Second last day of the 2 week training intensive, with only three classes today. Today’s focus was pushing ourselves out of our ever growing comfort zone… We sure did! We are only getting stronger from here.
Morning Training
Yesterday’s morning session was brutal! In partners, we started with one person jumping over a a set of bags set up in a T shape, whilst the other person would hold a shiko dachi with a bo in our hands straight in front of our body. We did this twice… It felt like forever, but we got through it. Soon, we did some punching in three different stances, uchi hachi ji dachi, shiko dachi, and sonkyo dachi. All together we ended up doing 100 punches in each stance 3 times. My legs were burning after this… It’s a lot harder than it looks. To finish off the class we buddied up and we did lots of laps. One, we had to do 10 push ups, 10 tuck jumps, and then sprint up and back. I honestly don’t think I would have been able to finish it if I didn’t have Klaudia as my partner to push me.
Little Champions
Yesterday we did a short warm up with the little champions before more torture haha.
The seniors were separated from the little champions after this. We did a little bit of kicking which was good because I didn’t feel completely warm yet. We just did the 4 kick combination with one normal paced lap, and one lap as fast as we could. There was an odd number of people, so, the other person would be using the heavy metal bo whilst waiting for the others to finish kicking.
In this class we also did a small circuit with two parts. One, with a partner we had to jump over a row of bags and run back to the start whilst your partner is trying to catch you and vice versa. The other pair would be doing push ups with a medicine ball each. So, we would both do one push up at the same time, role the ball to each other and then repeat with the opposite hand. We went through this circuit twice and it was very challenging since we were on each rotation for quite a while.
Karate Kids
The warm up for the kids class was a race. Since most of the people in our group had just trained we didn’t do so well. My legs felt like dead weight with every step I took and it looked like the others were feeling the same by the way they were running.
The front line in the kids class were sent across to train. When we started doing the punching and had to go into shiko dachi, I knew we were going to do the same as this morning again. Luckily we only had to do one set of this.
After this my legs were once again aching, but next we had to partner up and we were going to be doing squat kicks. We got to choose the number that we would do, and Miguel chose 50. We eventually got all the way to 125 squat kicks, and then we were told to start from zero and do the same amount we just did. This time we had to go low enough to touch the bag below us every time. As a team Miguel and I did 250 squat kicks all together!
The last thing we did in this class was one kumite drill. One very painful kumite drill. In pairs, one person would have a belt around their waist doing combinations across the dojo and the other person had to hold onto the belt and try keep them from going anywhere too easily.
