Blog

Only a short day in the dojo today since squad training hasn’t started back yet (1 morning class 2 kids classes), but still a very productive day.

Morning Training

Today the morning session was unexpected. We were told to think about something that we will work on today whilst we sat in seiza. We stood up and got told to do your own personal training and work on the things we thought about in our head. I am personally not a big fan of this way of training but when I think about it, it is a very good learning tool because you get to work on what ever you want to or need to, where as in a normal directed class, the focuses are supposed to be aimed towards everyone but sometimes it will not suit every students individual needs.

In last night’s post I was talking about how I am trying to mainly focus on my posture and breathing. To practise this I spent most of my time doing basics, kihons, and kata. By the time I had finished everything there was around 10 minutes left and Savannah grabbed to help her try to remember the sequence to the first sai kata. Having a go with the sai with the focus of posture and breathing did make me think quite hard about what I was doing but it ended up feeling way better after this.

Little Champions

I was feeling very refreshed at this stage in the afternoon because I knew that there was less than two hours to go!

After doing some sai once again, the girls had to create an obstical course for the boys and vice versa. We are all very competitive so we tried to make it hard for the other team. It was great to have some fun making each other sweat!

Karate Kids

To start off the last session of the day Savannah, Bailey, William and I did a weapons performance for the karate kids and went straight into a game to warm up (not that I needed to warm up haha) which definitely involved lots of noise but great fun!

For most of the class we did lots of kumite drills and I must’ve been pretty tired because I forgot what a reverse punch was and accidently did a front kick instead… oops haha!

The last 10 minutes of the class and everyone was worn out… well at least I was, and this was when we all got introduced to the 300 kick challenge. We had to choose a partner and each do 300 kicks on a bag each and finish in 10 minutes. Claire went first and got to 50 and needed to rest, but I wanted to show her that it is possible to keep going so I when I went I went all the way through, 1 to 300 kicks in a row. I was hoping that this would help so that she realises that she can push beyond what she thought was possible, and that’s exactly what she did. With about two seconds to spare we both finished all 300 kicks in just under 10 minutes. Let’s just say there were lots of high fives and to finish Claire got her new belt… Great reward I’d say!

One more day to push through tomorrow and then a well deserved rest on Sunday ready for week 2!