” defense that I teach for each attack but, once students are reasonably competent at it, I allow them to defend however they like. As long as they avoid getting hit, and are able to deliver a counterattack capable of stopping further attacks, students are free to experiment with defenses that work better for them.
Once everyone could deliver and defend against all seven of those attacks. I told the pairs of partners to take turns announcing any of those attacks against their partner. They could even announce the same one a couple of times in a row. All that mattered is that the defender didn’t know which one was coming until the attacker announced it. The goal of this stage of the drill was for the defender to be able to switch back and forth between defenses based on what the attacker was announcing.
In the final stage of this drill, the attacker stops announcing which attack is coming, but slows the attacks waaaaay down - no faster that half-speed. The goal of this stage is to be able to recognize which attack is coming, without having it announced, and to switch between defenses appropriately. The tendancy here is for the defender to speed up, trying to make up for the time lost recognizing the attack, but that corrects itself as they get better and better at recognizing the attacks.
At this point, the only “prearranged” part of the drill is that each partner knows whose “turn” it is to attack or defend. But once that limitation is removed, we basically have slow, jiyu kumite.
