Wado Academy Winter Course 2011

[wadoka]

The first day has ended, a gentle ease into things. Mokuso for about 20 minutes.

Key things we covered today: sonoba zuki, jodan uke and gedan barai. All from straight legs then into shiko dachi and then turn to junzuki dachi to the sides.

Pinan Shodan, didn't get past yoi without being corrected on being too wide for some. Went through the first three moves and then with a partner. I use the term returning wave but won't elaborate here.

We did another two pairworks. One I will just call a bundling of gyaku jodan uke and then into "kesa giri" with the arm using tai otoshi. The next was shuto uke together with furiken uchi and then into kansetsu waza.

One thing I will touch on was the concept of putting weight into your heels and not the balls of the feet to aid tai otoshi. I have been thinking about it and my current view is that attempting to drop your weight into the balls of your feet activate the thigh muscles which either makes you go up or at least inhibits your downward movement.

[wadoka]

Aside from the training there is also the social aspects that surrounds the course.

To watch people rub their hands with glee and giggling like schoolkids, who are in fact close to pensionable age, as they meet up with old friends makes the whole-of-life approach of karate study very endearing.

[wadoka]

On the heel/ball of foot thing again, it has just occurred to me that when I have been teaching some of the pairworks that have an element of kuzushi against the opponent's leg, I have seen students come up onto the ball of the foot and try to push with the knee and it just ends up all wrong.

One problem is usually they are too far away and try to reach by coming up onto the ball of the foot and poking the knee out. Also, even if they are in a good position sometimes they start pushing with the knee. I think I will get them to try the same focus of taking the pressure away from the ball of the foot and move it backwards.

It might be another approach that helps prod and guide them in the right direction.

[wadoka]

Day two. Kazutaka Ohtsuka and Arthur Meek took the general sessions.

Kazutaka Ohtsuka went through through his trademark approach to body movement and got us to work in pairs on how to use the arms in an effective way for both defence to be able to attack quickly straight after.

Arthur Meek cover Kihon Kumite 1, 4 and 6 extending them with additional moves that included a lock against the opponent's shoulder for number 1 and a strangle for number 4.

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[wadoka]

More training of kihon and the dan grading combinations. Got shouted at for not being low enough in gyakuzuki no tsukomi. Not just me, it was the whole dojo!

All that talk of kuzushi and kote gaeshi in the other thread must have made its way to Guildford... That's sort of what we did.

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[wadoka]

Day Four had the shortest mokuso ever. As Sensei gave the mokuso command, we had barely time to close our eyes before he said yame.

Kazutaka Ohtsuka work on movement and controlling distance to attack at the appropriate time. Shiomitsu Sensei also took kushanku kata.

[wadoka]

Day 5, the last day. Back to normal for mokuso. Even with tired bodies, mokuso was very welcome.

Shiomitsu Sensei took the warm up. He then moved onto kihon, pairworks and idori.

My brain is too tired to write any details unfortunately.

[WadoAJ]

Thanks for sharing all wadoka

AJ

[wadoka]

Many more photos are available on http://wado.karateforum.com

[zim]

What a great week. Still recovering from the buzz of it....