2025-06-11

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

Tonight’s adult class continued with our slow transition between pre-arranged sparring drills and free-sparring. I really wanted to work on block timing and positioning for counterattacks, so here’s what we did: Students lined up in pairs, with the attacking side continuously stepping forward with the same attack while the defending side stepped back with the same defense. (Think of it like three-step sparring, but more like eighteen-step sparring, and without a counterattack after the last one.) The pairs went across the floor and back, then rotated and did the same thing with a new partner. We did this with defenders using age-uke, gedan-barai, soto-uke, and uchi-uke.

The next step in the drill was to add a counterattack after every attack, making it very similar to a continuous ippon kumite drill. I wanted everyone to get comfortable being able to land a reverse punch after every block. It didn’t matter to me if they were in the right place after the block, or if they had to shift forward with the punch, so long as they were able to land it.

In the final step of the drill, I challenged the attackers to see how many times they could “tag” the defenders. They were encouraged to vary their speed, and the interval between techniques, to try to slip a few punches past their partner’s defense. I warned them to use good control, but also told them that if they didn’t tag their partner at least once, they were probably going to slow.

In other news, late last week the YMCA started putting out the fabulous sign you see below. The Tempe YMCA has a nearly identical sign, but the room with the karate classes is also impossible to miss as it’s just past the check-in desk on the ground floor. By contrast, our classes are upstairs and in the back of our facility, so it’s possible to be completely oblivoious of our karate program. Well, … not anymore!