2025-05-28
Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.
Summer a strange time for youth karate training. With school out, the combination of family vacations and visits to non-custodial parents seems to keep classes roughly half full. For a small program, that can be tough, so it’s important to keep things interesting for the students who are around.
Last night we worked a lot on side snap and side thrust kicks. My classroom has a wall-mounted, dual-level ballet barre, which I find helpful when working on kicking basics. In my experience, the fear of falling is the number one thing preventing students from being able to focus on improving their kicking techniqe. Remove that fear and you can start to see real progress. That doesn’t remove the need for balance training, but we work on that in other ways.
In the adult class, I learned two things about myself.
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I had someone taking pictures and, when reviewing them later, it seems I make frequent "WTF" faces at my students.
- Also, I can't count. How many bottom-fist strikes are there in Heian Nidan? Two, dummy ... there are two. 🤦
