2025-07-16

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

We continued with applications tonight, reviewing the ones we worked on Monday, and adding some nuance. Many people can perform a kata just fine but then seemingly lose their minds when you put a human in front of them and ask them to do the same thing.

For example, when doing wrist grab escapes, people try to use speed and muscle instead of just performing the move from the kata the way they’ve been doing it for years. To fix this, I have the “attacker” grab very loosely and offer no real resistance at first, so the person practicing the escape can move naturally like they do when performing the kata on their own. Then we slowly add resistance until the defender can escape without any awkward deviations from the kata.

Another problem occurs when there’s a large size discrepancy between partners, but that’s great, because bad guys come in all different sized and shapes. For example, when executing the first move of Heian Shodan as a cross-side wrist grab escape, you’ll grab the attacker’s wrist and pull them to your left with the “downward block”, but that’s not always possible, particularly if the attacker outweighs you by 100 pounds or more.

To fix that, we have to remember that turning to the left in a kata doesn’t necessarily mean you need to move to the left - it just means you need to get the bad guy on your left. So, instead of pulling the attacker to your left with the downward block, it’s just as valid (and way easier) to put the attacker on your left by shifting backward to the right, yourself.